We’ve discovered the future of Social VR, and it’s not coming from Facebook

There’s been talks recently about developing a killer app that is going to make virtual reality succeed beyond our wildest expectations. Facebook, for obvious reasons, is banking on developing a powerful social app that will place viewers in the same room to allow fun interactions and conversations.

However, I have to say that while the technology is impressive, I don’t see placing virtual bodies in a room as the most emotional way to drive social interaction with VR. How is this different than just a video chat over Skype? With video chat you are, at the very least, able to see their face, their eyes, and their emotions. A virtual persona doesn’t add enough emotional benefit to the user to really make a huge splash in the social space.

But I think another filmmaker, Jessica Brillhart over at Google, has unwittingly found social VR’s future.

Jessica Brillhart is a VR filmmaker that, like the rest of us, is trying to discover what exactly differentiates VR storytelling from movies, novels, and music. What stories can VR tell that no other medium can? How can we tell them differently?

Recently she gave a talk at EmTech exploring these essential questions.

Her big idea: let’s get away from storytelling as it exists today. Let’s stop trying to shove an explicit narrative down people’s throats and instead show them a holistic experience that will not require narrative, but drive narrative. She argues that VR should contain an implicit narrative that is so interactive that it will propel the “visitor” in the virtual world to tell their friends about their experience. The explicit storytelling then does not happen within the headset but after the experience is over — when we recount our virtual experience to our friends.

If this sounds familiar to you it’s because this is how we recount life as narrative. Life does not happen in narrative sequences. Instead we organize memories and experiences to recount events as linear stories to our friends. It’s storytelling from person to person, voice to ear, and is completely organic.

But what does this have to do with Brillhart? Her theories on organic, oral storytelling describes what I believe to be the future of social VR.

I’ve thought for years that movies are stripping us of unique experience. Now this isn’t to say that movies are a terrible narrative experience, but with a singular director’s vision, films often lack the ambiguities required to make a narrative personal to each viewer. Movies share linear stories and, for the most part, each viewer of the story has a similar experience when exiting a movie theater. Sure, people can talk about the techniques that were used or the different themes that they took away, but these conversations are always limited simply because there just aren’t enough variables given to the audience that truly allow for a unique experience that is worth sharing. The existence of “spoilers”, for that matter, speaks largely on this idea: the experience with a movie so hinders on its linear nature that by giving away part of the plot, a person could ruin the excitement and the experience for the viewer altogether.

Our answer to this? VR.

Story in VR must come from the “visitor”. As Brillhart touches on in her lecture, it’s the difference between a Kinetic Story (a linear story, like we see in movies) and a Potential Story, a title that here describes the telling of an organic, spontaneous story from one person to another. Instead of driving one single narrative into the viewer’s mind through VR, she suggests that we should engage “visitors” into an experience that has multiple story points (like life), allowing for organic stories to be built and conversations to be shared.

This is the true future of social VR.

We will share the stories that we experience in virtual reality because they are novel and because they are our own. We will type our excitement in 140 characters on Twitter. We will tell it to the people of Facebook Live, Periscope, Snapchat, and however else we can tell these stories. Why? Because VR allows for novel experiences that directly imitate life— experiences that are so unique to each and every visitor. VR has the potential to launch a viewer into a powerfully condensed life experience that can be nothing else but profoundly buzzworthy.

It’s the ignition that will drive social interaction. And, in this way, Social VR will not arrive when we digitally put people in the same room together (as Facebook suggests). It will arrive when we realize how to create truly novel experiences for each viewer so that they can’t help but tell their friends.