Interview
a16z Podcast | Building Worlds with VR, Art, and Narrative
- Plans to work on Avatar for four and a half years following inspiration from James Cameron's concept of floating mountains.
- Expects to change careers approximately every five years throughout his professional life.
- Anticipates rapid technological advances enabling users to walk within and enter the world of Pandora, with viewing system fidelity and game engines improving over time.
- Predicts the implementation of a motion rating system similar to G, PG, or color codes to indicate experiences that may cause motion sickness.
- Foresees a floodgate of storytellers entering VR once a compelling, emotional "killer story" with real actors is established.
- Anticipates an explosion of visual effects and CG work driven by creatives and technical minds uniting, mirroring the shift in early computer graphics.
- Plans to be platform agnostic and align marketing and business plans with future market adoption over a three-year horizon.
- Expects the VR business model to evolve into a Netflix-like subscription service once sufficient content exists to sustain it.
- Predicts the realistic emergence of 30 to 40-seat theaters featuring motion-based seats synchronized to the experience.
- Notes the current "chicken egg" problem where hardware adoption requires content and content requires hardware, expecting more focus on compelling content in the next year.
- Plans to develop branching narratives allowing users to take different paths based on where they look, creating a "true choose your own adventure" format.
- Intends to write stories with character arcs and multiplicities that form one broad narrative without one story holding more authority than another.
- Expects to sustain longer narrative formats in VR, moving beyond four-minute pieces to feature-length films.
- Plans to reinvent the intermission as a narrative tool to divide stories into "before and after" segments while providing viewers a pause point.
- Believes VR will alter socialization patterns, potentially becoming more social than current computing models.
- Expects the VR ecosystem to experience both successes and failures during its development.
- Predicts eventual home market adoption of VR similar to current television setups.