Want to Know What Virtual Reality Might Become? Look to the Past

Quick cuts were seen as violent and jarring when film was new, too. We will get used to VR cuts just as we got used to film cuts. It may take a few generations; right now VR is still a novelty.

I don't think that the "cut" automatically applies to VR. Film is fundamentally more indirectly immersive. You are looking through a window into another world, and the immersion is also largely through involvement via plot/characters/interest. VR will also (hopefully) have this, but the jump up in immediacy from film is like the one film has from books. Instead of a "cut" I think other tools and vocabulary will arise that are much more interactive.

People like looking through a window into another world. I don't think slaving your POV to the level where it's strapped to your head is fundamentally viable. Looking through the magic window of cinema is an active choice to delve into that POV, moment by moment -- for you can always close your eyes or look away in an instant. With VR, it's more like you have the choice the moment you strap on the goggles, you give it up for the experience, then have the "safe word" of being able to take the goggles off. Many more people will like looking at stuff than they will like being strapped to it.

No doubt some future V.R. creators will figure out how to tell cinematic stories or make compelling game experiences.

The director Chris Milk, in a widely circulated TED talk, called V.R. systems "Empathy machines," a description echoed by other V.R. auteurs.

The paradox of V.R. is that when you see the world through someone else's eyes, you can't actually see the person's eyes.

Donning V.R. goggles, visitors entered a parallel version of the forest, where they could shift in and out of the perspectives of different creatures, from midges to frogs to owls.

"This isn't storytelling." If V.R. allows you to project yourself onto the deck of the Titanic, I suspect we won't want the entire James Cameron-style back story about a dashing artist and his fleeting romance with a wealthy young woman facing an arranged marriage.

"We weren't expecting it really," Steel says about the process of creating "In the Eyes of the Animal," "But by the end of it, we were all thinking, If you'd had a stressful day, it's super nice to just put it on and just explore. You always find new perspectives and angles. With these bigger trees, you're scanning so much detail that you notice stuff in V.R. that you wouldn't notice in real life. We're stuck at five to six feet high, and so you rarely go down and put your chin on the floor. But in V.R., you just stick yourself down there, and you're like: 'I love it down here! Look at all these pine cones!' ".

In an age when action movies have acclimated our eyes to multiple cuts per second, and in which video games bombard us with nonstop carnage, there turns out to a surprisingly meditative quality to the world we inhabit with V.R. goggles on."

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My Vive had performance issues where my background environment would randomly pop-up during games.

I thought that was a feature called "Chaperone."

You're not going to be in constant amazement or think you're in some new reality with a new body. It still a screen pasted to your face and your mind knows this the whole time.

Who said anything about amazement? No one. What I'm referring to is precisely the fact that you know it's a screen strapped to your face. Being stuck on someone else's POV through something strapped to your face is a different experience than looking through the magic window of the cinema screen or the computer monitor. I think it makes a fundamental difference to how the "cut" works or won't work.