Side by Side

The medium of movies and television is changing rapidly. Soon there will be no physical object to hold and put into something to play and what plays is a video. What will be the next big medium to stream this entertainment into our lives? Virtual reality has the potential to add even more immediacy into our lives, short of the entertainment being interactive akin to a video game. Different angles, different shot compositions, and especially different experiences, compared to film, are now possible thru the power of virtual reality. The only drawback is that finding people to jump on board with such an idea is because they are overly sentimental of what took place in the past, the associations they make with a familiar experience like going to the theater to watch a a giant screen with strangers sitting all around them. They can't fathom the future of entertainment and the way we receive it because it is like anyone else predicting the future: no one knows anything with absolute certainty. How can that transferred into a viable business venture?

The device to capture and record for virtual reality, to my knowledge, has not been created yet. Much like constantly watching fully animated films with no semblance of a real live human person, the digital worlds of virtual reality may lose an audience's interest over time or get stale. We'd need some human being onscreen with whom we connect, we empathize, we sympathize, we feel joy, anger, sadness, or fear. This supposed device can record the exact visual representation of the actor in the real world and display them in the virtual reality world of the movie, or show, right next to, in front of, or below the audience member. All the audience member would have to do is turn their head to view a different part of the same scene. The experience would be unprecedented in the history of cinema. The placement of said actor and the placement of the entire fictional universe created for the setting of the movie, or show, can drastically add an immediacy and involvement to the audience.

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