My name is Camille Donegan and I am a Virtual Reality Producer
working on the TRACTION project with Virtual Reality Ireland.
I have long brown hair, brown eyes,
I am wearing navy and gold glasses
and a blue and yellow jumper with stars on the sleeves.
Virtual Reality is disrupting pretty much every sector you can think of,
primarily due to the immersive nature of the medium
and the power that’s inherent in that.
VR is used extensively for training across a multitude of sectors including
Healthcare and Wellness, Manufacturing, Sales, Tourism, Law Enforcement and Military training.
When it comes to entertainment, R offers unique characteristics.
We can experience Scale and Depth in new ways.
For example in a VR experience called Richie’s Plank,
you walk out of an elevator 100 stories up and have to walk the plank!
Your palms start sweating even though the graphics are cartoonish in nature.
Then there's a VR experience called TheBlue,
where you're situated in a boat under the sea and get a full body thrill
when a huge blue whale swims by!
Right now all storytelling genres are up for grabs
and its a great time for creators to experiment and play!
Last week I experienced a steampunk VR Opera called MIRANDA
and next week I'm going to be exploring Alien Adventures in the Metamovie project.
Right now, we are at a huge turning point in our industry.
Some of these are related to the Covid pandemic.
For example, many consumers have bought VR headsets during lockdown,
so headset sales are ahead of expectations.
However, previous to the pandemic,
many people in organisations would use shared headsets for training.
Now we are looking more at users having a personal VR headset.
This is aided by hardware becoming more affordable.
For instance, the new Quest 2 from Oculus, owned by Facebook,
is completely tetherless, so it has no wires, it’s all in one,
and it has 6 degrees of freedom so you can walk around,
and it’s retailing at €350, that’s nearly half the price of its predecessor.
Also, it looks like the telecommunications companies
are soon going to offer subsidised VR headsets with their pricing plans.
The industry needs many more people to have headsets
in order for it to really take off
and those headsets need to keep getting lighter, more comfortable,
have screens with improved resolution capabilities
and become more affordable.
Competition from more headset providers will help to drive these advances
VR works best when the viewer is transported somewhere else.
This can be to the Moon, to Africa, or even into another person’s perspective,
experiencing the world through their eyes.
VR has been dubbed the ‘Empathy Making Machine’ for this reason
and the UN have created several documentaries where you walk in someone else’s shoes.
This could be a refugee in Syria, a Roma Gypsy or someone protecting endangered wildlife.
The nature of the story being told really defines
whether that content is created with computer generated graphics,
like animation, or filmed with a 360 camera, video.
For example, if I was producing an interactive VR experience for training,
computer generated content would work best as you need to programme interactive triggers.
Whereas if I wanted to tell the story of say a fire ceremony that takes place
every year at a sacred site in Ireland, 360 video would work best for that.
To an extent, this is already happening with 360 degree video.
Go Pro have developed some excellent consumer grade VR cameras.
Many people are filming themselves surfing or horse riding for example.
Regarding computer generated Virtual Reality content,
this usually requires advanced hardware, software and skills associated with those.
However, there are platforms that enable non coders to create.
One example of these platforms is called VR Chat,
where non-coders can go in and create worlds or characters and stories,
and interactivity.
Well one of the aims of TRACTION is to promote Opera to new audiences,
especially disenfranchised communities, via novel formats.
It has a strong focus on utilising the power of technology to extend reach
and offer new possibilities for dissemination of content.
In the Irish trial with Irish National Opera
we are working with community groups over the next 2 years,
to co-create a virtual opera which will be presented in 2022.
Along with Irish National Opera and our director Jo Mangan,
we are exploring areas including live performance and motion capture,
and are passionate about exploiting the medium of VR
to connect audiences with Opera in new and innovative ways.
You can see more about Virtual reality Ireland’s work at
www.v (for virtual), r (for reality) .ie.
that's www.vr.ie
Thank you, goodbye :)