Interview
a16z Podcast | Building Worlds with VR, Art, and Narrative
- Robert Stromberg's career spans 18 years as a matte artist and visual effects supervisor, transitioning to production design, directing, and co-founding The Virtual Reality Company (VRC).
- Stromberg attributes his shift to production design for Avatar to a Sunday phone call from James Cameron, who provided only two plot details: a moon orbiting a gas giant with floating mountains.
- Stromberg created a Photoshop concept of floating mountains and giant trees; Cameron's reaction ("that's my movie") secured Stromberg four and a half years of work as Avatar's production designer.
- Avatar pioneered a workflow where 90% of the film was shot in a motion capture volume using a virtual camera, allowing real-time visualization of actors as avatars in a "crayon version" of the final render.
- Stromberg defines the distinction between design and art by citing John May: "Design answers questions and art asks questions," emphasizing that artists are superior observers of small details that solve problems.
- Stromberg co-founded VRC immediately after seeing the Oculus Rift in late 2014, declaring the experience "exactly what I hoped to see" after years of imagining stepping into fictional worlds.
- The Martian VR Experience utilized inverse kinematics (IK) to render realistic, textured arms and hands, allowing users to interact with the environment using actual body movements rather than floating virtual limbs.
- VRC introduced a "box cutter" narrative device for The Martian VR, utilizing floating windows that appear and disappear to guide the story without breaking the 360-degree immersion or requiring traditional film cuts.
- Stromberg identifies motion sickness in VR as a design flaw rather than hardware failure, attributing it to specific camera accelerations and horizon instability.
- He proposes a future "motion rating system" for VR experiences (e.g., color-coded ratings) to warn users susceptible to nausea about specific movement types that may cause discomfort.
- Stromberg compares current VR storytelling to "writing little poems instead of a novel," noting the medium is currently in a "parlor trick" stage of guiding attention without full narrative agency.
- The Martian VR was developed using HTC Vive prototypes with early hand controllers, requiring custom adaptations of hardware to achieve high-fidelity positional and hand tracking.
- Stromberg observes that VR offers a "Broadway play" dynamic where the audience chooses their viewpoint, creating a psychological shift from passive screen watching to immersive, first-person presence.
- VRC is currently developing feature-length VR films with branching narratives that allow viewers to look in different directions to trigger alternative story paths, creating multiple character arcs within a single experience.
- Future business models for VR are expected to evolve from transactional downloads (Steam, Oculus) to subscription-based libraries similar to Netflix once a sufficient content backlog exists.
- Stromberg predicts the emergence of 30–40 seat motion-based VR theaters with synchronized seating as a viable distribution channel alongside home consumption.
- VRC is reinventing the "intermission" for VR feature films to allow viewers to take breaks, potentially serving as a narrative divider between acts or a commercial break equivalent in serialized storytelling.
- Stromberg believes the medium's maturity depends on a "symbiotic relationship" between Hollywood creatives and technical hardware innovators, mirroring the explosion of visual effects in the digital transition era.