Content creation for virtual reality is all about creating compelling VR experiences, and that is really about creating presence. The three illusions that make up virtual reality: These are place illusion, which has the sense that we are transported to another place. Plausibility illusion, which is the sense that the environment we're interacting with is real and responds to us. And embodiment illusion, which is the sense that we're interacting with the virtual world using our own body. Place illusion is really about low level responses like head tracking, which is when we move our head and our view updates. Embodiment is about feeling like you have a body in VR, which is much more about how you interact with it than about the content itself. Plausibility illusion, on the other hand, is about creating an environment that is credible, in a sense that they work in the same way as they do in the real world. Lots of people are talking about whether VR is more like films or games or theater, but really, VR is more like the real world than any of these preexisting media. So you should really take the real word as your reference when creating VR environments. That doesn't mean you can't create a fantasy world, in fact, quite the opposite. VR is also about transporting you to places that you might never be in real life. But when you're creating your alien spaceship, you shouldn't be thinking about whether this would look cool within tracking shots, instead, you should think about what it would actually be like to be in this place in real life. So there is a lot to think about, but for now, we just want to mention a few important points. One is scale. When you are making video games, players will notice if something isn't completely life-size, but in VR, you have to make sure everything really feels the right size. The table in front of you and the mug you're holding in your hands have to be, more or less, the size you would expect them to be. We're quite familiar with these objects in real life, so we could be quite sensitive to even small inconsistencies. So really, take care of the scale of your objects and really test it out in VR to see if they feel the right size. But having said that, there are lots of VR environments that are actually tiny. The Oculus Rift launch game, Lucky's Tale, is notable for having a very small environment for a tiny character about this big. In this game, you aren't interacting with the environment from a first person perspective, you're just looking into it like a doll's house, and that can work really well in VR. So if an environment is meant to be life-size, it should be exactly life-size. But you can also play with having very small environments which you can look into, and maybe even huge environments which will make you feel tiny. There is another aspect of scale, which is how big your entire world is. In video games, characters can move incredibly quickly. You can run at 30 miles an hour and it feels fine. In virtual reality you can't do that, it would make you nauseous and would feel unrealistic. So your environments need to be of a size that you can comfortably move around in. Again, you want to think about how big an environment you could move in in a real world. You need to think about whether you could get around your environment if it were a real place without having to walk for 20 minutes. Another really important difference between the VR and film or games is that in a film or a game there is a frame, you're viewing things on a rectangular screen and the frame of that screen determines what you can see and what you can't. In virtual reality, there is no frame, and you can look anywhere just by turning your head. Framing is a key part of filmmaking. Cinematographers spend a lot of efforts in getting the frame right. So it captures the action from the right angle, and the composition of the scene looks good. Things that don't appear in the frame don't have to look good. They don't even have to exist. For example, you can have buildings with a front and no back. None of that applies to virtually reality. Your entire environment has to look good because your users can look anywhere. More importantly, there is no guarantee that your users will be looking at the action. Because you're not in control of their viewpoints, they could be looking away at something when an important plot event happens. Although you can't control where a user look, you can guide them. You need to do this by making some parts of the environment obviously more interesting than others. Don't put a lot of nice-looking stuff somewhere you don't want users to look. You could focus all your attention on the important places that have an interesting detail or a lot of movement or sounds in a particular place. People's attention is captured by sound, by movement and by detail. So use this as a way of encouraging people to look in a particular direction. These are just a couple of the differences between virtual reality and other media and some ideas of how you should handle them. Many other things will come up as you develop your virtual reality environments. The important thing to remember is not to make assumptions from your experience from other media and not to just look at things on screen. You really need to test everything in VR with a headset. Until you've done a lot of testing in VR, you don't know whether your environment will work. So try it out in your headset from the very beginning and then carry on trying it in VR throughout the process. Try it yourself, with friends and families and get strangers to try it. Only then will you be confident that your environment works in VR.
