Yesterday our production got off to a rocky start due to network issues. But today, thanks to amazing work by our grad students, our CAVE production at SIGGRAPH has hit its stride. Just in the last day, our shared VR story has been seen and heard by hundreds of people — thirty at a time in the same room.
The experience of actually being physically together seems to fundamentally transform the experience. Because audience members can see where each other is looking, they feed off each others’ vibe.
The audience creates an “energy in the room” that is its own unique entity. The result is that the experience becomes more than the mere sum of its parts. People end up with the feeling that they have gone on a journey together.
It also helps that we have a truly amazing team. Everybody on this production has been astonishingly good, and has really added to our success.
If this experience can scale up to thousands, then it can scale up to hundreds of millions. We may be witnessing the dawn of a new medium — one that has the potential, just as cinema and the novel did before it, to expand the way we tell each other stories.