An interview with Fred Volhuer
Fred Volhuer, CEO of Atlas V, gave a talk about distribution at the MIT Open Documentary Lab (ODL) in the spring of 2018 as part of the Hacking XR Lecture Series. ODL director Sarah Wolozin ran into him at Sundance this past January and he said he had more to add. So, Sarah and Fred sat down and had a conversation, adapted below. Learn more about the distribution of mixed reality projects in this issue’s lead piece.
You mentioned that the VR ecosystem is currently more robust in L.A. than New York. Why?
Obviously, Los Angeles is based around the entertainment industry. In New York, apart from banking and real estate—the two main economic activities in the city—a lot is happening in the advertising industry. Most of the advertising agencies and big advertisers are here. I think, until XR connects with one of those verticals, with those industries that are in New York, it’s going to be very difficult for independent artists to thrive, to live, and to develop more XR projects.
And that’s why I would say L.A.’s probably a better place, right now. But it’s not necessarily going to last for long. I think New York has a very good ecosystem with organizations like NYU and city council initiatives. There’s IFP, there’s Tribeca, so you can feel that a lot of people are interested in pushing the medium. And it’s also the case for us creators that live in New York. There is, actually, a real community here of people…
Talk to me about your theory that we need to look at the way creatives and artists are shaping new models of distribution.
It’s pretty straightforward. Last time I came to MIT, I spoke about different economic models and how we could apply them to the environment we are building. And I realized that one very important part of what I was saying to the students was that pop culture always predicts the future. The Simpsons have announced Trump as a president, Star Trek and the Holodeck etc…
And the reason why pop culture always predicts the future is probably linked to the way entertainment is built. Entertainment is not an activity, but a goal that entertainers try to achieve for an audience, which means that artists want to find a balance between two things. Creativity first, and it is the most important, but also stickiness with audience. It means that when you’re an entertainer (contrary to a pure artist), you’re actually really judged by your own capacity to create an audience.
Now the interesting part for us in studying the economic models of emerging technologies, is that when you create an audience you, willingly or not, create habits. And you are in the life of people. And when you’re there, you have an economic model in front of you.…
What I discovered, when I left advertising and dived into VR and AR to start building this environment, is that entertainment, contrary to most of the products and services we are surrounded by, is something that you cannot model.
There’s no real economic model for entertainment that would make sense. There are a thousand economic models for entertainment, because ultimately, there’s a lot of ways for people to be entertained and there are a lot of ways for artists to create. And, if you look at the way the main models emerged, it is fascinating to see how many happy accidents happened in the hands of artists, to ultimately become an economic model. The movie industry is very much stable, so it’s not very interesting to comment on, as we forgot the details of how it became what it is. Everybody knows how it works, it’s been stabilized for about 70 years. But, if you look at emerging models—for example, the mobile industry today—and if you look at tomorrow, the models that AI will continue to build, or XR, or wearables, and the combination of all of the above, you realize very quickly that it actually comes from an idea, a very powerful, creative idea that people got addicted to. And consequently, became part or all of an economic model.
A good example is Candy Crush. Artists, video game programmers came up with the idea of basically copying a video game that existed (Bejeweled) and modernizing it. So, they copied the basic gameplay, integrated a new body movement with finger touching, and they also considerably changed the pacing of the game.
What they did was brilliant. There was an artistic approach, but there was also a real user-centric approach. They thought, “Because I’m on my mobile, I don’t have a lot of time, I need to onboard quickly, I need the game to be fast.” And doing that, they created what we call now “casual games.” And, subsequently, they created the value of casual gaming which is, as a user, I’m ready to pay $1 for something like that. Because it’s casual, right? But it all came from something that was a creative idea and then was a relationship that they wanted to create with an audience.
And, so, when I look back at what I said at MIT, I think I should have insisted on the fact that, as artists, MIT students and fellows can have a substantial impact on determining emerging technologies business models. Let’s dream big. Why would some of them not challenge the establishment of Silicon Valley? Some artists can contribute to building the industry. Some others can potentially leverage their position if they are aware of the impact they can have.
Are there some examples of VR projects? What are some of the models out there that you’re seeing that have been created by artists?
I think that right now, the ecosystem we are on is very much in the making. It’s not stabilized, which contributes to 150% of the reason my partners and I are into it, because uncharted territories attract some peculiar types of personalities. I am also talking about our extended XR family, the same 300 people we see everywhere in the festival/conference circuit. Driven personalities, that find it interesting to solve these kind of problems…
We are very much at a state right now where we are building the fundamentals of something. I don’t have a crystal ball, I don’t know what the economic models will look like. What I can tell is that creatively, it is so different, that we are not looking at flat screens any longer, that the content is all around and you can touch it. Can you really solve the user experience of something that is that new, with old recipes?
So, my bet is that there will be new economic models out there. I don’t know which ones, I don’t know how, I don’t know when they will emerge. But I am pretty sure that this will happen in front of our eyes.
What do you see now, though, that’s hinting towards it? What kind of things are presently developing that you see in your position?
There is an ambition in terms of content from the major actors in Silicon Valley… it’s obvious right now, to us, that we live under a Netflix era, that Netflix is gathering a lot of attention. But if you go a little bit further, if you maybe look at the perspective that screens will be less important, that contents and interactions could be everywhere, then, the video game area probably shines a lot. We are talking about an industry that is about three times bigger than entertainment today.
We can basically anticipate that entertainment platforms and video game technologies, streaming both content and computing power at the same time, will get closer at one point.
Let’s move this crazy scenario forward, and say, streaming interactivity (like what Google is doing with Stadia) plus streaming narrative content (Netflix, Disney…) are going to merge into something to create a new kind of entertainment. We can anticipate two potential applications. One, at home that is easy to imagine, like a dragon setting your sofa on fire while watching GOT, branching narratives with user input etc etc…and another one is a much bigger and controlled collective space.
It looks like location based entertainment capacities will be enhanced first. Ubiquity is the promise, going through amazing worlds, cooperating with your friends, seeing each other in those worlds…that we will have to transform the movie theater model that we know. It is already changing a lot: Retail is evolving, malls are transforming themselves, and we hope that immersive entertainment will have a huge part in that transformation.
So, more like theme park type places?
Yes, exactly. It is interesting to remember where those entertainment spaces come from. What did we need them for? The “consumer goods society,” which we’re living, means that we basically work, spend our money to live and to distract ourselves. And traditionally we did that for close to 100 years now, by going to retail places, commercial areas where we go buy our bread and fruit and furniture and sometimes go to the movies together. But this consumer goods society is coming to an end and we are going right into a “delivery society.” So, we stay home.
Amazon is doing a good job at delivering products and services, and Netflix is doing the job of entertaining us. So, why would we go to all of these commercial places? What is the value of a retail space? What is the value of the commercial square meter in the city and in a world where people prefer to stay home? So, maybe that’s where artists come into play. Maybe that’s where new technologies and entertainment have to work hand-in-hand, to make entertainment different.
Sitting in the dark, with a dark flat screen is no different than what I can do at home. We have to come up with something that is inherently different to entertain people… Our mission, as content producers, is to find the artists that understand what it takes for people to leave their comfortable sofa and make them do something they can never forget.
You talk about entertainment being the driver of this, and yet we focus on documentary and non-fiction. And a lot of your work is non-fiction and that’s entertainment too, but a type of entertainment. But it’s also journalistic, it’s socially motivated, social change focused. Where do you see nonfiction in all of this?
Epic creation is important, good stories, well delivered is something every film maker wants to achieve. But what the producers at AtlasV are looking for can never be framed that way. In a sense that what we do, is to basically use technologies to modify the spectator’s perception of any subject. I think that’s our strength. You can strip that down to: We modify perceptions. If you modify perception, you modify cognition. If we’re able to change perception and cognition about a topic, we are able to give people a transformative view of something they already knew.
To give you a concrete example, SPHERES is a three-part documentary, it is educational and it is also entertainment. Where are we taking it from there? For SPHERES, the project will go on and live its life. For AtlasV, it now means a lot to us to be able to bring more of those types of experiences to more eyeballs.
This is my dream, that one day, my daughters, when they want to learn something about history or science, can go to the corner of the street, or to the sports court of their university, and visit all those wonderful places and talk to the best specialists … At our level, it would mean a lot to be able to achieve part of this dream…we are working with Google on a project related to cave paintings. There are probably 10 projects that are cultural and that mix entertainment and education that we really want to do, with a compelling narrative, social cooperation, gamification.
Curiosity is an adventure. We are convinced that there is a way to reinvent this sense of curiosity with this new form of perception that is “immersive storytelling.” We want to build a platform that makes it easy for people to fall into black holes and to visit the Great Pyramids.
We as humans are so pretentious, we believe that we understand the world…while we actually build very personal interpretations of most of the physical and social scenes we can perceive. Those interpretations are based on things that we learned and we saw around us. So maybe, with immersive technologies, there is a chance that we can really capture people’s attention. What if we added brainwaves to the mix ? Of course it’s frightening, let’s agree on that, but isn’t it also a unique chance of having a very deep understanding of the world we live in?
If we were to be hopeful for the human kind, we could project that we are building a generation of people that will have a deeper knowledge and conscience, because they will be able to project themselves into the reality of the world they live in, empowered by technology. Maybe this is the real challenge here for us. It’s to heighten cognition, at the end of the day. It’s to have another way of relating to important topics.
What distribution models out there give you hope or inspire you or you find interesting?
Maybe totally anecdotal, but there is a trend with young people on Snapchat and Instagram, to have several accounts. And some of them are private and accessible through micropayment. And so, it looks like everybody’s becoming the entertainer of somebody else, and micropayments are a minimalistic gatekeeper. Why is this interesting? Because of the nature of new audiences’ understanding of what makes a relationship transactional. Are a dollar or two a real payment? Or is it an easy way of gratifying someone with something useful and saying thank you?
The same economics happen on reddit, now. You can reward someone for their knowledge and interactions, and make them climb in the community. And I sometimes wonder if this is or not an evolution of society. One could argue that because we became so self-centered, focused on making our reputation and personal wealth grow, the way to say thank you (the most basic human interaction) is to micro pay.
Instant gratification and reward systems are becoming very powerful tools in our individualistic societies. Every basic interaction (like a like or a heart) is measured and becomes meaningful, subject to questions, treasons and delivering a feeling of accomplishment—to the point where the frontiers between friendship, love and trade, are shifting. And now, what if artists could integrate that into their art? I would love for an artist to come to us with the idea of creating a relationship between people through real life, real time monetary exchange and personal questions, a life poker game!
Say a show costs $40, but a part of this sum is something you are going to use to your interest, depending on how you are involved in the show, as a user. You could pay some of the actors to see more things, or to prevent other spectators from seeing more. You can try to steal from others, or get to an objective that was suggested to you. We could elaborate on that, but interesting things would happen if we were giving an audience a sense of purpose and a role to play, including money.
Think also that credit cards are disappearing and contactless transactions are now possible. So it means that I can be in a room with people and just passing by them, we could exchange money. It means you can think of many new ways of mixing stories, bodies, choreography, and money into a same experience.
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