Virtual Reality: Everything is so real here
Virtual Reality: Everything is so real here
The future of humanity lies in virtual reality. That is what leading tech visionaries claim, anyway. But what do you really see when you put on these strange glasses?
Photo: Illusion Walk Berlin. Julien Rüggeberg. All rights reserved.
With stewardess smiles, the employees glide through the rows and adjust the technology one last time; the scene looks as if a handful of chosen people are about to be shot to a better planet. In fact, the DJ series "Boiler Room" is opening its first club night in virtual space. “We want to democratize club culture and make it accessible to everyone in the world”, explains the head of the VR Dancefloors Experience, Steve Appleyard, to the invited guests. "Techno for everyone" is the new "fountain for Africa", or so it seems.
Sad fantasy of a pickpocket
Viewed objectively, the scene looks more like a pickpocket's dreary fantasy: around a dozen hipsters are sitting with their backs hunched on the dance floor of the Berlin club Arena. Opaque glasses and headphones have completely shut them off from the outside world. It is 7 p.m. The spring sun is still shining outside, and the virtual reality - VR for short - of a club night is pulsing beneath the glasses: 150 ravers are partying wildly to a pumping live set. With a controller in their hands, the invisible onlookers zap through the rooms of the virtual club; there is a chill-out area and even a darkroom, but neither drugs are dealt nor bodily fluids exchanged. In the digital dimension, nothing is left to chance. The party, which lasted just 15 minutes, was filmed beforehand with extras, some of whom - two girlfriends being hit on, a party animal in a bunny costume - even followed a script. When the first break begins, the hired party people throw their arms up in jubilation, in stark contrast to the silent observers in the real parallel universe, who are locked in an absent state somewhere between Rodin's Thinker and a coma patient hooked up to life support machines.
Nothing will be the same as before
For almost two years, the hype surrounding virtual reality as a business area of the future has been at a boiling point, with new applications and start-ups appearing almost every day. Companies like Facebook are investing in their own VR departments, and patents are piling up in drawers. Festivals, sporting events, theme parks, theater and cinema visits, shopping trips, property viewings, trade fairs, exhibitions, vacation trips, social media platforms, computer games and every conceivable type of pornography will never be the same again, if you believe the prophecies of VR enthusiasts. The results are usually rather sobering: poor graphic quality and bandwidth often make the visuals appear bumpy and blurry. Most photorealistic content that is touted as virtual journeys is usually just 360° videos, which give the viewer an amazing panoramic view, but otherwise pin them to a static observer position. Was the technology perhaps brought to market too early?
“The experiences are so intense that VR will replace traditional cinema in the next few years”
“Moving freely through virtual worlds, as suggested in advertising, is actually not yet feasible for home use”, explains Thomas Pilar, who is not usually one of the boom's sceptics. The bearded young entrepreneur has already founded several start-ups and sold them at a profit. "Virtual reality is a very exciting, promising industry," he says. "There is great optimism. And a lot of money is flowing." Pilar's latest project is called VR Box: a virtual reality cinema in which up to 50 visitors can simultaneously explore alien worlds on special rotating chairs. “The experiences are so intense that VR will replace traditional cinema in the next few years,” says Pilar. Once a suitable location has been found, virtual concerts will also be shown regularly in the VR box. "You want to be as close to your star as possible. That's why I think the medium is perfect for music." In ten years at the latest, virtual concerts would be the ultimate experience for music fans.
Content is king
Bands like Depeche-Mode and the Red Hot Chili Peppers have already circulated their own 360° content. However, the most money so far has not been invested by the music industry, but “by gamers who, as early adopters, spend a lot of time with the technology”, says Pilar, who often plays VR games for several hours at a time. And the potential mass market is hesitantly waiting for developments. In the boom year of 2016, just under two million of the most sophisticated desktop devices, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR, were sold worldwide, no comparison to other tech innovations such as the iPhone. In terms of content, the most sustainable formats have not yet emerged either. “Every manufacturer wants to create its own ecosystem. Whoever has the most immersive content will ultimately get the users.”, believes Pilar.
VR glasses and barf bags
"Immersion" describes the feeling of immersion, which in the best case is so convincing that the simulated environment is perceived as real. Long-term effects have hardly been researched. Some people react with "motion sickness": because the sensory perceptions do not always correspond to the conditions of the programmed environment, dizziness and anxiety attacks like seasickness can occur. That is why many VR presentations also hand out barf bags along with the glasses.
Other newly created terms such as "post-virtual reality syndrome" or "VR hangover" describe the danger of losing your footing in virtual worlds. On Reddit and in other online forums, users report that the reality beyond the glasses already seems grey and sometimes unreal. The first moment after returning is particularly haunting, a balancing act and finding your way back: “Oh yes, exactly: This is where I come from!” One commentator refers to the famous anecdote from the Chinese philosophy classic "Zhuangzi", in which the wise Zhuang Zhou, after waking up, no longer knows whether he had just dreamed of being a butterfly or whether he is perhaps a butterfly dreaming of being Zhuang Zhou. The sheer science fiction quality of virtual reality (the term goes back to Damien Broderick's 1982 SF novel "The Judas Mandala") alone provokes alarmism: How can you convince an adolescent to make something of themselves when they already have superpowers in a parallel world? And what if unstable users here and there act out fantasies of violence and omnipotence because they believe the real world is just another technically induced hallucination?
Visiting Illusion Walk
“We must create ethical standards for the responsible use of technology,” says Julien Rüggeberg from the Berlin start-up Illusion Walk. Together with his brother Jim, the 40-year-old is working on overcoming the biggest hurdle for groundbreaking VR formats: Illusion Walk wants to make the virtual space actually accessible - as a shared experience. To do this, the entrepreneurs have rented an office floor in western Berlin, their "real-time holodeck": 150 square meters that give the impression that the 15-person team has just moved in. Apart from the dusty carpet, the corridors and rooms are empty. Only cryptic squares with QR codes hang on the ceiling and walls. They track the movements of the users equipped with portable backpack computers and VR glasses and transfer their bodies into the virtual space as avatars. The fact that you don't constantly bump into real walls is because the fantastic worlds are superimposed on the existing environment in real time. Office doors open to form portals. Empty corridors become sooty tunnels. An elevator leads to the observation deck of an oil rig. The sound of the sea in the depths. A light wind blows through your hair. Dry smoke blows over from the engine room. "Turn around!" says Rüggeberg's avatar, who leads you through the experience. A poisonous green storm cloud suddenly breaks apart above us. Aggressively flashing spaceships shoot out of it, circling the platform like hornets. "Just get out of here!" But how?
It is just one of several moments of shock in the 15-minute experience that the start-up has developed for demonstration purposes."We recently had a visitor here who almost pulled his glasses off his head. It took him a moment to overcome his fear of heights, even though he knew it wasn't real.", Rüggeberg remembers. If you take the headset off, you really do feel as fundamentally deceived as Neo in the film "The Matrix" after he swallowed the red pill. The three-dimensional user interface that you were just touching to escape to the next world was in fact just the Plexiglas surface of an empty picture frame. The red buzzer that opened the sliding doors to the command deck of a spaceship was just a wooden rod with a plastic knob. The elevator, which shot up at breathtaking speed, was nothing more than a vibrating wooden box hidden in the next room. A row of fans had created the wind effect, a small fog machine for the smoky smell.
“At some point people have shot enough zombies”
Even though the technology is not yet fully developed, Illusion Walk makes you understand what a powerful medium is unfolding its potential. “Because the virtual world can be perceived as very real, we don’t want to put the user under a complete adrenaline rush”, says Rüggeberg. “After all, we don’t know what effect these impressions have on the psyche and how long they linger there.” The company is currently working with the TU Berlin on a study to investigate the long-term physical and psychological effects. “No matter what the results, no one should leave the experience with grey hair”, says the CEO. A little dose of thrill is fine, however, especially since Illusion Walk, unlike its US competitor The Void, does not want to open itself up to shooting games or horror scenarios. "At some point, people have shot enough zombies and want to experience something more exciting, more complex. We want to tell good stories. That's our approach." At the Berlinale, the makers have already demonstrated their technology to interested filmmakers. "The film industry has recognized the potential of VR, but has also realized that stories have to be told in a completely different way. Classic techniques such as tracking shots don't work because the user looks around the room independently." The sound also still presents challenges, says Rüggeberg. "At least a third of immersion depends on realistic sound. That's not easy to do."
Music as the engine of virtual reality
For Chris Milk, too, virtual reality stands and falls with the sound, and even more so: with the music. “Music can make you travel through space and time, and that’s exactly what makes VR so special as an art form”, explains the 41-year-old multimedia artist. Before his career as CEO of the VR content company Within, he made music videos in which the user could already intervene. In 2010, he created the short film “The Wilderness Downtown” for Arcade Fire, in which the user’s own street becomes part of the plot via Google Maps. For Beck He developed an interactive concert video that registers head movements via the PC webcam and simultaneously changes the spatial sound depending on the viewing angle to the stage. "VR is the future of storytelling because it can so directly translate how we feel, how we dream and how we think. At this point, however, we still have to learn the grammar before we can speak it like a fluent language.", says Milk, who learned programming from his mother at the age of six. Never before has an art form been able to get so close to people, he continues. “VR is fascinating because, unlike other media, it does not require translation but interacts directly with consciousness.
Making the real world a better place with the help of the virtual world
The hopes tied to the new technology have found their greatest advocate in him. In a euphoric talk at the TED innovation conference, the director even declared the medium to be the ultimate empathy machine; an ecstatic tech messiah who wants to make the real world a better place with the help of the virtual world. Milk traveled several times to crisis areas, such as a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan or to Ebola-stricken Liberia, to capture the misery from all angles with 360° cameras. He then had his team distribute VR glasses to politicians and other decision-makers at the World Economic Forum in Davos, in the hope that the immersive close-ups would arouse empathy where normal news has long since ceased to have an effect. His VR documentaries get by with little plot. For content that the user explores at their own pace, too much information would only distract and too much action would be disturbing. Instead, Milk lets the music control the dramaturgy, for example by slowly drawing the user into the everyday life of a 12-year-old refugee girl with swelling and fading piano sounds. "With the right use of music, you can create the emotional stage of a story, which is similar to other media, but in this context it has a much more immediate and profound effect."
Extermination camp as a virtual place of remembrance
Most recently, Milk supported the VR film "The Last Goodbye" as a producer, a co-production with the Shoah Foundation, which was shown at the Tribeca Film Festival at the end of April. In the documentary, shot by Gabo Arora and Ari Palitz, we accompany Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter through the Majdanek extermination camp, where the now 85-year-old lost his parents and siblings. Using VR glasses, the user experiences the oppressive confinement of the wagons and the gas chambers. Does such a walk-in memorial necessarily have an enlightening effect? Or are its creators not overestimating the good in people? Because while the new medium is already being used successfully in therapy and stress management, content is of course also conceivable that has the opposite effect, for example numbing users with fantasies of violence or stirring up racist aggression. “An old saying goes that with great power comes great responsibility”, replies Chris Milk. "This is especially true for VR. The possibilities are as endless as our imagination. That's why we have to be honest with human sensory impressions and create experiences that connect people with each other. The responsibility rests on our shoulders."
Will music that doesn't roar around us in 360° surround sound seem flat and meaningless?
Today, we can hardly imagine how technology will change our lives once the clunky glasses are replaced by contact lenses and realistic, walk-in VR worlds blur the boundaries with reality. Will we forget how to see going to the cinema or a concert as a communal activity? Will we be able to snatch the guitars out of our favorite bands' hands or slip into their bodies? Perhaps the spectacular medium will ultimately just change our listening habits. And music that doesn't roar around us in immersive 360° surround sound will seem flat and meaningless to us.