Daily Archives: February 9, 2017

Over the last several years, the Sundance Film Festival has been an early adopter, and key champion, of bringing virtual-reality content into the world of film. What had once been primarily a gaming movement has evolved into a cinema fixture. Sundance and its New Frontier program are big reasons why.

This year that movement turned up a few notches. The Sundance that ended recently was the first in which VR occupied its own physical space an intimate venue away from the Main Street tumult called the VR Palace. It was, coincidentally, also the first festival in which much of the content can now be viewed broadly, thanks to the release of dedicated headsets such as the Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR in the last year.

Maybe most importantly, it was the first year veteran creators truly began to push boundaries. Nearly every one of the modern VR pioneers Chris Milk, the directing tandem known as Felix & Paul, Oculus' in-house filmmakers brought new content to show off, along with worthy lesser-knowns. Much of it 16 pure VR pieces at the Palace and about a dozen more with VR components at the mainline New Frontier exhibition was impressive and instructive. (Many are also available for these new platforms, or can be viewed at an upcoming film festival/tech show.)

Virtual realityis still a ways off from mass consumer adoption. But one of its biggest hurdles not enough interesting content is firmly a thing of the past.

Here are seven new pieces that both showcase the range of what the medium can do at present and hint at where it could be going.

"Dear Angelica" (lead artist: Saschka Unseld)

Story Studio, the cinematic-content division of VR headset player Oculus, has been breaking ground from the beginning. The animation pioneer(it's made up of many Pixar alums)had one of the first narrative films in VR, a distant-planet story called "Lost," several years back. It won the first Emmy for an original VR piece with Henry last year. And now it has its most ambitious effort,and arguably the most moving tale yet created for VR.

Directed by Story Studio chief Unseld with the help of artists Wesley Allsbrook and Angela Petrella, Angelica tells hauntingly of a young woman grieving the loss of her actress mother. She describes how she now watches her moms movies to bring her memory back, then feels the sense of emptiness when the images flicker off. The story is a potent one, about love and loss, parent and child.

But its the way content merges with form that makes "Angelica" so notable. Using an illustration tool called Quill designed for this film (Oculus will now make it available for other creators), "Angelica" tells its story with swirling colors and vivid dimensionality. There's the opportunity to quite literally walk in and around images as they move slowly enough to allow you to inhabit the world. Unlike many VR pieces, you're not just inside the film, youre crawling around in a character's mind. Also present is a dizzyingly beautiful sense of scale; shapes slowly enlarge and diminish as the story unfolds.

In "Angelica's" most powerful moment, an astronaut is seen floating away, capturing the majesty of life and the melancholy of passing into death. Aesthetics and emotions two staples of cinema that have yet to become part of VR are key here. Memories dont have linearity; theyre moments frozen in time, said Unseld, one of the more philosophically inclined of the cinematic VR movement. We all have them in our lives. And the way we experience VR is not the way we experience the world; its more the way we think, our memories. Thats what we wanted to capture.

"Out of Exile: Daniel's Story" (lead artist: Nonny de la Pea)

Albert Maysles liked to talk about documentary as primarily an empathy tool. Virtual reality takes that idea and ups the ante. And few can throw down with empathy like De la Pea.

Known as the godmother of VR, De la Pea helped create the medium, inventing headset tech at a USC lab. (She now runs her own show over in Santa Monica.) The early days were MacGyver-ish it wasn't that many years ago when she had to rig up sensors and run alongside the user to allow the kind of free-range movement that is now becoming de rigueur.

One element that's constant, though: De la Pea's interest in the medium as a way for ordinary people to understand conflict points. While past pieces have dealt with outbursts of physical violence the Syrian Civil War, a confrontation on the Mexican-U.S. border the creator has, with her new piece, shifted her focus.

In "Exile," she tells the real-life story of Daniel Ashley Pierce, who faced verbal and physical abuse from his family after he came out to them. Using audio from Pierce himself, it drops you into the living room during the confrontational moment, your head whipsawing between Daniel's heartfelt announcement and his relatives' unsympathetic reaction. Deceptively simple in concept, it puts you inside conflicts still sadly ongoing for many Americans.

"Documentary is about explosiveness abroad but also at home, and VR is a great way to show that," De la Pea said. Then, noting the timing on which she was giving the interview the same morning as the presidential inauguration she added, "Yes, now more than ever."

"Life of Us" (lead artists: Chris Milk, Aaron Koblin, with music by Pharrell Williams)

You could use all the words in the world to describe this gleeful riff on evolution and still feel as inadequate as a Homini seeking a second stick for a fire.

Chris Milk helped kick off the VR-indie film crossover years ago with such early pieces as "Evolution of Verse," "Clouds Over Sidra" and a nifty Beck concert he filmed by rigging his own cameras. These days he oversees Here Be Dragons, a VR production company, and Within, the distribution side of the business. None of that insider-speak will prepare you for this goofy-but-heady experience in which you and a partner in adjacent rooms basically go from early forms of life to futuristic robots.

There isn't a ton of narrative, more of a chronology, as the seven-minute piece allows you to begin moving first as simple organisms, then to more ape-like beings, then birds, then humans, then whatever comes next, as the experience has you crawling, scampering, running and flying alongside a partner. You can communicate with said partner: they're in an adjacent room but you hear them and they you, in voices that take in the qualities of the creature you're inhabiting at that moment in evolutionary times.

Sound trippy? Well, sound is also trippy--since shouts open up certain experiences, there are noises and screams and squeals. And that was just those coming from this reporter.

Technologically speaking, "Life of Us" shows what's possible in a sweeping, and tandem, VR experience. More conceptually? The idea is to use the medium to give you a playful, macro view of where we're headed as a species. Or as the creators put it in their mission statement: "This shared VR journey tells the complete story of the evolution of life on Earth."

"Heroes" (lead artist: Melissa Painter)

One of the essential questions in the VR movement is how it will fit with so-called AR. Augmented reality is a kind of hybrid VR it uses glasses to allow the sight of computer-generated images but still affords you the ability to see the real world simultaneously.

That complementary dynamic is manifest in "Heroes" a new piece by Painter, an "innovation strategist" (drop that job title at a cocktail party) at the design studio MAP.

Working with Laura Gorenstein Miller's Los Angeles-based Helios Dance Theater and shooting in spaces around the city, Painter has created a new take on live performance. A more traditional VR piece allows you to watch a pair of particularly acrobatic dancers from a multiplicity of angles, including a swimming pool and a theater stage.

The AR component, meanwhile, pushes boundaries. The tech is still being ironed out, but the possibilities are intriguing: "Heroes" has you entering a room and conjuring up those same young dancers from the VR pieces, this time as holograms with the help of a variety of voice commands. You can multiply them as they're spinning all around you. At one point you can even shrink the kids and have them dance in your hand.

But the point here is more than just giving you that Rick Moranis feeling. The idea of a dance performance that can happen in a room only for you, and customized to your (sometimes surreal) specifications, prompts conceptual questions: about the relationship between performer and audience, between disembodied VR consumer and the qualities of physical performance.

"Dance and sports, as two forms that have never let go of the idea of extreme human physical/athletic potential, have a lot to teach us in this moment about the importance of being embodied," Painter said, "They can help remind us how to design technological experiences and entertainment experiences that dont divorce us from our minds or our bodies."

"Tree" (lead artists: Milica Zec, Winslow Porter) and Mindshow (lead artists: the Mindshow staff)

On the surface these two wouldnt seem to have much in common. The first is an environmentally themed piece about the importance of trees. The latter is a storytelling tool that allows everyday people to become VR directors by creating characters and reaction shots.

But both underscore a key point: The virtue of VR is its ability to make the viewer a story driver. Thats often spoken of in more incidental terms, like where the viewer looks. But these pieces show that a viewer's actions can also change what theyre experiencing.

In Mindshow, the tool allows you the ability to select reactions and then embed them into a story line; one demo has you alternately playing a captain and an alien in their first encounter; how you choose behaviors for each one informs how the scene plays out.

"Tree, from the duo that offered the powerful war experience "Giant, tracks you as you move from a seed under the ground to a towering sentry of the rainforest, and eventually become a logging casualty. Notably, your movement changes the story: hold out your arms, for instance, and birds will land on them. How much you want to interact will change what you feel, said Zec.

Many consumers are still getting used to just wearing VR headsets. But both "Tree" and "Mindshow" demonstrate that there's room in the medium for viewers to do a lot more than adjust the focus.

"Miyubi" (lead artist: Felix & Paul)

What's that old line, the more rules you have the less you follow? For years VR was thought of as a medium of "couldnts:" You couldn't tell linear stories, you couldn't do comedy, you couldn't put people under the headset for more than 15 minutes.

Flix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphal, the Montreal-based duo who go by the collective name Felix & Paul and who created some of the first VR pieces for Hollywood movies ("Jurassic World" and "Wild") are here to flout all of that.

For their new piece, they partnered with Funny or Die and its editor in chief Owen Burke for a 40-minute dramatic comedy featurette that is one of the most traditional stories told in VR, and certainly one of the longest. A child in early 1980s suburbia receives a toy robot; overjoyed, he begins bringing him everywhere to class, to his room, to family dinners. The robot obliges by performing tricks that are pretty nifty circa the first Reagan administration. Oh, and did we mention you're seeing the world through his eyes?

Were just starting to figure out how to suspend disbelief in VR, which is something weve known in cinema for a long time, said Raphael. And one way to do that is to give you a sense of presence, to make you feel like youre a part of whats happening.

Miyubi is a story of obsolescence and childhood, boosted by a very clever meta in-joke that we are experiencing a story of a doomed cutting-edge technology through a device that will no doubt one day be viewed the same way.

But back to the present. Were they worried about the length, traditional narrative and all the other non-VR forms theyre trying in VR?

I think we would do two hours if the story demanded it,Lajeunesse said. When you shatter a barrier and cross frontiers you say youre now in this new land. Lets see what we can find in it.

steve.zeitchik@latimes.com

Twitter: @ZeitchikLAT

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In the burgeoning world of virtual reality, storytelling is both cutting ... - Los Angeles Times

VR technology development is thriving and is attracting a lot of interest from both manufacturers and users alike. We're only at the beginning of the VR era and things are still a little complicated, but the future still looks very promising.The Japanese are taking it to the next levelas they are hopingto add a whole new dimension to the technology: smell.

We recently saw that some people have hadsomedifficulties acceptingVR: itcan cause headaches and nausea, few people are interested in it due tothe small number of apps, but the main problem is obviously theprice. It will take time for VR to become more accessible,and thats not necessarilya bad thing as by that time the technologywill be far more superior to what we have at the moment.

Some developers are alreadyon the lookoutfor solutions to these problems, whileothers are venturing even further again. A Japanese company is currently trying to make virtual reality even more realistic by adding another sense to accompany hearing and sight: smell. The VAQSO VR is a small device made up of cartridges, each of which contain a specific smell. Depending on your preferred VR adventures, the device will release certain smells to pull you even further into the game. The technology obviously isn't perfect, as it is still in the development stages, but it does have potential.

AsCNEThas recently pointed out, smell is already associated with VR in many specific situations.We're hopingthat we'll see something a little more interesting than just sex and pets in this respect (Oh, and please refrain from writing you'd need to test both at the same time in the comments).

Sight and sound are the primarysenses usedin any video game experience, and there's every chance that smell will also be used too one day. That just leaves touch and taste to be implemented to achieve a rounded VR experience. Theoretically, touch would beeasy to integrateas you already touch the controller to interact with the game. That said, if we want a FPS game whereyou can fire a gun, you'll need more than just a controller. Hereyou'd need a number of other accessories and different kinds of controllers, the number ofwhich would most likelyincrease over time.

Being able to taste test a meal before eating it is an interesting idea.

What do you think?

Taste is much more complex as this wouldinvolvea direct interaction inside the body - meaning you would have to putsomething in your mouth. Other than using an external accessory that is optimized for this purpose (which isnt very practical), I cant think of any other strategies. With that said, I cant imagine how taste would be useful in games or sightseeing tours. Perhaps it could be used by confectionery businesses or other catering companies to showcase their products? This is purespeculation, of course.

How do you envisage the future of VR? Do you think the technology will one day have a full sensory experience for its users? Let us know in the comments below.

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Virtual reality: prepare for the revolution - AndroidPIT

JOHN WALL LOOKS down to discover that the nice, safe carpeted floor beneath him has disappeared. Impossibly, he is suddenly swaying on a wooden plank, the width of a diving board, 30 feet above a rusty pit. His heart races. Just the slightest wobble could be fatal.

Safety is merely 8 feet in front of him, a distance the stressed Wall chooses to cover on tiptoes. He's about halfway there when someone nearby gives him an instruction: "Turn and step off the plank." Wall shakes his head. He won't do it.

After telling himself over and over that this can't possibly be real, he finally turns to his right, steps off the plank and plunges into the abyss below.

Then Wall peels the black virtual reality headset off of his face, relieved to rejoin the safety of the physical world as we know it.

Welcome to the bleeding edge of the NBA's 30-team wrestling match to find a competitive edge, where a hot new frontier is the use of virtual reality to get into the heads of NBA players as never before.

A Stanford study found that sawing down a virtual tree can cause people to use 20 percent less paper in real life. Another study found that football players improved decision-making by as much as 30 percent and sliced almost a full second off their decision time after they used virtual reality to simulate defensive coverages.

Can it apply to basketball? The Wizards intend to be at the forefront of finding out.

"I really thought I was gonna die," says Wall, who was coaxed into trying virtual reality largely after hearing that Tony Romo, of Wall's beloved Dallas Cowboys, is a fan. "This, is going to be great for the NBA."

STANDING IN BURNT-GREEN khakis and a gray half-zip sweater just outside the Washington Wizards' locker room, majority owner Ted Leonsis shakes the hand of 76-year-old former coach and player Kevin Loughery, dressed in a pressed navy suit for Bullets Night at the Verizon Center, a salute to the team's past. Leonsis can't stop talking about the future, specifically the virtual reality company he invested in two years ago, STRIVR, which originated in the halls of Stanford University with a bent toward the sports world.

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"We should get him in virtual reality," Leonsis jokes of the white-haired Loughery, who seems to have only a vague understanding of what the heck Leonsis is talking about.

Loughery offers a conciliatory chuckle and, before long, heads for his seat. Leonsis presses on, explaining that his Wizards may have won just two of their first 10 games, but they won't lose this race: "It obviously hasn't shown in our record, but we want to be on the ground floor of this."

Leonsis brings up the Socratic method and other traditional avenues of idea creation and cognitive learning. He explains that virtual reality is just another tool to deposit information into the brain.

Wall can tell you: The difference with VR is that it is immersive. Coaches will tell you it's like pulling teeth to keep the attention of a roster for an entire film session. What if they could go over plays, study shooting drills and hammer out defensive rotations without players' thoughts wandering to Instagram feeds?

An early benefit has come from players noticing things they used to miss on laptops -- especially hitches in their shot mechanics.

"I really saw a difference in my jump shot and free throws," says 20-year-old wing Kelly Oubre, who grew up playing "Call of Duty" and is used to wearing a headset. "I could see my mechanics, what I needed to do right." Oubre's true shooting percentage is up this year, from 50.7 to 53.4.

ACCEPTANCE, OF COURSE, is the challenge. Deploying virtual reality means developing new habits, and in that department the Wizards are at something of a disadvantage. The NFL's Dallas Cowboys and New England Patriots have VR labs built into their facilities. The Wizards, meanwhile, have just one headset to share, and it's not for everyone.

"It can really screw your mind up. I started bending down, trying not to fall and stuff. I was in the room, trying to figure out, like, 'What is going on?'"

Marcin Gortat

When Marcin Gortat -- a 32-year-old 7-footer with a giant goblin tattoo on his left arm -- tried what's commonly referred to as "the plank," he went into a panic, getting on all fours to grab the board.

"It can really screw your mind up," Gortat says. "I started bending down, trying not to fall and stuff. I was in the room, trying to figure out, like, 'What is going on?'"

Gortat is still trying to decide whether he hates virtual reality or loves it.

"Oh man, it's amazing," Gortat says. "I think it can be successful, but for me, as a 10-year veteran, it's not going to change anything right now. It's the new tool of the century."

Wall isn't one of the team's heavy users, but he sees the benefit. "Oh, it's helpful now," Wall says. "I could see a lot of NBA teams starting to use it. I think it's helping so many different ways -- ballhandling, shooting, moving."

WIZARDS HEAD COACH Scott Brooks is a big believer in the power of visualization and VR. Brooks says he stood 4-foot-11 when he joined the East Union High School basketball team in Manteca, California. Not ideal for someone who had NBA dreams. Though he grew a foot by the time he graduated from high school, Brooks never topped the 6-foot mark.

Still, he could shoot with the best of 'em. By his senior year at UC-Irvine, Brooks shot 42 percent from beyond the arc and 85 percent from the charity stripe. Brooks owes much of his shooting success to a homework assignment given to him by Bill Stricker, his high school coach.

The task? Train his brain every night before bed. Don't count sheep. Count swishes.

"Visualizing is so huge," Brooks says. "My high school coach taught me that a long time ago. I used to visualize making free throws every night."

At first, young Scott was skeptical of the concept of mental imagery. Really, this was going to be the trick? But then the coach told him a story, a tale that Brooks loves to retell to this day.

It's about a prisoner of war in Vietnam who was locked in solitary confinement for years. To pass the time, he came up with the idea of playing a round of golf every day in his mind. He had never swung a golf club in his life, but he knew it was something that could keep his mind busy for four or five hours at a time. One day, he got rescued and decided to go play his first real round of golf.

"And he shot 2 over," Brooks says.

Really?

"Yes," Brooks says, with his eyes stretching from ear to ear. "My high school coach told me this 30 years ago, and I've heard that story so many times."

A quick internet search reveals that the tale first appeared in a book in 1975 and later popped up in "A 2nd Helping of Chicken Soup for the Soul." It's one of the most retold inspirational stories out there.

The only thing? Alas, in virtual reality, it's hard to know what's real. After a long dig into the story's origins, Snopes.com concludes the following about a man coincidentally named James Nesmeth (not James Naismith):

"Although many current versions of this legend identify one 'Major James Nesmeth' as the Vietnam POW whose playing golf in his mind translated to his becoming a far improved linkster once he was back home, we have been unable to verify that anyone of that name served in Vietnam, was held as a POW, was released from captivity, or achieved notable results on the links after returning to the U.S."

Brooks went on to play 10 years in the NBA, and he currently ranks top-100 in career free throw percentage, making 85 percent (564-of-664) in the pros. In this case, maybe visualizing the truth is more important than the actual truth.

THE COACHING STAFF of the Wizards works with the team's analytics gurus, Brett Greenberg and Ben Eidelberg, to figure out the most impactful experiences that can help players improve their games.

They have been focusing most of their attention on Ian Mahinmi, who has been wearing the headset so much he's worried he might short-circuit it.

"I don't want to sweat all over it!" he shouts, holding the VR headset in the air inside the Wizards' practice gym.

Mahinmi was the poster boy of last summer's free-agency bonanza before Miami's modestly toothed reserve, Tyler Johnson, stole that label. After eight seasons in the NBA, and only one as a full-time starter, Mahinmi received a four-year, $64 million contract from Washington to fill a bench role. Combine Mahinmi's age (he just turned 30) with the fact that he's fresh off of a monster deal, it doesn't seem that he would be the most likely candidate to be a VR guinea pig.

It turns out that a knee injury and a free throw affliction made him a perfect test case. Mahinmi's career free throw percentage is just under 60 percent, including a recent season in which he shot just 30.4 percent.

"It's more like building muscle memory, but for your brain. Kind of like, OK, if you see it, your brain is going to register it. And then, when you shoot live, you're going to think about it and see yourself shooting and making. You know you can do it."

Ian Mahinmi

Two weeks ahead of the 2016-17 season, Mahinmi underwent surgery to repair a partially torn meniscus in his left knee.

Over the next several weeks, the Wizards put together a rehab program with two key objectives: minimize excessive time on his feet and, secondly, get him to work on his free throws so they can remove him from the Hack-a-Shaq list.

To build up his confidence as a shooter, the Wizards used a 360-degree camera to film him making free throws. Then they played the makes on repeat so he could watch himself making free throws over and over in the first-person perspective. Before his daily shooting drills, he put on the VR headset and underwent a session to prime his brain with success -- his own success. Seeing is believing.

"It's more like building muscle memory, but for your brain," Mahinmi says. "Kind of like, OK, if you see it, your brain is going to register it. And then, when you shoot live, you're going to think about it and see yourself shooting and making. You know you can do it."

Hours after finishing his morning workout, Mahinmi is back on the floor, this time on the game court just before tipoff. As rainbow-clad analyst Walt Frazier does a pregame MSG hit a few feet away, Mahinmi walks to the basket stanchion and puts on the headset so he can watch himself make free throws. Next to Mahinmi stands Eidelberg, who is watching Mahinmi's perspective on a MacBook Pro. That way, Eidelberg and Wizards assistant coach David Adkins can see exactly what Mahinmi is focusing on. It's at this moment that a handful of nearby fans take out their phones to snap a photo of this bizarre scene.

"What are you seeing, Ian?" shouts Adkins. "See your hands? Keep them up. Keep the follow-through up."

Mahinmi is talking his way through it. Make after make. After eight minutes in VR, Mahinmi takes off the goggles and walks to the free throw line. He starts shooting free throws. Swish.

Adkins walks over with a grin and relays Mahinmi's success rate.

Sixty-five out of 70.

"There's a bunch of stuff I didn't realize I was doing," Mahinmi says. "My hands, sometimes after I make a few of them, they drop. My body is shifting sometimes. There's a bunch of stuff that I notice now that I didn't before."

After a series of light jumpers, Adkins tells Mahinmi that he's good, the workout is done. Time for regular treatment on his real knee.

LIKE MANY HYPED tech revolutions, the VR bonanza hasn't taken off yet. While the short term has seen intriguing signs in beleaguered Detroit Pistons big man Andre Drummond (sporting a career-high 43.8 percent from the free throw line this season after incorporating virtual reality into his training), the long term is riddled with potential.

Consider that STRIVR is developing a "hangover experience" to demonstrate to NBA players what it's like to play basketball with slower reaction times as a result of a long night of drinking and a lack of sleep. There is talk of creating experiences that allow injured players to feel as if they're on the court while their teammates sweat out road games.

What is the value of helping people feel closer together and more empathetic? Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, created "the plank" and other scenarios not just for basketball players but for all people. He's a co-founder of STRIVR and works with companies such as Google, Facebook and Samsung. He says the most interesting development in VR may be diversity training to reduce bias.

The "Walk a Mile in Digital Shoes experience" is one in which the subjects see an avatar version of themselves in a virtual mirror, and then the avatar changes between races, ages and genders to feel what it's like to be the target of racist, sexist or ageist remarks. Consider an older white male who swaps bodies with a young African-American man. (Roger Goodell tried out the empathy training at Stanford last summer).

Bailenson says that within four minutes of being in someone else's avatar, the brain undergoes a "body transfer" in which it fully believes it is that person. Once racial discrimination is inflicted to your avatar, you feel that it's happening to you. Studies show that the empathy felt in that experience can last long after you take the goggles off.

"This is what virtual reality is all about," Bailenson says. "Changing human behavior for the better."

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TrueHoop Presents: The Washington Wizards and virtual reality - ESPN

Want the best seats in the house for an Eric Churchconcert? Fans can now have them without ever leaving their living rooms.

Vantage.tvis now offering avirtual reality experience featuring Churchs headliningperformance from Day 1 of the 2016 Stagecoach Country Music Festival in California. Thanks to theeight-camera setup used to record Churchs Stagecoach set, fans can experience 180- and 360-degree shots of the country stars show, and see the concert from both the stage and the audience;immersive audio helps round out the full-body experience.

During his 2016 Stagecoach set, Church performed some of his biggest hits, includingDrink in My Hand, Springsteen, Give Me Back My Hometownand Talladega, as well as newer songs such as Record Year, Knives of New Orleans and many more. Fans using Vantage.tv can experience Churchs 13-song set through a multi-camera directors cut, from the front row or through a 360 view. More information is available onVantage.tv.

Church is currently out on the road for his 2017 Holdin My Own Tour.The trek, which began in January, includes more than 50 stops and no opening acts; instead, Church will perform two full sets every night.

Its going to be a three-hour show. And the only way to do that was to go by ourselves. Otherwise, it just doesnt work time-wise. It doesnt work with the load-in, the load-out, Church explains. It gives us two chances as an opener, two chances at closing the show. And it gives us a wide chance to do things, like possibly keep it thematic, where the first set is [songs from]Sinners Like MethroughCarolina, and then we come out and run ChiefthroughMr. Misunderstood. Stuff like that.

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Eric Church Offers Virtual Reality Concert Experience to Fans - The Boot

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Reality appears to be catching up with virtual reality.

A report released Wednesday by Forrester Research said 42% of U.S. online adults have never heard about VR headsets and that an additional 46% said they don't see a use for VR in their lives.

Meanwhile, a separate report by marketing services outfit Yes Lifecycle Marketing says only 8% of marketers are curerntly using VR in their advertising. Thirty-five percent of those surveyed said they either have no intentions or have reservations about using the tech, while 57% said it does not apply to them.

"There is much more hype than substance when it comes to using VR specifically for marketing," said Samantha Merlivat, an analyst at Forrester Research. "A lot of brands have tried VR in the last year, and in many cases, it left marketers and consumers rather underwhelmed."

The resistance by brands toward flashier tactics like VR underscores the notion that advertisers are being more pragmatic about their efforts to improve their marketing. According to the Yes Lifecyle Marketing report, marketers are still using tried-and-true methods like social (68%) and video (56%).

"In the past year, it has been very difficult to find a brand that has made a compelling use for VR," Ms. Merlivat said. "Planning your brand story around a three-minute video in terms of consumer experience is not something I would call compelling. Brands need to find a use that makes sense, whether it is entertainment, utility or social that goes beyond what they are doing at the moment."

A movie that's experienced in VR, where the plot changes based on where the viewer goes, might provide the type of spark needed for average consumers to turn their attention to the devices, Ms. Merlivat said.

Other obstacles include consumers who first experience VR with smartphones rather than high-end devices like HTC's Vive or the Oculus Rift. "There is lag, it is very pixelated," Ms. Merlivat said regarding smartphone VR experiences. "The consumer isn't going to want to invest in a $500 headset. That is going to hurt adoption of high end VR devices."

According to Deutsche Bank, there were about 22.5 million mobile VR users worldwide in 2016, up from nearly 6.5 million the previous year. By 2020, the investment bank projects more than 154 million people will use mobile VR at least once per year, but only 3.2% of them will be daily active users.

But in the long run, that may change.

Although the Forrester report is hesistant about VR's use cases short term, it is significantly more optimistic about its long-term implications. Brands who are at the forefront of the technology will be far more prepared when VR reaches scale. "And when it does, it will be very transformative for the brand," Ms. Merlivat said.

"There are brands who want to do VR because everyone is doing it," Ms. Merlivat said. "But in the long term, it will be widely adopted by consumers. And once it hits a certain scale, it will make things more interesting for everybody."

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Only 8% of Brands Intend to Use Virtual Reality for Advertising - AdAge.com