Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Ian Kettlewell

Some context: Early this year I quit my job working with the great people on the HoloLens frontend team. Now I’m creating a tool for virtual reality artists (it’s not announced yet). As a careful observer of the industry I wanted to write about the mistake I feel Oculus is making by shutting down Oculus Story Studio, and the important role artists are playing in creating VR.

Back in college, while I was studying game design, I established a core goal for my work: make lives better. Many worry that virtual reality will supplant reality reality, and I worry that as well. There is much that can go wrong with virtual reality, and I feel that the early steps of the medium are critical for shaping its future path.

After thinking about the good and the bad that can emerge from VR it became clear to me: artists must build the groundwork of this medium if it is to become the incredibly positive world it has the potential to be.

Often businesses tend to focus on making what people will pay for and use, not what will most benefit the lives of their users. Going down that path VR has the potential be the land of invasive advertisements, manipulatively addicting design, and tactics that encourage you to spend the majority of your time using VR.

But VR also has the potential to be something positive: the world of creativity, wonder, empathy, intrigue, love, and productivity. If we can establish this culture of creativity and connectivity (with eachother) VR will grow into an amazing experience. The first step towards this goal is to empower artists to create wonder in virtual reality.

Artists have naturally gravitated towards VR as an expressive new medium, and they are gradually becoming the architects of the new reality. I use the word “artist” loosely here to mean those who create to inspire emotion. Artists create as an exploration of what is possible, what is beautiful, and what is emotional. Artists are the people we need building the VR worlds we will occupy in the future, rather than people who design for addiction and profit.

Oculus Story Studio was a relatively small team created to explore story-telling in VR. They created a few small shorts, won an Emmy, and made an incredibly piece of software called ‘Quill’.

Often, when creating something entirely new, the best approach is to get together collaborative intelligent people and to give them a vague task and not too much overhead. They may not solve the problem you expect, but they will solve the important ones.

It is evident from the work coming out of Oculus Story Studio that they were one of those rare teams. The creation of Quill (a tool to sketch and animate in 3d), shows that the team there was beginning to solve problems tangential to their dedicated task of creating small VR movies. The team was addressing the larger problem of how to empower virtual reality artists to create wonder.

It seems Facebook, likely for structural reasons, had difficulty perceiving the true value in Oculus Story Studio. Oculus Medium, also a lovely tool for VR artists, is their dedicated “VR creativity” team, and Oculus Story Studio was their in-house film studio.

When viewed purely through the lens of winding down their own film making efforts, shutting down Oculus Story Studio makes sense, but breaking up the team and stopping their work was a foolish mistake. Facebook is splitting up a team that was, by its own volition (rather than corporate decree), tackling one of the core challenges of VR. They were creating tools to allow artists to build the future. Their value to VR was far beyond that of just making films. They were creating the tools artists needed to create in VR and they were showing what you could do with them. I have no doubt that the Oculus Story Studio team, if given proper freedom, would become monumental in the future of VR.

Closing Oculus Story Studio, and the loss of Quill, is a setback, but the future is bright. Artists presently have tools to create sculpture in VR. Soon VR artists will be able to create worlds people occupy, not just sculptures. The creativity of individuals like those at Oculus Story Studio, and the many amazing VR artists out there, are laying the groundwork for the VR world builders of the future.

If you’ve read this far I encourage you to explore some of the incredible works VR artists are creating by browsing the galleries linked below:

Tilt Brush Sketches

http://ift.tt/2pvcBRB

Artists are defining VR: Closing Oculus Story Studio was a mistake was originally published in Prototyping: From UX to Front End on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Artists are defining VR: Closing Oculus Story Studio was a mistake

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