Just four years after its last Vancouver appearance, SIGGRAPH, the annual worldwide trade fair for the burgeoning Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality sector, has once again made landfall in our up-and-coming tech hub.
After spending much of the past week among the 16,000+ global digerati, I can now attest that “I have seen the future and it works.”
Sort of. With glitches. A bit clunky and crude, in need of some finish. Still groping for a raison d’être. But bursting with energy and promise.
SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques), is a subset of the international Association for Computing Machinery, or ACM. To the uninitiated, the scene at the Vancouver Convention Centre might have seemed an odd take on the notion of a “fair.”
At the proprietary booths of tech companies – industry titans and start-ups alike – milling geeks craned to gawk at the rather ho-hum spectacle of another fellow nerd, all kitted up in opaque goggles and earphones, cryptically waggling some sort of joystick wand. But that’s just the prosaic view from outside. Inside those goggles whole worlds unfold.
Your intrepid stereoptonaut might be performing open heart surgery. Or plunging through a space-time wormhole. Or initiating a Neolithic shaman. Or trying on alternative genders and ethnicities. Or hang-gliding. Or surveilling Upper Manhattan in real time. Or fighting the War of the Roses. Or … or … or…
With so many and such disparate adventures vying for eyeballs, company barkers patrolled the Convention Centre aisles to reel in the rubes. Some of the snazzier demos, though, needed no shills at all to attract long lines of viewers. At the Disney booth, SIGGRAPH conferees queued up for half an hour or more to savour the three-minute spectacle of Cycles, the company’s first-ever VR movie.
Half a dozen Disneyites stood by to suit us up for the plunge. These were no mere Maître D’s, but rather the core makers of the film – producer, technical director and two separate animators, one for “environments” and another for characters. Together with a team of 50-odd specialist collaborators, they pulled the fleeting three minute drama together in a mere four months – a fair indication of the labour-intensity of VR production at this pioneering phase of its evolution.
My particular cyber-butler turned out to be Jeff Gipson, 33, author, director and conceptual initiator of the whole project. His quirky career to date ideally suits him to make Cycles.
He started out as an architect with a specialty in skate parks, so he knows a thing or two about zipping freestyle through immersive spaces. But he then discovered a passion for mathematically modelled light sculpture, so he signed on with Disney Animation to work on such projects as Frozen and Moana.
Marooned in L.A., far from his native Colorado and his customary skate park milieu, he had to get his hyperkinetic kicks on a BMX bike instead, careening around the abandoned swimming pools of derelict Hollywood Hills mansions.
Those empty haciendas recalled the sprawling ranch house back home where Gipson’s grandparents raised their children and grandchildren until widowhood and infirmity finally forced his grandma to relocate to “Assisted Living.”
Cycles uses VR to situate you, the viewer, in one of those ranch house McMansions. There you witness the distilled lives of its occupant couple, “Bert and Rae” (named after Gipson’s IRL grandparents).
You track them through all the rites of a long marriage, from newlywed threshold-crossing through baby-burping and teen-watch vigils, family feasts, illness, mourning and finally downsizing into a Seniors’ Home. It all ends up with a lingering pan around the dilapidated, graffiti-tagged shell of the now-empty ranch house.
Leap of faith in the Hollywood Hills. Photo: Jeff Gipson
To telescope nearly five decades of experience into just 180 seconds, Gipson serves up lyrical mini-vignettes interspersed with staccato riffs of time-lapse animation. He relies on lighting effects, sound cues and subtle choreography to direct viewers’ attention – all without compromising the illusory 360o freedom of motion that lends VR its sense of immediacy.
Inside the goggles, Gipson points out, there’s no proscenium, no curtain, no stage right, left or centre, no clear-cut demarcation of one scene from the next. Makes for a whole different story-telling grammar, which packs its own special emotive punch.
At SIGGRAPH Gipson’s seen gruff, tattooed Goth-type patrons swagger into the Cycles booth, only to emerge teary-eyed three minutes later. And I must admit the mini-movie even inspired me to fog up my own bifocals a bit inside the wraparound goggles.
That said, the film settles for mere sentimentalism, rather than aspiring to high drama – a wise self-restraint in this limited format and at this rudimentary phase of VR narrative. More dramaturgically ambitious fare screened in SIGGRAPH’s VR Theatre, hard by the Disney booth.
Results were mixed. Some of these films – a lurid take on the Hindu demiurge Hanuman or a hokey promo for the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration – amounted to no more than grandiose propaganda.
But the best of the VR Theatre offerings were minor masterpieces in their own right, like the jazzy – almost abstract – Trans-Dimensional Designer (跨界师) from the Beijing Film Academy. Others presented teasers for very promising coming attractions, such as Arden’s Wake, a visually lush subaqueous feature by Penrose Studios, or Trinity, an existentially angsty, dystopian sci-fi series from Montreal’s UNLTD-INC.
Aquaballet: Arden's Wake. Photo: Penrose
Still, these stories all unfolded within the isolated ambit of one’s own begoggled skull. Edgier SIGGRAPH offerings attempted to incorporate multiple viewers interacting in real time with each other and with the virtual simulacra of the VR tableau.
In Cave, an “untethered room scale collocated extended reality installation, ”New York University VR rock star Kenneth Perlin uses state-of-the-art electronics to propel his fellow techies, a couple of dozen at a time, back some 10,000 years into the past.
We huddle in a ring around a (virtual) subterranean campfire celebrating a shamanic succession. As we don our goggles, each of us gets to view the rite from our own perspective – including ghostly images of our fellow-celebrants, bedecked in Neolithic regalia and moving in real time. Ironic, that it should take state-of-the-art VR to light our way back to Stone Age retribalisation.
Platonic cave-men (and -women). Image: Meghan Welles
Or forward to cosmic transubstantiation. From the Swiss start-up Imverse comes Elastic Time, a little thought experiment that invites you to juggle a conveniently palm-sized Black Hole. With this orb, you get to wrap your own personal space-time continuum around a 3-D simulacrum of the Harvard-Smithsonian space observatory, where presiding astrophysicist Tony Stark attempts to explain the science of it all.
Hard to follow him, though, not only because the subject is intrinsically abstruse, but also due to the gravitational warp that often slows down his speech to unintelligibility. Even more distracting is the real-time apparition within the VR space of anybody in the Imverse staging area.
That includes yourself, as well as Elastic Time creator Mark Boulos, who attended SIGGRAPH to serve as a virtual Virgil to your cyber-Dante. The digital passerby manifest inside your goggles as moving, shimmering holograms.
This marvel is achieved by melding images from six real time cameras deployed around the Imverse booth. But when hologram Boulos high-fives your own ghostly holographic hand, the absolutely concrete tactile reality of the slap comes as an eerie shock.
Even more disconcertingly, you presently get sucked into your own black hole and reemerge as a formless (but free-moving) Point of View hovering all around your own real-time holographic self – as close as I’ve yet come to an out-of-body experience.