Ken's Blog

Talking with various people about our CAVE experience, I needed to articulate aspects of our storytelling that I had only intuited. One of those aspects is a non-obvious point about world-building.

In any story, you begin by establishing a world. The world can be perfectly ordinary — like a factory town in New Jersey. Or it can be completely crazy — like a talking rat in Paris who dreams of being a master chef.

It really doesn’t matter what your world is, as long as it is consistent. When you create that initial world, you are creating a contract with your audience, one that you need to take very seriously — because your audience will indeed take it seriously.

But then your main character will go on a journey, and in the course of that journey will have an important epiphany, and will consequently become emotionally transformed. At that moment the world needs to change.

And that is your chance to change your contract with the audience. That is the moment your audience will be open to a transformation of the entire world you have constructed for them.

But there are rules. The change you make needs to correspond in some reasonable way to the psychological transformation of your character. For example, if you are showing an animated film that features a relationship between a young woman and a prince who has been cursed to look like a beast, your world transformation can take place in a ballroom scene.

The moment the young woman and beast finally dance together, and their relationship consequently deepens, your animated world can change from 2D to 3D. If you had effected that change just for effect, it would seem like a mere gimmick. But if you synchronize your world change to the corresponding change in the relationship between your characters, your audience will happily go there with you.

Following the same principle, we do some unexpected and magical world changing in the middle of our CAVE immersive VR production, keyed to a corresponding important psychological transformation in our main character. And audiences love it. I would tell you what that change is, but you might end up seeing CAVE, and I wouldn’t want to ruin it for you.

I had an interesting discussion today with Fred Brooks after he saw our CAVE experience. He liked it, but he was surprised because he had always envisioned VR as the medium that lets you walk around freely in another world.

In contrast our experience is designed to be shared by a seated audience. You can indeed move your head around — and when you do, what you see is correct — yet you remain seated throughout.

I suggested that the thing to compare this to is not VR, as that is normally conceived, but rather the experience of going out with your friends to see a movie or live theater. An audience being told a story does not expect to be part of the story.

There is no question of right or wrong here, but rather of genre. We are indeed using the technology of virtual reality, but we are aiming it in a different direction.

Once he and I had talked it through, Fred saw that we are not creating “the future of VR” but rather one form of “the future of narrative”. In that context he liked it very much.

It was interesting to have our first full day of showing CAVE at Siggraph, and then on the same day to attend Jensen Huang’s talk on the launching of the first Nvidia graphics card that does true real-time ray tracing. The two visions are so interestingly different.

Nvidia is focusing on the ability to create computer graphics that is visually indistinguishable from reality. And they are doing quite an impressive job of it. As usual, Jensen’s talk was inspirational and fun, and the demos were spectacular.

We are going in a very different direction. We are not striving for visual realism, but for emotional connection. You can read my blog post today on our Future Reality Lab website to read more about our journey.

I don’t think it would make sense to say that one vision is “right” and the other “wrong”. That would be as pointless as those arguments comparing grand opera to Westerns.

The goals are so fundamentally different. Yet one day they may very well converge. After all, grand opera and Westerns managed to do it. 🙂

First day of SIGGRAPH
So much to talk about, but
Right now my brain’s full

🙂

Tomorrow morning SIGGRAPH begins. Today has been our last chance to put everything together and fix things up before the crowd arrives, and the floodgates open.

For my part, it’s been a day of working on making our miniature tabletop mammoth world better. I’ve been teaching procedural mammoths to pick up and eat apples, to walk around obstacles rather than through them, to drink water from a lake with style and grace. Basically, all of the behaviors you’d expect from mammoths in a miniature tabletop world.

Fortunately, there are no actual miniature tabletop mammoths, so I have a lot of leeway. As long as the little mammoths don’t do obviously non-mammoth-like things, it’s all good.

In a way the situation is similar to the animation challenges faced by the creators of Jurassic Park, since nobody knows exactly how those big dinosaurs moved. And that very lack of knowledge created an interesting opportunity.

The filmmakers didn’t need the dinosaurs to move correctly. They just needed them to move in a way that wouldn’t feel wrong to an audience.

Ten of us flew in together from New York to Vancouver last night, and several more of our team met us here today. The big crunch for SIGGRAPH 2018 is upon us.

I haven’t done a truly large show at SIGGRAPH for many years. This one has a million moving parts, a large crew, and a budget that is probably best not to dwell upon.

You don’t do these types of things unless you are trying to change the nature of the conversation. And we are definitely trying to change the nature of the conversation.

When people these days think of “Virtual Reality”, they very likely think of something like Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, or the recent Spielberg film adapted from that book. In that view of VR, when people enter a virtual world they completely disconnect from their physical bodies.

The production we will be showing argues for something different. We want people to be aware of each others’ real presence, to share actual physical space, even as they enter a virtual world together. We don’t aim to replace physical gathering, but to evolve it.

The only way to explain to people why that is good is to show them. And for that you need to build something, and then invite thousands of people to experience it.

Which is what we will be doing this week at SIGGRAPH. After that, I think we will probably all catch up on sleep.

I gave a talk last night in which I showed a vision for the future. Everything I literally demonstrated on my computer is clearly possible today — after all, people were seeing me do the demo right there in front of them.

Yet I was telling a tale of things that are not yet possible, yet will be in the future. This relationship between what was real and what was merely suggested created a dramatic tension, and that tension was the heart of the story.

I think we feel a similar tension whenever we experience a play or a movie, attend an opera or read a novel. We are being introduced to a world that clearly does not exist, in any literal sense.

Yet it could exist, at least in our collective imaginations. The task of the players is not to fool their audience, but rather to invite that audience to willingly enter a shared land of make-believe.

There is an extra dimension to this invitation when the “land of make-believe” is presented as though it is real. We feel this dimension when we watch a movie filmed in a style of Cinéma vérité, or a performance by a stage conjurer. Logic tells us that the thing we are watching is clearly not happening, yet our senses tell us otherwise.

I think my talks about the future fit into this latter category. I want people to experience an exciting and positive future as though it is already here.

My goals in doing so are quite specific: I’m not trying to fool my audience. Rather, I am inviting them to join me in making the future happen.

Since I will be traveling to Canada tomorrow, my mind is turning to the mystery of borders. How is it that we can take a single step, and end up in an entirely different country?

When we take such a step, our body may move only a matter of inches, yet the human laws governing our body radically change, sometimes in unexpected ways. What a tortured definition of “reality” we humans must have, for such a thing to make any sense to us at all.

I think of this when I ponder the concept of my tax dollars going to build a border wall between our country and another. What if I don’t want such a wall? Should I still be required to help pay for it?

Unfortunately it seems to be official U.S. policy that the nation south of such a wall is financially responsible for its construction. So when that border wall is finished, how much will our nation be required to pay?

I guess Justin Trudeau will tell us when he is good and ready.

Today was one of those crazy days.

I mean, I knew going in that today was going to be crazy, but I had woefully underestimated the level of craziness. It all felt a bit like some alternate version of This is Spinal Tap where Nigel says “This day goes to eleven.”

In addition to everyone in our project running around madly to get our big CAVE project ready for SIGGRAPH (starting in just four days!), there was an extremely large film crew from Oculus making a documentary about us.

They were really nice people, but they were a film crew.
Interestingly, they had been told not to show anything with logos on it. Imagine trying to film a whole crew of computer science students at work without showing a single tee shirt with a logo. It isn’t easy.

I came in at seven in the morning to get all my programming done for the day. I knew that by 9am I would be spending all my time putting out fires, continually switching roles depending on who I was talking to.

Sure enough, most of today felt like a cross between the stateroom scene from A Night at the Opera and the birthday cake scene from Bugsy. I guess when you think about it, there are worse ways to spend your day than feeling like a cross between Groucho Marx and Warren Beatty.

With maybe just a dash of Nigel Tufnel thrown into the mix.

Speaking of eyeglasses, I’ve always wondered about Superman and Supergirl, ever since I was a little kid. In the comics — and more recently in the movies and TV shows — these two superheroes can always walk about unrecognized, just by putting on a pair of glasses.

Now, I don’t know about you, but if I put on a pair of glasses, I just look like me wearing a pair of glasses. This seems like a far more remarkable superpower than their ability to fly or to burn through walls with death-ray eyes, or even to bend steel with their bare hands.

There are lots of amazing wonders in the Marvel Universe, including a billionaire who flies around in an iron suit, a guy who can shrink down really really small, a giant green id monster, another guy who’s part spider, a talking raccoon, and whole family of Norse gods — the list goes on.

But not one of these people has that far more awesome and eerily inexplicable superpower possessed by our heroes from DC Comics: Just let these folks slip into an ordinary pair of glasses, and nobody will ever recognize them.

How cool is that?