If you want a new form of technology to take off in the mainstream, you generally need something or someone high-profile with content that can push the method to that place, and filmmaker James Cameron is in recent times one of the best someones considering his role with 3D breakthrough act Avatar, but any hopes that the virtual reality crowd had of turning to him were shot down after he announced he was not a fan.
Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Cameron claimed that virtual reality headsets, such as the Oculus Rift device, was no more than a gimmick, and that there is ‘no place for it’ beyond the realm of games, regarding the issue of people currently making optimised TV and movie content for the pictured headwear.
He said of the Oculus VR and similar technology, and his opinions of it: “There seems to be a lot of excitement around something that, to me, is a yawn, frankly. What will the level of interactivity with the user be other than just ‘I can stand and look around’? If you want to move through a virtual reality it’s called a video game, it’s been around forever.”
Oculus, though, will naturally not take that as an instruction to shut down their operations in less interactive means, with new owners Facebook encouraging a variety of uses for the product beyond immersive video games, with the brand’s first-ever optimised film, Banshee Chapter, currently able to be partially downloaded on the device’s developer website.
With Samsung and Sony rumoured to be developing similar VR headset products in the anticipation that this will be a big future means of creating viewable content, will this new industry be able to kickstart its movie development sector and prove James Cameron wrong? They had been saying similar things about 3D in the past and look at where that is n-oh…
