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.
So much of journalism is conveying a place and time that existed, to someone at a later date: giving a person the context and trying to make them feel as informed as if they were actually there.
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.
When people ask whether virtual reality will be a real thing or just the next 3D, what I always say is, 'Take a headset, walk outside, and the next person you meet, put it on them and see what the reaction is.'
When the protagonist breaks the fourth wall by looking at the camera in a movie, it's generally been used for comedic purposes, rather than feeling like they're looking into your soul.
With Street View, you're curating a data set capable of incredible emotional resonance for the person interacting with it because everyone grew up somewhere. And if your house is in this dataset, that's going to provide some emotional context for you.
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.
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.
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.
My premise is that there's something hardwired into our DNA, that we as a species came and evolved from caves and clans and tribes, and therefore, we as a species care more about the things that are local to us than we care about the things that are 'over there' from us.
My real motivation came from my quest for music videos to have the equally soul-touching emotional resonance that straight music does. Honestly, I'm not sure they ever can.
If you look at all the technology we're interconnected with every day, all this complex technology that connects humanity, it actually doesn't connect us.
I've played in bands myself, and sat on the floor photographing some of the greatest bands in the world while they rehearse. What's always struck me is how different the sensory, especially auditory, experience is when you're in the middle of the music with the musicians playing off each other around you.
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.
I think there's a little bit of a danger of a hype machine that puts forth a whole bunch of experiences that aren't great, and then a whole bunch of audience comes and don't have great experiences.
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.
Every digital video player - RealPlayer, Windows Media Player, Vevo, Hulu, YouTube - all of them had different ways of getting you the video, but it was still always the same series of rectangles. The format never changed.
As entertainment and storytelling move in the direction of more immersive environments, binaural sound will begin to play a larger and larger role in those experiences.
All these experiments I've done over the years with technology have been asking whether I can tell stories that affect humans in a deeper way than I could without the technology.
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.
