6. gaze,
n. (ˈkaʊn tərˌgeɪz)
That which is watching
what you are watching.
Omnopticon’s countergaze
chills discourse, dissent,
and individualism.
counter-
7. stortion,
n. (ˈstɔr ʃən)
Subject To Object
Rotation Transfer.
Sometimes stortion is the
best technique for
examining virtual objects.
8. epikinetic,
n. (ˌɛp ə kɪˈnɛt ɪk)
Side-effect of motion.
Epikinetic acousmatics let
you aurally teleport with
just a tilt of the head.
9. epikinetic,
n. (ˌɛp ə kɪˈnɛt ɪk)
Side-effect of motion.
Epikinetic acousmatics let
you aurally teleport with
just a tilt of the head.
seen
heard
10. epikinetic,
n. (ˌɛp ə kɪˈnɛt ɪk)
Side-effect of motion.
Epikinetic acousmatics let
you aurally teleport with
just a tilt of the head.
seen
heard
11. beheld,
n. ('biˌhɛld ˈfʊt ɪdʒ)
Like handheld except shot
by someone with an HMD.
Some beheld shots were
used to bolster
subjectivity.
handheld headheld beheld
12. watchline,
n. (ˈwɒtʃˌlaɪn)
A path taken through an
immersive film.
The director’s watchline was
not designed to be read as an
ideal viewing; rather it
illuminated obscurer details.
15. graph,
n. (fəˈnɛ strəˌgræf)
Writing in windows.
Fenestragraphy balances
the wonder of moving
volumes with the
determinacy of montage.
fenestra-
traditional film 3D movie
immersive cinema fenestragraph
16. mulsure,
n. (ˈmʊl ʒɚ)
A cross between
sketching and sculpting,
made possible in VR.
I use Tilt Brush or Quill to
mulse abstractly. Glen
Keane made this
mulsure of The Little
Mermaid.
Hello everybody, thanks for listening. My name’s Doug Blumeyer and I’ve been tinkering with VR ideas since the early 2000’s when I worked at Stanford’s VR lab.
At a Sundance panel last month Saschka Unseld put it this way: if VR is still in its infancy, then we’re all just babbling babies for now.
When we try to speak to each other with this new immersive medium, every once in a while a word comes out, but for the most part we’re unintelligible.
Well, if we’re ever going to speak clearly in the language of VR, first we have to speak with clear language about VR. Here are some words and terms I came up with to help with that.
I’ve got 9 minutes left for 9 words, you do the math. Let’s get going.
Opture is a word I came up with to identify media which is interactive, but where the only input is where you look.
No keyboards, mice, controllers, or Cardboard-style triggers.
Not even winking or those hold-gaze-for-2-seconds-to-select loading rings should count, really.
That’s more like clicking with your eye than looking.
I think opture best describes cinematic-style experiences with head-tracking, eye-tracking, or both mixed in.
I coined the word “opture” by taking the root ‘op’, for choice or preference (as in “option” or “opinion”), and hiding it inside the root for eye or sight, ‘opt’ (as in “optics”).
Thus, in opture, our choices play out invisibly through our eyesight.
Because inside an optie the player knows that their gaze itself is being watched in every split-second, opties can be amazingly active, intimate, and engaging.
The human gaze is closely intertwined with our train of thought and our willpower.
But this power can be used for good or evil.
As humans spend more and more of their time in environments where their head and eyes are tracked, we will become more and more conscious of where we look, and where each other look.
I’m concerned this will have a dampening effect on freedom and self-expression.
I suggest we refer to this new force, this force we sense tracking our gaze, a force made up of everything from friends and family to strangers and big data, as “the countergaze”.
If social media has made us more image conscious, VR will go further and make us more consciousness-conscious.
The world a more connected place — sure, maybe, but at what cost?
Anyway, think about it. Next word.
Here’s a technical one: stortion.
The next in a line of great words that come from acronyms, like radar, scuba, and laser.
STORT stands for Subject To Object Rotation Transfer.
If you want to try stortion for yourself, just get the Google Cardboard app and go to the Exhibit feature.
Basic idea is you’ve got a museum artifact floating in empty space in front of you.
When you turn your head, say, to the left, away from the artifact, instead of it going off the right side of your field of view like an object in normal reality would, instead it stays perfectly centered in your field of view, but rotates to the right so you can see a different side of it.
You the subject don’t rotate; instead it the object does. Hence subject to object rotation transfer.
This effect only really works with objects floating in empty space, because if there was a background, I really have no idea what would happen with it.
So if you have an application where examining objects from any conceivable angle is useful, like architecture or product design maybe, this is a surprisingly intuitive and effective means.
Epikinetic. This one means “as a side effect of motion.” Let me illustrate by example.
Superhot is a game where time only moves when you move. That’s epikinetic time.
TotalCinema360 has a demo where the soundscape you’re surrounded by changes depending on where you turn. The visual space is divided in three.
When you face the rock concert, all you hear is rock concert all around you, even though when you turn around you’ll see a nature vista and nature will then be the only thing you’ll hear in every direction. That’s epikinetic sound.
And in Sightline: The Chair, anything can change whenever you’re not looking.
At one point you’re trapped in a room with no doors or windows, and the more frantically you look around, the more rapidly the walls close in on you, without you ever seeing them move.
That’s epikinetic action.
In first person embodied VR, when it’s your body’s movement causing effects beyond mere movement, epikinesis is pretty mind-blowing.
Next word. “Beheld”. As in “I beheld the glory of Godzilla”, but in the contexts where you’re used to hearing “handheld”.
This describes the footage we watch on YouTube when someone uploads a recording of their POV playing Eve Valkyrie or whatever.
I don’t think “headheld” is the right word here, because that’s for when folks strap GoPros to their foreheads and record themselves base jumping.
I know it’s just a few inches off, but it makes a huge difference when what you’re viewing is exactly what another person was beholding through their own eyes.
This one’s related to beheld footage. Watchline.
So for a given immersive film, there are an infinite number of possible watchlines through it.
A watchline would be the beheld footage of one person watching it from start to finish.
Each time this person watches, they produce a new unique watchline. You can’t watch an immersive film the same way twice.
Depending on the field of view, you can only physically see something like 20% of an immersive film each time through. It could be dozens of times through before you’ve seen everything.
We’re beginning to see a culture of watchline sharing between fans. And maybe directors of immersive films will release watchlines of their own films as bonus features.
Okay, next word. This one takes a little setup.
So editing between shots in VR is challenging.
Mostly this is because you can’t be sure where the viewer will be facing when it’s time to cut.
And it’s dangerous to put important events at the beginning of a shot because a viewer might miss them before she has time to decide where to look.
However, there are ways to shoot and edit VR films that minimize this problem.
I stole the diagram here from Jessica Brillhart, though I added the arrows.
Each ring moving out from the center is a new shot.
The black dot is the direction you’re meant to face at the start of a shot, and the white dot is the direction you’re expected to be facing by the end.
So when editing, just rotate the rings to line up the dots.
Now sometimes you don’t want orientation to be continuous, relative to the previous shot.
You just want to say, “No matter what, I want the viewer to start this shot facing this way.”
In terms of these diagrams, you’d end your circle and jump over to start growing a new one.
I call a move like this an “ope”, another acronym word, standing for Opening Perspective Enforcement.
Next word. Fenestragraph. The roots of this word combine to mean “writing in windows”.
So virtual movie screens inside VR can do some amazing things.
Fenestragraphy is when one functions like a magic window into the story world, still locked on the wall in your virtual space, jumping around in space and scale on the story world.
Not only can things peek out into your space, you can peek in on theirs.
You get the shared-space, 3D physicality of immersive cinema, but keep a frame on it so you can compose and edit shots like you’re used to.
I first came across a fenestragraph in the VR demo “From Ashes”, which features a TV set you don’t watch images on so much as inside of.
Mulsure. This is my word for one of the new artistic VR mediums.
If you’ve played around with Tilt Brush or Quill, you’ve made mulsure.
If you haven’t had the chance, basically it is drawing magical floating lines in space.
It’s a cross between sketching and sculpting, but 100% its own thing, and never before possible.
It is volumetric like sculpture, but consisting of loose, open, discontinuous lines like a sketch.
The word mulsure comes from the Latin mulceo, to stroke: to stroke as one would with a pencil while sketching, but also to stroke as one would across the surfaces of a form while sculpting.
Oculus Story Studio’s “Dear Angelica” is the first work I’ve seen which animates mulsure, and thus I would say it qualifies as “animulsure”!