What inroads will virtual reality make in TV, communications?

This week is a long-awaited one for virtual reality enthusiasts, as Facebook Inc. starts to ship its Oculus Rift headset to people who pre-ordered their $599 US devices as far in advance as early January. While in the short term, VR technology is likely to make its biggest inroads among gamers, television and video conferencing could start taking place in virtual reality, too. The Oculus Rift joins an increasingly crowded VR marketplace, which already includes Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.’s $139.99 Gear VR, also made by Facebook’s Oculus, and lower-budget options like Google Inc.’s Cardboard. Other competitors include Sony Corp.’s Playstation VR system, set to launch in October at a suggested price of $399 US. According to René Bourdages, the Beverly Hills-based CEO of media and entertainment consulting company Elevado Inc., VR will be “the new way of storytelling” in TV and film. “I wouldn’t be surprised in a couple of years from now, when a new movie from Star Wars is created, a certain scene or certain elements are only available in virtual reality,” he said. Virtual reality also has the potential to be used for communications. Bourdages noted such apps already exist — Starship’s vTime, for instance, bills itself as the “first VR sociable network that allows anyone, anywhere to socialize with family and friends in virtual reality.” The proliferation of cheaper 360-degree cameras will, within a couple of years, enable people to use VR technology for conference meetings, he added. “I think we’re very close” to the creation of virtual reality video chatting, Bourdages said. His company recently conducted a study for the Quebec Film and Television Council on the market potential of the virtual and augmented reality industry in the province, which recommended “the rapid implementation of structural measures, such as tax incentives, inspired by the recent successes of the animation, visual effects and video games industries.” It noted that virtual reality would draw from the same talent pool as “the field of film and television production, animation, visual effects and video games,” industries that have already been successful in the province. Bourdages added in a phone interview that it’s a “great time for Canada to continue to lead the way. Canada is the poster child of film and television production tax credits, and there is no reason why Canada couldn’t take a leadership role, and Quebec has already made a first step.” Montreal is especially well-positioned, he added. In 2016, VR is expected to achieve a billion dollars in sales for the first time, with hardware sales accounting for $700 million and content for the rest, according to Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Ltd.’s predictions. The “vast majority” of that commercial activity will focus on video games, the company predicted, adding that it doesn’t expect the technology to be used “to any great extent” in movies and television this year. Duncan Stewart, Deloitte’s director of research for technology, media and telecommunications in Canada, said in a phone interview he expects virtual reality to be an occasional activity for people, not a device the average Canadian would have in their home and use during the hours they spend watching TV every day. People may not be willing to buy VR devices for occasional use, like to attend a family reunion they couldn’t go to in person, Stewart cautioned. He also questioned how much benefit there is to using VR for such purposes compared to current video tools like Skype. Stewart also pointed to a number of challenges regarding the usage of VR in TV and film, including a lack of equipment. “The tools to capture, edit, score and transmit virtual reality are in their infancy,” he said. Shooting in VR is also different from the way traditional TV and movies are filmed, where behind the camera are “a bunch of people holding lights and sounds and directors and producers and make-up people, and none of them are on camera.” It’s going to take time to figure out how to shoot a traditional sitcom, or sports, in virtual reality, he said. That includes answering questions like “where do you put the camera so that … the hockey puck doesn’t bounce off the camera that’s in the middle of the ice?” Additionally, part of the reason 3D TVs weren’t widely adopted is simply because “people don’t like sitting in their living rooms with things on their face,” Stewart noted, a problem that VR devices share. “It makes it hard to talk to people around you, it makes it hard to look at your smartphone… second-screen and play with the dog and glance over there at whatever is going on out of the window.” Also, people don’t necessarily want action happening behind them, he added. “I want the … TV show to show me what’s going on in front of me, and I don’t to have to be twisting and turning and turning around to follow . I mean, we’re called couch potatoes for a reason. We want to sit there and have a story told to us,” Stewart said. There are other applications for VR, he noted, such as medical training and surgery, simulating the inside of a mine, or allowing customers to house or condo-hunt instead of making a physical trip. Such initiatives could bring “tens of billions of dollars in the relatively near future for enterprise,” he said. While virtual reality TV shows and telecommuting may still be a ways away, the technology and capacity to make them possible are already here. Danny Dicks, a U.K.-based analyst with research group Heavy Reading who authored a recent report on the impact of VR on telecom network operators, said in a phone interview that both wireless and wireline networks in countries like Canada should have the capacity to accommodate VR “as long as there isn’t an enormous increase in the number of virtual reality streams pretty quickly.” He said “most developed market networks will be ready and becoming ready to deal with large amounts of video content of increasing levels of high definition, and to be honest with you, a virtual reality stream is not that much different from an HD video stream or a 4K video stream,” he said. Networks operators are already “dimensioning their networks” to deal with more video, he said. While the VR industry is likely to say usage will “explode” in 2016, others expect a more “gradual and incremental impact on network capacity, and I tend to that view, too,” Dicks said. One key question is how VR content will be consumed. “If everybody’s using VR on mobile phones stuck into cheap headsets, which is quite likely, and the streams are generated by graphics processing units in the cloud, then there’s going to be more data traffic, and if it’s more high-end stuff that’s downloaded, then watched, and the rendering is done locally, then there’s less of an impact,” Dicks said. He added that “there will be VR content consumed over both mobile and fixed networks, though the “balance between the two is difficult to predict.” Another issue is latency, since having the image lag behind the user’s movement can cause motion sickness, Dicks noted. “Low latency is going to be a requirement for effective virtual reality, not just for computer games of various kinds, where you’d expect latency to be a massively important requirement, but also for all sorts of VR content, even just the 360-degree virtual tourism-type applications and the streaming content, too,” he noted. — With reporting by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca and editing by Asha Hingorani at ahingorani@parliamentnow.ca

What inroads will virtual reality make in TV, communications?

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