Nearly Ideal Immersion

A movie maker should desire, first and foremost, to tell a good story. Immersive technology may be a means to that end, or it may be a distraction, or it might require a very different approach to storytelling.

The ideal immersion described in the earlier post took as the measure of perfection the achievement of total presence, the viewer's sense of being physically in the scene. The trade-off for achieving total presence, however, is the loss of every cinema device currently used to tell a story visually.

I experienced a state of the art demonstration of total presence immersion, Nonny de la Peña's Immersive Journalism project, "Hunger In Los Angeles", at Sundance 2012. The Virtual Reality head tracking goggles, an early precursor to Palmer Lucky's Oculus Rift device now nearing consumer release, provided a convincing, slightly pixelated stereoscopic view without peripheral vision. The virtual world was a recreation of an actual event, using an actual audio recording of it, situated in a computer graphics scene recreating the actual physical location, populated by motion capture avatars of actors portraying the actual people who were there. The whole idea was to simulate an eyewitness experience that allowed the user to bear witness from any point of view.

The demo was quite effective at showing the promise of the technology. I felt simultaneously immersed and reflective, imagining myself as a news cameraman trying to shoot the best view of the action, feeling complete personal detachment from the events unfolding. I'm not sure what the demo hoped to evoke in viewers, but what it brought out in me was the desire to shoot the scene well. I would NOT have reacted to the actual event this way if I had been there when it happened, I would have improvised a pillow under the head of the man who fell to the sidewalk during a diabetic seizure caused by hunger while waiting in a food line. But these were virtual actors, not people, and so I responded cinematically.

I reflected upon that occasion a long while afterward. It wasn't storytelling, it was event simulation, the story of which was up to the person vicariously experiencing it. I had created a story as recorded by a news cameraman looking for good coverage and cinematic composition. Other people created stories of themselves as powerless and invisible, unable to influence the events unfolding. The story as perceived was entirely in the augmented mind's eye of the viewer.

"Ideal Immersion", defined as the achievement of total user presence in the scene, is not a storytelling medium, it is an experience medium. There are no aspect ratio choices, no lens focal lengths, no camera dollies, no post production effects, no edits. The cinema storyteller is the eliminated middleman, making way for user stories.

By contrast, "Nearly Ideal Immersion" isn't an oxymoron, it isn't a lessening of an absolute. Rather, it requires a shift in emphasis from a simulation of physical presence in the scene, to the creation of an emotional presence within the story, using immersive technology. This means that the cinematic storyteller retains traditional control, with constraints, not only over the action but also over how it is shown, and that the viewer has to make a personal commitment in order to experience this immersively.

Next installment in this series of posts on immersive cinema, I'll discuss the tradeoffs for achieving balance between physical and emotional immersive presence, and the technologies for doing so.