“VR can still enter everyday use”

Virtual Reality (VR) is a technology that has not yet been appropriated by the general public. It seems interesting to me to take a step aside, playful, to build our critical mind on VR. The Usbek & Rica media interviewed me on this subject, about my coming to animate a VR workshop at the QIFF in Quimper on February 4, 2022.

Read the article on Usbek & Rica: https://usbeketrica.com/fr/article/la-vr-peut-encore-entrer-dans-les-usages-quotidiens-de-demain

The Quimper Images & Films Festival (QIFF), a festival whose ambition is to “question the cinema of tomorrow”, will take place from the 1^st to the 5^th of February in Brittany. Before the event, Usbek & Rica proposes to explore briefly the subject of education to images applied to virtual reality with Benoît Labourdette, filmmaker, artist and consultant in cultural innovation and digital strategies. During the QIFF, he will lead a workshop that will question this new technology in an interactive way, by allowing participants to make small 360-degree shootings, on Saturday, February 4^th from 2:00 pm to 5:30 pm, at Novomax in Quimper.

Note that our journalist Pablo Maillé will lead a session dedicated to short formats from YouTube, at the same place, on Friday, February 3 at 5 pm. Infos and program on the QIFF website.

Usbek & Rica : Why do you think it is necessary to do “image education” on VR ? What is the objective of your workshop?

The objective of this workshop is to use the new tools offered by virtual reality in a playful way. Creativity can allow us to take a critical distance through detour and play. Critical in the constructive sense of the term, obviously. Contrary to some, I am not at all opposed to VR as such, which I consider to be an interesting technology, which is not new by the way. However, I think it is necessary to ask the following question, about VR as about all technological tools: what do we do with them? How do we use them? For me, the game is the best way to study these questions. Playing means reinventing the rules. There is a reason why children who play games spend as much time discussing the rules as they do playing.

In concrete terms, this workshop will allow participants - and this is what usually motivates them to come - to make a short film in virtual reality in a collective way. This will take place in the following way: the people present will form a chain, outside and inside, then they will pass the camera from hand to hand, moving from one to the other, which will constitute a sequence shot, a film made in one go. Everyone will be able to do what they want, without a pre-established scenario. Last year, some had held the camera upside down, others had run with it... The idea is to play while creating a link thanks to this digital tool. Once we’re back in the room, we’ll show the film on a big screen - not in a virtual reality headset, because what we’ve just lived as a collective experience would otherwise turn into an individual experience. The VR dailies show two “fisheye” images side by side, front and back, or top and bottom, at the same time. It’s a pretty gripping viewing experience. We’ll all talk about it together to discuss what it evokes in us. The idea is to discover things that the “traditional” creation workshops would not necessarily have allowed to discover. We will use the VR camera in a creative way, and not the way the industry intended us to use it. It is a playful detour, a side step that invites critical thinking. And this creates a very singular and interesting work.

How is a virtual reality image different from a “traditional” cinematographic image?

Technically, an image is an image: there is no technical difference between a digital image that we see in a cinema and an image that we watch in a headset. The virtual reality image is simply distorted when viewed on a conventional screen because its spherical shape means that it is supposed to be viewed through a headset.

What is different is the project. Virtual reality is a particular device where the image appears spherical. One can look where one wants “in” the image simply by turning one’s head, as if one were in a new reality. In the cinema, on the contrary, the device of projection does not replace reality: one can turn away the head from the screen and one will see completely other thing. That’s why VR is called “virtual reality”: somewhere it’s as if it were reality, you can’t get out of the image! It replaces our visual perception of reality. There is an ambivalence there: certainly that can generate very strong experiences - can be even fascinating - but, at the same time, the critical distance with the image is less obvious, except to close the eyes. The ethical approach I try to adopt consists in studying this ambivalence in order to ask ourselves collectively how best to use these devices. Even on a small scale, the discussion is always fruitful.

Despite their popularity in festivals or with certain professionals, virtual reality images do not seem to be very widespread among the general public... Why should we educate our gaze in front of images that do not (yet) give rhythm to our daily life?

A few years ago, there was a very strong belief that virtual reality was going to change everything, that it was about to become the “new Eldorado” for artists and that everyone was going to get a headset. It is clear that it did not take. On the medical and architectural side, VR is being used more and more, often in exciting ways, but it’s not a mainstream use as such. Apart from video game players, in terms of distribution, we remain in a niche market. Contrary to what some industrialists and some media had predicted, VR has not become a major new broadcast medium.

But just because VR hasn’t entered everyday use doesn’t mean it won’t later. A lot of investments are still being made in VR, just look at Mark Zuckerberg’s projects to see that. VR can still enter into the daily uses of tomorrow. The example of tablets is very revealing: when the iPad arrived in 2009, tablets had already been around for 20 years! And yet, that’s when the object became widespread. So to come back to VR, I think it is interesting and important to question this technology now, as long as it has not yet taken off. This leaves time to “prepare” for it, so to speak! For me, the issue is not industrial but educational and collaborative. We must avoid technological leaps forward and encourage playful and creative appropriations of VR.

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Pablo Maillé
January 20, 2023