Two Takes at the Future of Interactive Video: Disney Planning a VR Short and Fable Looks to AI

Showing VR and 360 video has become common at film and entertainment festivals like Sundance, Tribeca, and South by Southwest. While much of this content never reaches a mainstream audience, it still serves as fertile ground to experiment and showcase how creative minds can use this new medium to tell their stories and share their visions. While many of the studios and artists are similarly less known to mainstream audiences one powerhouse, Disney, has started its journey into VR and immersive video content. Disney produced a VR short called “Cycles” late last year and, more recently, announced that it has greenlit a new VR short from Jeff Gipson (who also directed “Cycles”). While the new short is still under-wraps (or likely in the very early stages of development), this suggests that the strong reception to “Cycles” is at minimum compelling Disney to continue exploring this medium.

A separate studio, Fable (name formerly Fable Studio), is pivoting away from VR, which was its initial focus, and toward AI. The company sees AI as the lynchpin to bringing immersive content to the mainstream audience or, as Fable calls it, “virtual beings.” The use of AI in virtual settings is not novel, but Fable’s vision goes beyond most current and earlier interpretations of how this technology could find its way into immersive entertainment. In the company’s first experience, “Whispers in the Night,” participants interact with a virtual character named Lucy. Using natural language processing and computer vision the virtual character can both track the user and recall past conversations when you interact again. While the experience is well suited to VR, the interactions could happen through any device or screen.            

Disney’s use of VR for “Cycles” presents viewers with an immersive experience that, for many, is highly relatable (life events in a house and the residual signs we leave behind when we move away) and can make an emotional connection in this way. “Cycles” also makes the house a focal part of the experience, which fits well with VR, where the user may or may not direct their attention in the manner the creators may have intended, making the experience as much about the location and emotions it raises in the user as the actions performed by the characters. As with any movie, the visual and auditory presentation may be the same but the emotional experience or reception of said content could differ quite dramatically between viewers. The story and the arc of the characters remain unchanged, but the response they elicit from viewers is more unique. Fable’s approach is a more radical departure from conventional storytelling. While the beginning and end could remain the same, how and what the viewer experiences during the arc from start to finish could be dramatically different.

Video games have often allowed players to make choices in-game that lead to different endings and relationships with NPCs (non-player character) but are all ultimately largely scripted events, just multiple pathways through them. Using AI to allow the virtual character (or being) to engage with the user in a more unscripted fashion (and recall past history) could lead to far more personal connections than previously possible. Venturing down this road and imaging future, more advanced implementations/incarnations could begin to elicit the use of tech’s favorite term to describe something transformative (“magical”), but other public demonstrations of AI should raise some cautionary flags.

Perhaps it is the confluence of these two that could best drive interactive and immersive content forward. In some regards, a video series could begin to take on the appearance of some long running game franchises. In other words, updates or DLC could update and expand the stories and adventures possible with the virtual characters while maintaining a uniquely individual connection to the user based on past interactions. This would create a string of monetization opportunities and keep the content fresh.

When we say open but not free, we are not speaking of business models, but of finding the right balance between allowing experiences to mold themselves to the viewers and establishing enough barriers to keep things from going off the deep end. Even if each individual user experience is siloed from other users’, the service or company could still be responsible for the end result of giving users free rein to shape and mold an AI (cases where the open internet was allowed to interact with and “train” Ais/chatbots have not gone well—e.g., Microsoft’s chatbot Tay). In a similar vein, social experiences online—and, indeed, in social VR rooms--when veiled behind a semblance of anonymity result in some users behaving in a toxic manner.

These are issues that need addressing and it may take several trials before finding the right balance. Once this balance is achieved, however, companies and services could collect significantly more intimate details about a person, their daily life, dreams, problems, etc., especially if the user connects to the “virtual being” on a personal level. With this information the service provider has the tremendous opportunity to generate value (advertising, ecommerce, DLC, increased stickiness/reduced churn), and exceptional care must be given to use it in a socially acceptable manner and protect said information. This will invariably engender privacy issues and, given that the current environment (e.g., GDPR and other initiatives) is favoring consumer safeguards and transparency regarding how information is collected and used, it will not only be incumbent on companies to follow these new rules but, considering the potentially personal nature of collected data, it would behoove them to go above and beyond.