Not a Film and Not an Empathy Machine

With the arrival of the first generation of consumer headsets, virtual reality has produced a wealth of exploratory projects from a diverse group of very talented practitioners including game designers, animators, documentary journalists, Hollywood filmmakers, social activists, university researchers, and visual artists. Most of what these adventurous folks (myself and my students included) are producing is terrible, which is just as it should be.

Expanding human expressivity into new formats and genres is culturally valuable but difficult work. We are collectively engaged in making necessary mistakes, creating examples of what works and what doesn’t work for one another to build on. The technical adventurism and grubby glamour of working in emerging technologies can make it hard to figure out what is good or bad from what is just new.