What are people's thoughts on VR Sound/ Immersive audio etc as far as a future medium? Will it ever go beyond gaming or a novelty (for want of a better word) form of presentation that clients will try once or twice. I've been trying different things out and looking at a lot of talks etc... but I can't see it ever making it's way into the lounge room. The thing that lost me was in an Oculus video saying that headphones are the only way forward (not an exact quote). Which they probably are for that format, but families aren't ever going to sit around at home all wearing headphones to watch their nightly TV, are they?
Just curious, are 'regular' post engineers getting many requests to do VR audio from clients? I know that the Youtube player isn't functional outside android at the moment. Is it something a lot of Post houses are looking into as a future form of work..? I know it will grow as a field, but it still feels a bit to me like practicality is going to outweigh the benefit for most everyday people. Even most friends of mine who are tech savvy can't be bothered setting up surround for their home system, a few will go as far as adding a soundbar.
Any thoughts? Love to hear from those already doing some of this work.
Thanks.

There are many terms currently that seem to often be conflated. Each are in fact distinct and have different methods and applications.

The short answer:
The EBU recently held a workshop where new evidence about the maximum time a viewer prefers to watch VR narrative content was presented. There is some evidence (based on findings from several European broadcasters) that the maximum time is about 20 minutes, which may limit its use for full length sports events or drama. Obviously this severely limits the scope of VR and 360 video content in a broadcasting scenario.

Is there a published paper, and any chance you could point to it easily? I would like to read that study.

Randall

There is a lot of low quality vr that messes up almost all the current consumer research, I can't watch any of the so called 360VR for more then 2 minutes. So a lot of the studies are meaningless.

People should look at the steamvr vive numbers, I've actually watched test groups with people that despise watching 3d films and dislike games play the vive for over an hour.

People really need to get the vive and get some of the content like apollo 11 or the blue. Apollo 11 is basically cinematic (you don't have to control the lander), also "the blue" is primarily cinematic doc ... also they are far longer then 20 minutes.

Game revenue is already larger then film numbers, cinematic vr will cut into that more. In general gearslutz needs to wake up, or this will be a old timers "remember when" crowd using 1990 forum tech. Looking at the current trend lines, my take is dubstages and grading facilities will be majorly impacted by 2017.

In my small world VR is enjoying quite a vogue right now, mostly for short branding or "look how cool we are" pieces by corpos etc.. They seem to be working very well for "walk thru" videos, as well as thrill ride type pieces. I too have questions about how well the medium works with what a lot of clients needs really are (especially re presentation to a large live audience) but whatever they end up doing with it I think it is here to stay. Filmmakers just have to figure out how to do more than just the basic 360 HRTF stuff, possibly by making more complexly interactive game-like pieces, since everyone will get bored by the basic VR thing after the 2nd project they see. Budgets are going to have to be both modified and increased to meet the heavy post-labor needs, at least until that kind of thing gets more automated. I'm most curious to see if filmmakers who make long-form doc and drama work take up this medium, either as a VR verite doc or a "Playhouse 90" style live-TV-theatre work on a stage with actors. I know of one full-up VR location-verite doc already in progress.

Not that I am aware of, but if one is available it should be available for download from the EBU site. I will investigate.

Oculus, for example, have suggested users take short breaks after 30 minutes of use. There appears to be a definable limit.

That sounds like me, yep. Absolutely true.
Nonetheless, I know a lot of people tire very quickly e.g. of listening with headphones, although this of course is strongly dependent
on the medium consumed, and the reproduction quality. I can listen to Mahler's 5th on my DT770s without a break, but wouldn't get through one single Rihanna song on a pair of iPhone buds.
The same certainly applies for goggles.
But the main thing, and that's what the VR industry has to (and will) tackle, is the lack of social interaction that goes with wearing goggles & phones. I WAS amazed by vive, and 3d movies DO make me regurgitate my lunch, but when push comes to shove I'd still prefer going to a 3d flick with my girlfriend than sitting next to her wearing a vive.
But that's gonna change, I'm pretty sure. Not the audience preferences, but certainly the technology. After all - 25 years ago, most people would have taken OLED for a Scandinavian boy's name, and 9.1 for just another decimal number...

Mostly echoing what others have said here...

I've had my head in this full time for the last two months and we are doing a couple of spatial mixes for short doc projects using the FB360 plugins. It's very exciting and generates a lot of interesting discussion. I think in the long run we will definitely be watching narrative content in VR, but it's still too early to predict what good VR filmmaking will look like. There's not a lot of polished live action content out there yet and I don't think there are any people who can say they are real experts on how to use VR for storytelling. It seems like there's some stuff on the festival circuit that will hopefully come out this year.

And yeah my preference is 5-10m tops for a given experience. I don't think many producers will be motivated to make anything long format right now. The experience is not good enough yet and it would financially be hard to justify. I don't know how game developers can expect people to play games for 2-3 hours on this generation of headsets. That will probably all change once the hardware improves though.

I 100% think it is here to stay and it will be a huge disruptor. Just look at the Windows 10 Holographic demo. It's insane.

If anyone has any suggestions for stuff to check out, please post in here.

I actually don't think VR's a big disruptor at all. I think it's more of the same, just a next logical step. I might agree that it's disruptive to some fields when I see work done with it that people will pay to see--everything I've been a part of or seen so far has been available for free unless it's part of a game. How it moves into mainstream for-profit media will determine if VR productions will get the budgets to really stretch out, change the entertainment industry and cause millions of people to equip themselves with what they need to experience it.

yeah i meant beyond entertainment, vr/ar/mixed reality have so many crazy applications in other fields..

I think it's early days, so things are still wide open at this point. I borrowed an Oculus DK1 for a couple weeks and was playing the space game Elite Dangerous with it. Could play for an hour or so straight no problem. Probably depends on what the context of the program or game is as well. I'm yet to watch any linear media in VR, but a Friend saw a demo and said it was excellent. Really looking forward to seeing what can happen.

hmmm ... reading through this anyone that has tested this know it will happen, but the time frame is a bit nebulous. How I do these type of projections for the last couple of decades for the big time finance guys - is I find the bases of the technology in $ then just do a simple half the cost every 2 years which gives me the cost points per tech generation. So about 30 years ago there started to be a lot of VR on the government side that went into full production, so something that cost about $10 mill 30 years ago should be costing around $300 this year (i.e. divide by 30 by 2 to get 15 technology generations, then divide the old 1985 price for VR by fifteen "2*" which is around 32000). Now there is some fluff around the $300 number with how I rounded things, but just on a long term plot VR cost have moved into the consumer space. So it's not so much when will VR leave gaming, since it has been used in hazardish conditions for a long time, but when is the cost point of VR move to "consumer" range. Also when I normally do these profiles, I look at secondary impacts. My current view is VR will impacting flat screen sales in double digits in 2020, this then effects business realestate prices and moves to home realestate a bit after - so this is big time effects. When the impact to flat screen sales starts softening screen sales, that's when a lot hits the fan.

I guess, if the general population takes to it and sees it as an alternative to TV viewing, and if the new tech allows there to be some meaningful group viewing options.

Wave is certainly banking on VR audio being here to stay, looks they are getting ready to develop a suite of VR sound tools.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...any-headphones

This is a really good point. Part of entertainment for what I'd say is the majority of viewers is the shared experience. At the moment it's still a fairly solitary experience outside of gaming.

I've heard comments from teenagers that VR is "gimmick". But I think they were upset about high price of headsets.

VR movie theaters are already starting to pop up.

Shared VR experiences (interactive and linear) with multiple users in a virtual space or mixed reality space seem inevitable. It looks like body scanning technology is already being tested with the holographic stuff.

Whether us old people like it is a whole other issue. But I don't think my kids will interact with screens much in 10 years.

Could be, but I do know that people are often very concerned with how they look to other people, and people wearing VR gear look like nerds.

I actually spent quite a bit of time in Second Life for a couple of years, learning to build and learn my way around the system and the possibilities.

A number of large companies, universities, and organizations had/have virtual spaces in Second Life used for education, training, and experiments.

Music and video can be streamed in-world, local voice is 360-degrees directional, websites and information can be displayed virtually. VR is full of potential for business, education, and entertainment.

I was exploring making an immersive educational VR platform for pro audio, music, and audio engineering. In the end, the Second Life system just wasn't robust enough. Too much lag, crashes, and glitches, etc..

I created and built nearly everything in the image below. VR is coming. It will get better, faster, and more powerful, and the interfaces will become more readily available. And while I may have been early to the actual game, I have enough VR experience, that I'll be able to jump in and know the lay of the land when the time is right.

I was also heavily involved with virtual community building, forums, and social media before they really took off, and because of that I was able to be at the right times and in the right places to use those as tools for education and business. I'll be there when VR hits, too.

Cool! Save me a seat!

I've been involved in virtual reality for years. It's been as exciting as it's been frustrating.

I was first on the internet in 1985, when I worked at a software company in NYC that created the first terminal-emulation software for the PC. I knew the internet was going to be the future, and I knew it was going to take time.

VR is coming, and it's going to be big.

I'm really hoping that it will not just get used by the current big-action-feature type market--the one targeted most at teenagers. I'm really looking for serious story-driven filmmakers to figure out how to use this medium to tell the kind of stories in which nothing blows up and no one is pursued by black helicopters or has to fight heavily armed ninjas etc.. When someone does this (and I bet many are trying right now) I'll get very interested in this medium.

As someone with acute sensitivity to motion sickness and vertigo, the tech of the viewing apparatus has to really up its game for me to want to choose it over current HD video (since I'm mostly interested in story and don't care so much that it's in VR or not). Please do a better job than the 3D Theatrical people did!

It'll probably take a new generation of filmmakers to figure out how to use VR in a narrative film.

The problem is picture, not sound. We've got surround mics and the ability to place objects anywhere we want during post.

But visual filmmaking tells a story by directing our attention to specific things, usually action or dialog by an actor, but often carefully framed objects or scenes. So you frame a shot for the story, not worrying about the large bunch of non-story distractions just outside the frameline. Then you edit hours of disparately shot sequences, relying on the viewer to supply continuity as objects or people carry from one shot to the next. A cut works because the eye can focus on one thing across the edit.

VR wants a 360 degree field of view. You have to set and light the whole world, and duck yourself and crew/equipment out of view during the shot. Then you have to figure out how to edit in a way that maintains continuity no matter where the viewer is looking. I know good editors who've been attempting the latter... and haven't figured it out. They still can't make cuts that aren't jarring to most viewing angles.

One solution may be totally CGI films, possibly with live actors matted in, performed in continuous scenes with fades in between. Another solution... who knows?

When film started out, it was documentation of single scenes: a train coming at you, two actors kissing, a bandit aiming his gun at the camera, a cartoon dinosaur interacting with a stage performer. Audiences were wowed that these things were even possible. It took a while to figure out how to tell stories with that tool, and develop a language of film.

VR is still in that documenting a single scene, and viewers are wowed, phase. Stay tuned.

Cinemaeditor Mag recent article on The Jungle Book explains how they cut/edited sound "first" which was followed by rough mocap output - the whole Sound First approach makes a lot of sense to me. Mark Livolsi goes over a bunch of the problems you've mentioned, then goes over solutions that worked for the film. I think from a workflow perspective it has laid a lot of groundwork, some of the small cut scenes done in VR for that film that are on Vive are excellent.

Sound first! I like VR more already!

In my 2020 film production world, film would start off with a editor with a small team in a central virtual dub stage that was a hub between other various rooms/areas. In one direction they would be looking at film screen with a dolby atmos system, turning to thier left could be another room that had adr & performance capture, next room over would be the orchestration/film_music, next room over would be previs, room over from that would be sound design, room over from that would be film production & vfx. Basically instead of going to a dubstage at the very end, the film would start with a virtual dub stage with nuthing but sound at first, slowly filling in the pieces as things were ready.

Rolls Royce reveals remote controlled 'roboships' will take to the sea by 2020 | Daily Mail Online

VR is but a stepping stone toward Augmented Reality, where the larger revenue lies.

Building sound first (maybe with some mocap dialog) and then designing the room in CGI can give you a VR experience... but while it's Virtual, it ain't the kind of Reality people expect from most narrative filmmaking. It's more like an incredibly detailed cartoon, rather than the combined art of a director, production designer, DP, actors, hair/makeup/wardrobe, and all the other visual production crafts.

Will this replace what we know as filmmaking? Ask me in 30 years...

I'm not ACE, and can't access the Jungle Book article. Can you post a link? Or if that's not possible, tell us how they take the viewer through edits for time or place. All the VR I've seen -- which isn't an exhaustive sample by any means -- has had to stick to the ancient Greek Unities.

I just have a paper copy, sorry ...

Another good reference is the podcast on Drew Medina, which is especially pertinent to low budget Indie sound people (and or someone trying to break into the industry). He's one of the people that did a major Vive release. I think he's a bit too fanatical on his music viewpoint, but all his points are well taken and need to be thought out and considered in detail. SDA 009: Drew Medina – Io Moon & Virtual Reality