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Sam McMillan

Virtual Reality Is Virtually Here

A virtual reality–only game, EVE: Valkyrie places players in the combat zone of an aerial dogfight. CCP Games is developing the game for Oculus Rift and PlayStation 4’s VR headset, Project Morpheus. Without a release date (as of press time), WIRED UK called it “one of the most anticipated games currently in development.”

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s there a person alive who hasn’t walked out of a Star Wars movie thinking, “I want to fly the Millennium Falcon”? Today, thanks to a new generation of virtual reality (VR) headsets and VR-enabled smart phones, apps and games, that wish is about to come true.

From Google’s flimsy and fun Cardboard to Samsung’s Gear, which lets a user snap in a smartphone, to the powerful Rift headset from Oculus, VR is here—and it’s going to be huge. Designers and storytellers: pay attention.

First, an explanation for the uninitiated: VR combines a headmounted, motion-tracking device with a viewer that displays a 360-degree environment. Games, videos, computer graphics (CG), photographs, movies, animations, 3-D models—if it can be captured and rendered, it can be displayed as a spatially accurate 3-D environment. VR places you in the scene, so when you look up, down or to the side, the scene moves with you. Audio cues are spatial as well, so you hear what’s coming from the appropriate direction. Merge 3-D motion tracking—which syncs a player’s movement to a real-time game display—with handheld sensors, and a new generation of game play opens up, from light saber swordplay to batting practice to martial arts. Think Fight Club without the black eyes and broken teeth.

The secret sauce of VR is, in a word, immersion. Strap on a VR headset and, in a matter of seconds, the world around you disappears.

You plunge into a new dimension.

Nick DiCarlo, Samsung’s vice president of Immersive Products and Virtual Reality, who has conducted hundreds of VR demos, watches and waits for the telltale sign when a first-timer enters a VR world.

He calls it “the VR smile,” and it appears in about five seconds.

DiCarlo chalks it up to VR’s ability to deliver isolation and focus.

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Depending on the app, a VR user can find themselves flying a jet, exploring a dungeon, fighting with a laser, driving through the streets of San Francisco, soaring over Manhattan, touring a luxury home for sale or visiting a refugee camp. And the effect is utterly believable. How believable? “Clouds Over Sidra,” the eight-minute VR film shot for the United Nations, premiered at the 2015 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Told from the perspective of a 12-year-old Syrian girl living in the Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan, the VR film is so powerful that the producers have said, “If people aren’t crying, we suspect the headset isn’t working.”

The future is here, finally The transformation of VR from science fiction to a gift you’ll find under a Christmas tree has been a long time coming. Once the sole province of military simulation and NASA engineers, VR attracted enormous press attention in the mid-1980s with the launch of Jaron Lanier’s VPL Research. Unfortunately, the first commercially available headset and data glove produced by VPL weren’t ready for prime time, and the company cratered in 1990.

Today the stars have aligned. Headset makers like Oculus VR (Rift), Samsung (Gear), Microsoft (HoloLens) and HTC (Vive) have jumped into the arena. And the dreaded motion sickness and VR-induced vertigo that plagued early versions is gone. Thanks to processors that refresh VR worlds at the rate of 90 frames per second for a fluid, jitter-free display of high-resolution graphics, a new generation of lightweight headsets that provide a wide field of view, and low-latency motion sensing capabilities that track the wearer’s real-space movements to the virtual environment, VR no longer requires an airsickness bag.

Oculus Rift’s headset (left) is set for release in early 2016. Oculus Touch’s hand controllers (right) track hand gestures, enabling users to interact with the virtual realm more fluidly.

At a recent press conference in San Francisco, Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe rhapsodized about the new platform and its magical properties.

“You put [Rift] on, and your brain makes the switch,” Iribe said. “You feel like you are there, instantly teleported.” Of all the VR systems, Oculus VR seems to have nailed it. Set for release in 2016, the elegant form factor combines a headset that weighs about as much as a baseball cap and looks like a ski goggle on steroids with a motion sensor that plugs into the back of your computer and onboard audio that delivers 3-D sound cues.

One of the hardest problems to solve in the VR world is that of “handedness.” You don a headset and play the VR trailer for The Avengers, and when you see Thor’s hammer flying toward you, it’s only natural to want to grab it. Or as Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey says about interacting with VR worlds, “Input is hard.” For now, game input will be a wireless Xbox controller, but Oculus promises that its own handheld controllers, called Touch, will be coming soon. Thanks to built-in 3-D sensors, the half-moon, pistol grip controllers enable users to interact in VR space as if they were using their own hands.

On the other end of the spectrum, there’s Google Cardboard. At first glance, Cardboard looks more like a prank than a product.

Selling for about $20, Cardboard is actually made of cardboard.

Fold tab A into slot B, slide in an Android smartphone and download a VR app from the Google Play store. Then you’re ready for games, 360-degree music videos and expeditions that can take school kids on field trips around the world. Amir Rubin, CEO of Sixense, makers of the Presence VR engine and STEM motiontracking system, says, “When I think of the potential VR has to transform education, I get goose bumps.”

Content is king: Where the jobs are Although next-generation VR headsets have yet to prove themselves in the consumer marketplace, brand marketers are eagerly experi-

menting with the new medium. Coca-Cola entered the realm of VR with Casa Coca-Cola, a branded experience at the 2014 World Cup that took participants into a VR replica of the playing field of Maracaña Stadium in Brazil. Volvo partnered with R/GA to create a VR test drive using Google Cardboard to simulate a test drive of the carmaker’s XC90 SUV at the 2014 Los Angeles Auto Show.

Merrell, the outdoor apparel company, tapped visual effects studio Framestore to make a VR walk-around that enabled 2015 Sundance Film Festival attendees to strap on an Oculus Rift and take a virtual hike through the Dolomites of Italy. The thinking is that the depth and intensity of these branded immersion experiences might just turn viewers into buyers.

Recognizing that a new delivery platform needs content the way a razor needs a blade, forward-looking filmmakers are getting into the content game. Jaunt, a Palo Alto–based VR company, is exploring and expanding the medium with VR concerts that teleport viewers to performances by artists such as Paul McCartney, behindthe-scenes fashion shoots at ELLE magazine and cinematic VR movies like The Mission. In a field that feels brand new, Scott Broock, Jaunt’s vice president of content, says, “Everything we’ve done is a first.”

For today’s designers, illustrators, photographers and storytellers who want to join the party, Broock thinks the doors of VR are wide open. “What’s cool is that right now, we’re just starting. We’re all at the same level. It’s open to everyone.”

Everyone, that is, who can master short-form content, CG lighting effects and spatial audio and who can render complex mechanical creations in a game engine. Jaunt thinks it knows where to find these people: Hollywood. It’s opening a studio in Los Angeles as an incubator to drive the medium forward. People with backgrounds in film, game design and theater have become more relevant than ever, Broock says. “To make something insanely compelling, you Communication Arts | commarts.com

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hink of a war photojournalist, and chances are you’ll imagine someone broad-shouldered and stubbletinted, a person who charges into war on adrenalin and then, at night, drinks and cheats to forget what he’s seen. In other words, you’ll be thinking of a man. And no wonder, given that early war photographers like Robert Capa and Larry Burrows set the model, which has been perpetuated ever since in movies like Salvador, Under Fire and The Bang Bang Club.

Times are changing, though. Today, there are a growing number of women photographers committed to exploring troubled situations—from war in Iraq to Ebola in Liberia.

Sometimes using their gender to break down barriers, these women travel to global hotspots, bringing back images that are intense, challenging and often disarmingly beautiful.

The rewards are high, but so are the costs, which can include sacrificing one’s personal life and battling workrelated depression.

And then, of course, there’s the danger. “Three inches higher, and the bullets would have hit us in the face,” says Stephanie Sinclair of the time that her car was attacked by the US military—yes, you read that right. Sinclair was in postwar Iraq when she and her driver pulled up at an army checkpoint just after a bomb had destroyed vehicles on the road ahead.

“We didn’t stop as fast as they would have liked, and the soldiers were nervous and jumpy,” she recalls. In the heat of the moment, Sinclair’s first concern was for her driver, Alaa, who’d become a close friend. “If anything had happened to him, I wouldn’t have had the money to support his family,” she says.

Similarly no stranger to risk, award-winning photojournalist Lynsey Addario was kidnapped in Libya in 2011 and, along with three male colleagues, held in captivity for a week.

“There’s a survival mode that kicks in,” she says of her reaction when pro-Qaddafi soldiers pointed guns at her, ordering her to lie face down in the dirt. “My mind slows down into an almost catatonic state where it’s all about enduring whatever I need to endure at that moment. In Libya, one reason we stayed alive is that we stayed calm.”

Both in their 40s, Sinclair and Addario forged their careers right after 9/11, when documenting the US-led wars in Iraq and

Afghanistan seemed crucially important. On the war front, both gained a reputation for being relentless. In Iraq, Sinclair refused to play it safe by embedding with the US military because, she says, “I wanted to tell the stories of ordinary people caught in the war, not the story of the US Army.”

Younger by a decade, Katie Orlinsky and Glenna Gordon joined the profession more recently. They, too, are conveying world affairs using powerful visual language. Gordon photographed Ebola wards in Liberia in 2014, and Orlinsky has done searing work on child migration and the drug war in Mexico.

So what does it take to do this work? Not great height, apparently—all four women are petite. Nor were they born holding cameras, as one might expect: in fact, Sinclair is the only one with college training in photography; Addario, Orlinsky and Gordon came to photography later and are mostly self-taught. What unites them is a fierce interest in world affairs and a determination to burrow into complex stories and uncover their nuances.

“I have no idea where my interest in foreign affairs came from—I grew up in a family of hairdressers!” jokes Addario, an Italian American from Connecticut who now calls London home. Sitting in a café in the upscale Islington neighborhood, looking relaxed in a soft pink coat (“It was a gift,” she says, almost apologetically), she ponders her trajectory from footloose expatriate to one of the world’s most celebrated war photographers.

“I didn’t set out to be a war photographer; that wasn’t in my sights,” she says. “It happened because I came of age right after 9/11.” In fact, Addario had imagined becoming a UN translator until, after graduating from college with a degree in international relations, she moved to Buenos Aires. There, scrutinizing photographs in the newspaper, she suddenly saw how they overlapped with her studies. It was an epiphany.

Soon she was showing up at local newspaper offices, pestering editors until they would agree to pay her ten dollars per photograph.

Orlinsky, born in New York, imagined working for a nongovernmental organization or, like Addario, for the United Nations. Accordingly, she prepared by getting a degree in

Right: “Italian sailors rescued 109 African migrants from Gambia, Mali, Sengal, Ivory Coast, Guinea and Nigeria in a rubber boat (above), in the sea between Italy and Libya. Dozens of the refugees boarded an Italian commercial ship en route to Italy (below). The migrants claimed to have left from Tripoli, Libya, the evening of October 3, spending the night moving north. In 2014, more than 120,000 refugees landed in Italy, more than double the total for the entire year of 2013.” Lynsey Addario, photographer; Getty Images Reportage, client.

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CONSUMER NEWSPAPER ADS 1 (series) Danilo Boer, art director Grant Smith, writer Danilo Boer/Grant Smith, creative directors David Lubars/Greg Hahn, chief creative officers Barry Bruner/Jordan Bruner/Kelsey Dake/Richard Helo/Un Mariachi/ Alex Trochut, illustrators BBDO New York (New York, NY), ad agency Sneaker Freaker Boogazine, client

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“We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in.”

—Craig Davis, via Advertising Week

“NOBODY HAS EVER BUILT A BRAND BY IMITATING SOMEBODY ELSE’S ADVERTISING.” —David Ogilvy

“ADVERTISING SHOULD BE DONE WITH PENCILS.” —Dan Shepelavy, via Creative Interviews

“If you plan to become the world’s greatest woman art director, maybe New York is not the place.”

“In my opinion, “Creativity varies inversely with the if you are not number of cooks obsessive in involved in the broth.” the advertising business, you will “I’ve learned any fool can always work for write a bad ad, but it takes a someone else.” real genius to keep his hands —BERNICE FITZ-GIBBON

—Mary Wells Lawrence, in A Big Life in Advertising

off a good one.”

—Cheri Ramey, in Communication Arts, March/April 1971

—LEO BURNETT