That time I ended up in a womb with a baby and other virtual reality ‘immersions’

The first time I put on the goggles and headphones, I almost fell over. Your body and brain are being tricked into believing they’re in a different space. People are moving toward you, and they continue past. You turn your head and you follow them. You’re in the scene. I got dizzy at first, before finding my legs.

This was in the New Frontier exhibition that’s showcasing a new world of virtual reality technology and its use in filmmaking. There was plenty of video game-like “immersion”: you are there. But there was more: filmmakers beginning to think through how you’d tell a complex story using VR. The problem: you, the viewer, are suddenly in that story. A filmmaker controls how and what a viewer sees through what he or she shows us, through editing, and so on. It’s a different ballgame when we’re in the movie ourselves, where we can look around and pick our own ‘shots’ and, to some degree, change the story we’re living through.

How did it feel? Stimulating, exciting, fun, with a dose of skepticism about how much virtual reality I could actually take. I was right there when a bomb exploded on a street in Aleppo. I was somehow “there,” too, seemingly sitting in the middle of a lake and looking around, until some weird stuff started happening and I ended up inside a womb with a baby (you have to take my word on that one). I also had Reese Witherspoon walk down a forest path, sit down on a rock, and look right at me. Did she see me? Don’t think so.

All this is difficult to convey on your home set or computer screen, of course. That was on my mind as well while experiencing all this.

One other thought that crossed my mind: How easy it is to mess with our minds, and how potentially scary that could be if someone with power really did want to mess with you.

I also learned that I’m not much of a bird, at least not yet. On “Birdly” you spread yourself out on a machine, begin to flap your wings, and through the power and magic of the headset and software you are suddenly soaring over San Francisco. I used to live there and recognized the buildings. Pull my left “wing” up to move right, right wing to move left, head up and … uh oh. There’s a building straight ahead and I really don’t have control of this yet. Crash! It’s times like this that you’re very happy to be safely here on terra firma. All the reality one can take.

Tune in to tonight’s broadcast of the PBS NewsHour for Jeff’s report on the New Frontier exhibit at the Sundance Film Festival and filmmakers’ explorations with virtual reality. You can watch on our Ustream channel at 6 p.m. EST or check your local listings.