Will immersive tech ever go mainstream?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 5 February 2020
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality have been around for years, and billions have been spent on popularising them, so far to little avail.
Ed Butler dons an Oculus Rift at London's Natural History Museum to experience a VR journey through its collection, and speaks to John Casey, chief executive of Factory 42, which designed the experience. But despite big investments by the likes of Google, Facebook, Imax, Disney and others, sales of VR and AR headsets are still a fraction of traditional gaming consoles such as Sony PlayStation.
Jeremy Dalton, who heads the AR/VR team at consultancy PwC, says that's about to change. But Stephanie Riggs, author of “The End of Storytelling", says that first content producers need to get out of their comfort zone of traditional narrative telling, and embrace AI-generated stories.
Producer: Joshua Thorpe
(Picture: Man using Oculus Rift VR headset; Credit: dangrytsku/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello there, I'm Ed Butler and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service, |
| 0:06.5 | where we are asking today, is this the start of a breakthrough decade for augmented reality entertainment? |
| 0:13.1 | Imagine if we have a piece of technology that's able to capture the environment around it |
| 0:18.8 | and to give potentially an unlimited number of consumers access to that front row seat. |
| 0:25.3 | Yes, AR, VR, both are seeing billions invested these days. |
| 0:29.5 | But we've heard this before, haven't we? |
| 0:31.7 | Is it time for truly original thinking? |
| 0:34.3 | If we keep just developing it as a technology and just looking at it as plugging the holes and evolving things one at a time, then we're going to fall back into the trap again where the industry implodes. |
| 0:45.1 | How to make entertainment truly immersive. That's Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:52.3 | Slipping on the headset for a night at the museum. |
| 0:55.5 | And you should be able to see a VR environment? |
| 0:57.6 | I can, yep. |
| 0:58.5 | This is just the Oculus Rifts over the menu. |
| 1:00.5 | So if you hold your hands on. |
| 1:01.2 | Alongside John Cassie, CEO of Factory 42, a leading immersive technology company, |
| 1:06.9 | I'm meeting creatures from prehistory. |
| 1:09.9 | So here I am. |
| 1:11.6 | I'm in a room. |
| 1:12.2 | Yep. |
| 1:16.5 | And I have the 3D door to the Natural History Museum in front of me. |
| 1:21.6 | Yep. Now if you just click a button, okay, now you see the dot and then you're now going to go into... The door is opening. I'm entering. Is that what I was supposed to do? |
| 1:24.9 | Yep, perfect. You're very good at this. |
... |
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