I spent years shitposting on pre-Musk Twitter, some of which I’m slowly integrating into this blog. Mixed in with random brain farts are important moments where I detail some development in real time – like my quixotic attempts at VR. In 2016 VR was definitely ‘the thing’. I poured much time and money into virtual reality for so little success… but if Facebook couldn’t make Meta work then little wonder I burned out and moved on.
It looks to me like Apple is not giving up on VR. Not that I can afford their fancy Vision Pro headset – but I have upgraded to an IPhone 16 pro that captures stereo video – and look – the latest Blackmagic Resolve can process that format.
Revisiting the 2016 tweets reminded me of three cameras that helped empty my bank account. I still have them all. The Fujifilm W1 is a cute little snapshot camera with a small lenticular screen on the back so you can see the 3D images in real time, but the images captured are quite small. My one died but I was recently gifted another. The Ricoh Theta is a sports camera which is good for sporty things (like riding on a roller coaster) but not really happy on a tripod. The weirdest and most expensive of the lot is the Lytro Illum … what on earth did I expect from this thing? Light field photography? Hello? Crickets.
It seems certain to me that the iPhone can now take over the task of stereo video capture – thank you. Then what and where can be my delivery format?
Sound guides the way…
I dropped VR in 2017. The last few years I’ve worked with surround audio, following on a government residency, working through the complexity of Dolby ATMOS and ambisonics. On testing the ATMOS encoded album Severed Surround System it became clear that most people are happy enough with binaural listening – even though you miss out on turning your head to attend to one sound at a time.
But there’s been no simple headphones for images – it’s a helmet or nothing. And most people prefer nothing. Which is a pity.
A well designed VR experience, with plenty of floor space and high end helmets is effective. I went to an experience called Horizon of Khufu designed by excurio – it was entirely engaging, felt natural and made you wonder why there wasn’t more things like this. But it requires a team of people and a lot of physical real estate – it’s at the orchestral end of music performance. The small end is not as likely to succeed in this space.
I’ve been looking at Apple to solve the hardware uptake. They’ve produced some awful clangers over the years but usually rethink and regroup and iterate their way to the end goal. The iPhone 1 was a chunk. I waited then bought an iPhone 3 and that was ‘pretty good’. The 5 was ‘good’. Maybe the third Apple helmet won’t cost the price of a car. But I will go out on limb to say that Apple are going in the wrong direction for artists like me, and are more likely to serve the people that used to buy the MS Hololens.
Meta is hanging in there with cheaper options. You might wonder how much longer they are going to just ‘hang in there’ with VR. Zuckerberg describes the rise of full VR taking decades – but the sales of Ray Ban ‘smart glasses’ is far faster than that and so are driving the development in here and now. Projects such as Meta Orion look like a way to finally get rid of the helmet. The glasses are chunky. But they are glasses.
I want to reward myself for trying so hard. ‘Hey look – I was there at the start!’ But 9 years later I’m still waiting on the technology to catch up. In that time it’s worth thinking again – what is our role and opportunity as individual composers in this field of art – if any?
Hard one.
