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Disney Movies VR

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My primary reason for starting this blog was to keep a log of all the VR games and experiences I’ve tried. I was always intending to include Samsung Gear VR experiences as well as PlayStation VR although when I actually picked up my phone and looked at a few of the apps in my library I did wonder if there would be enough to write about. The Gear VR experiences tended to be short, occasionally experimental but more often than not promotional and yet there is something unintentionally weird and fascinating about even the most mundane experiences in VR.

Disney Movies VR is a perfect example of a VR oddity. This free app is mostly a collection of 360-degree trailers for Disney movies that are a few years old now (The BFG, Pete’s Dragon, Rogue One etc) although there are a couple of interesting experiences. Some of these are unintentionally creepy, like Lumière’s Dress Rehearsal in which you are sitting in the dining room from Beauty and the Beast and Lumière sings “Be Our Guest” at you while furniture and plates dance in front of your eyes. There is something about being unable to move out of the chair that makes it seem more like a surreal kidnap scenario, which I suppose in some ways it always was. There is one particularly terrifying moment where something I assume to be a tall wooden hat stand leans in front of you to feed you soup. This experience does have some interactivity so you can grab things like plates and spoons as they pass by but the limited control available makes you feel ineffective and adds to the sensation of being bound to the chair. In a desperate attempt to escape I tried throwing a candle at Lumière but it just dropped pathetically to the table, adding to the pervading sense of uselessness.

Then there are the two Jungle Book experiences, which are entirely intentionally terrifying. In one you are eaten by a giant snake. This really made me question who these experiences are aimed at but at the same time it’s this apparent lack of direction that embodies everything I love about these odd little moments in VR. They play like experiments, most not entirely successful but all at least trying to provoke some kind of reaction. It reminds me of the early days of CD-Rom software, when my favourite band The Residents briefly became tech pioneers and created The Residents Freak Show, which remains one of my favourite PC-related experiences of all time. If someone could recreate The Residents Freak Show in VR that would be something to see.

There are also a bunch of Star Wars experiences, the most interesting of which is surprisingly the behind-the-scenes footage from Rogue One. It’s purely a 360-degree video and I’m not a fan of the film but the sensation of being there on set as they shoot a couple of battle scenes is actually quite impressive.

However, the most interesting section of this app for me is the menu area. You stand at the entrance to the Disney castle. To your left is Stark Tower, home of the Avengers, although no Marvel experiences have been added to the app to date (and given the general lack of updates I’m not sure there ever will be). To your right are AT-ATs and various other Star Wars vehicles. The interesting point about this location, and it’s a recurring feeling in VR, is that it comes with a profound sense of loneliness. I assume this area is supposed to recreate the experience of being at Disneyland and the various experiences are the “rides”, but there is something deeply unsettling about being in a theme park alone at night. This feeling is amplified when you finish an experience and return to the menu area, which is now silent except for the sound of the odd, distant firework, like you’ve left the theme park then snuck back in after hours. I was briefly obsessed with watching urban explorer videos on YouTube and my personal favouites were those in which people broke into theme parks, ideally those that have been closed down and left to rot. There is something about seeing a place that was designed to be full of people and their associated noise suddenly quiet and empty that is inherently creepy. That’s the feeling the Disney Movies VR app creates and again, probably not their intention, but it’s there.

In VR creepiness is never far away.

PlayStation VR Worlds: Ocean Descent

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Ocean Descent is, and was presumably designed to be, the perfect introduction to PlayStation VR. It consists of 3 stages that are essentially three parts of the same experience. All three place the player inside an underwater diving cage. In the first episode, Coral Reef, you watch as angel fish and turtles swim by. This is fundamentally a 360-degree video with little movement and certainly no sense of peril.

In the second, Wildlife Tour, the same thing happens except this time the cage descends into a cave where you encounter stingrays and glowing jellyfish. It’s a perfect visual analogy for how far you as the player are willing to go with VR. The second stage introduces the movement of the cage and as the cage descends there is a sense of potential danger lurking in the unknown darkness of the cave. There are also some light narrative elements here, just by virtue of the movement itself and also with a clever use of visual foreshadowing. If you look down through the floor of the cage you see the darkness of the cave below and within that darkness a single, glowing light. As you descend further the light is revealed to be a jellyfish and moments later you are surround by dozens of them. It’s a simple technique but what it achieves is that it focuses your attention. Once you’ve spotted the jellyfish you know it’s there and you know it’s coming so even if you look away you are aware of the jellyfish.

This notion of focusing attention can be a real issue in VR storytelling, which is why this single moment of the one jellyfish appearing before the others is so important. Immersive theatre productions face similar problems. I saw Punchdrunk’s production of Faust in London around 10 years ago, which took place over several maze-like floors of an abandoned archive building. Left to wander and discover the narrative at our own pace, I distinctly remember feeling that I was constantly missing something more interesting elsewhere. In VR you can choose where to look at all times and it can sometimes feel that you’re missing important parts of the experience by not looking at the right spot at the right time. The single jellyfish is an elegant solution to this problem.

The mild sense of peril established in Wildlife Tour sets us up perfectly for the third stage, Shark Encounter. In this stage the sequence repeats again only this time two remote-controlled drone subs are floating around outside the cage and the experience is accompanied by the voices of two technicians, presumably watching your progress from the ship above. The technicians explain that this is a salvage mission although no one seems sure what the object of that mission is. As the descent continues you discover a sunken nuclear sub and the drones retrieve a radioactive MacGuffin from inside. However, before the cage can ascend it is attacked by a large shark who rips off the front grill and tries his hardest to force his way in before the cage is thankfully hauled back up to safety.

This episode introduces a number of key elements of VR experiences, which I’ll cover individually below:

The Guide

The technicians communicating with the player act as a guide through the experience, setting the scene, enhancing the narrative and adding a further assist to the issue of focussing the attention of the player as mentioned above. The writing in Shark Encounter is actually quite effective and sets the scene efficiently without taking anything away from the experience. It also sets up an interesting premise, prompting me to wonder what was going to happen next in the story once the experience had finished. As a player it makes you feel included and part of the narrative rather than an observer, despite the fact that when you really think about it your involvement in the mission is fairly redundant. There is another aspect to the guide that I think carries through into other VR games and experiences. They act as a ringmaster. VR, more than any other gaming experience, is primarily concerned with spectacle and putting on a show. In the circus the ringmaster’s function is to introduce the acts in a way that builds expectation, and the same can certainly be said of the way the technicians foreshadow the appearance of the shark in this experience.

Atmosphere

Added to the visuals and the communication with the technicians above there are also a couple of key elements in Shark Encounter that help to create an atmosphere. There is dramatic music at key points in the story and there is also the sound of your own panicked breathing. Obviously, such techniques are not specific to VR, but the way they are used and the decision to use them does raise some questions. Firstly, music in VR could in theory take some of the realism away from the experience. We don’t go through life with a soundtrack so being in a first-person viewpoint with a soundtrack playing can seem a little disorientating at times. That said, the music in Ocean Descent is subtle enough to work for the narrative. The breathing is more interesting because suddenly you become aware of inhabiting a character. Sure, I may be breathing heavily in real life as I play but certainly not as dramatically as the sound implies. It’s an interesting choice because it both increases the immersion of the experience and distances us from it at the same time. If it’s not me in the cage, who am I?

In Shark Encounter the atmospheric elements are used to heighten the sense of excitement and dread and for all my concerns it does work, so much so that even on my third playthrough I still backed away from the shark as it came towards the cage. It’s interesting that what was intended to be the first VR experience for the majority of players turns from a tranquil, visual experiment to a full-on horror-themed roller-coaster by the end. Shark Encounter plays like a nightmare and like a nightmare if you die in VR you are mercifully fine in real life. If things do become a little too intense you can always press the PS button and instant transport yourself back to the home screen as if waking from a dream. Dread and horror come easily to VR, as the plethora or horror experiences available clearly demonstrate.

Limited Control

As an introduction to VR, Ocean Descent naturally limits the player’s input to the movement of the headset only. You can, as I discovered on my third playthrough, move around in the cage by walking around IRL. In fact, the cage is around the same size as the field of movement allowed by the PS4 camera. This changes the experience immensely as suddenly you can approach the front of the cage and lean over the railings to steal a closer look at the shark. It also means that this is no longer a 360-degree video. The simple experience of movement within the virtual world that so closely mirrors your own movement in the real world is thrilling and vastly increases the sense of immersion. That said, we are still simply witnesses in this experience. We have no weapons, no way of fending off the shark, no agency.

In VR there will always be limits to what the player can do in the VR world. I can move around the cage, for example, but once the shark has ripped off the front of the cage, I can’t make a break for it and swim to the surface. My interaction is limited and here the developers have used this to their advantage. There is a sense of helplessness in Shark Encounter that while created by limited control is also perfectly suited to the experience.

The Tether

Taking into account all of the above it’s interesting that the designers are able to maintain a balance between the fear and the limited control. They achieve this via a tether, another common feature of VR experiences. This tether takes two forms really, first the physical line between the cage and the boat above that pulls you up from the depths to escape the shark, mirrored by the physical wire that connects the headset to the PS4. More importantly and in some ways more calming is the social tether, the voices on the radio reminding you that you are not alone here. And yet even with this tether established the designers couldn’t resist cutting communications at a crucial moment. This teaches us another important lesson for anyone playing VR.

VR is not to be trusted.

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chrisregan1Leave a comment

When I was younger I wanted to try Virtual Reality more than anything else. I’ve always enjoyed games for the escapism they offer; the opportunity to live as someone else in what is generally a much more exciting world than the one I’m in and to do so without risk of serious harm. VR offered the possibility of taking that to the next level.

I don’t consider myself a ‘gamer’ exactly. I love games and have spent many many hours exploring different worlds on different platforms, but it’s not the ‘game’ part that appeals to me. I’m not that interested in the mass slaughter of NPCs, winning epic races or battling space aliens. I’ve always preferred the quiet moments, like driving a truck through the countryside between cities on GTA: San Andreas or exploring the surface of a barren planet on the first Mass Effect game. I like the character moments too, when they work. Games can provide such a strong sense of empathy or connection between audience and character, even the poorly written ones. Most of all I like stories. I like being taken on a narrative journey. I will never skip a cutscene to get to the action.​

I’ll write more about my relationship with VR in a later post but for now just know that from the moment I first tried on the headset I realised there was so much more going on than I first anticipated. Sure, on a basic level virtual reality is simply putting a screen really close to your face and tricking your brain into perceiving depth, but when you add in the scope of the 360 degree view, the sounds, the way you interact with the experience, the memories it generates, the physical effects it can have, not to mention the way it allows you to connect to a narrative, it becomes clear there is so much to talk about. Of course, people do talk about it on review sites and subreddits and YouTube videos but what I find lacking is anything other than vague descriptions of how these experiences feel.​

There’s a reason I think this is important. I recently visited Whitechapel Gallery with my wife and a couple of friends. It had been some time since I’d been to a gallery and I’d kind of forgotten how to do it. You have to commit to art in a gallery. You have to look at it and clear our everything else until you feel something. What you feel will be different from what someone else feels, there’s no “right” way to feel despite the artist’s intention and that’s what makes art special. What you feel may not be positive but as long as you feel something the art has done it’s job. All art has the capacity to make you feel something, you just have to commit to it.

Video games demand commitment by their very nature. You can’t check your phone while running from the law in Red Dead Redemption 2, not without pausing and breaking the flow. Putting aside online gaming, games are also primarily solitary experiences. They may play for an audience, that’s why Twitch happened, but ultimately the game is there to connect with the person holding the controller. VR games take this even further, making the experience even more solitary and making it even harder to look away. Like it or not, when you play VR you are committed to the art. What that art has to reveal is what I intend to explore in this blog.

This is not a review site, I have no interest in whether VR experiences are “good” or “bad”. Nor is this an academic study, although I am interested in academic readings of VR and may explore this area further in the future. Imagine instead that this is an old-fashioned adventurer’s journal with scribbled notes and diagrams on frayed pages between a worn cover.

This is an account of my adventures in VR and you are more than welcome to join me.