Virtual reality is a technology that could actually allow you to connect on a real human level, soul-to-soul, regardless of where you are in the world.
Virtual reality is the 'ultimate empathy machine.' These experiences are more than documentaries. They're opportunities to walk a mile in someone else's shoes.
In virtual reality, we're placing the viewer inside a moment or a story... made possible by sound and visual technology that's actually tricking the brain into believing it's somewhere else.
It connects humans to other humans in a profound way that I've never seen before in any other form of media. And it can change people's perception of each other. And that's how I think virtual reality has the potential to actually change the world.
I was born into a world in which the most compelling stories are through film. But that wasn't always the case. Everything changes; everything evolves.
Video games as a storytelling medium are, from a mathematical standpoint, a branching narrative. You start at one place, you can go in multiple different directions, and there's a multitude of different endings.
Your head is a stereo input. The density and cartilage of your ears embed certain extra characteristics into stereo sound sources. Your brain decodes that and gives you sound plus conscious directions.
Journalism is about bringing people to an event or something that they couldn't attend.
There's three things that you need for virtual reality to work. You need the hardware that's affordable and doesn't make people sick, you need an audience that is willing to pay for it, and you need the content.
A bad version of a virtual reality video makes you vomit in your headset in under 10 seconds. It's much easier to make bad VR than it is to make good VR.
Film is this incredible medium that allows us to feel empathy for people that are very different than us and worlds completely foreign from our own.
If there's a new HBO series, you know there's going to be a certain level of storytelling mastery - that you can trust it.
With virtual reality, I'm not interested in the novelty factor. I'm interested in the foundations for a medium that could be more powerful than cinema, than theatre, than literature, than any other medium we've had before to connect one human being to another.
Music scores your life. You interact with it. You listen to it in the car. It becomes the soundtrack to that one summer with that one girl.
I want to figure out what comes after cinema as the gold standard for storytelling.
I knew a bit about the capabilities of HTML5 and have always had a preoccupation with technology. I wanted to delve deeper, to see what else it could do. The technology becomes the palette that you make the artwork with, your palette and your paint.
Virtual reality started for me in sort of an unusual place. It was the 1970s. I got into the field very young: I was seven years old. And the tool that I used to access virtual reality was the Evel Knievel stunt cycle.
I didn't want to be a storyteller when I grew up; I wanted to be stuntman.
We build camera rigs tailored specifically to the story we're trying to tell or the shot we're trying to capture.
For a long time, I believed that a great piece of music on its own could do more to stir the soul than any other single art form.
