I know several people working on VR projects right now, but I have yet to be impressed by what I’ve seen. Especially when it comes to VR movie experiences. There’s something about trying to tell a story in VR that doesn’t quite work, at least with the current hardware. I think Catmull hits the nail on the head when it comes to this. He says:

We have a whole industry which is gigantic: games. Games is very successful. It’s its own art form though, and it’s not the same as a linear narrative. Linear narrative is an artfully-directed telling of a story, where the lighting and the sound is all for a very clear purpose. You’re not just wandering around in the world.

When you give the viewer the freedom to wander in a virtual environment, it’s difficult to tell a linear story. This makes a lot of sense. There’s a reason a director hires a cinematographer. He or she knows how to line up the shot in just the right way to tell the story. But how do you “line up the shot” and guide the viewer in a VR movie experience? Maybe you don’t. Maybe that’s just not what VR is designed for. And maybe that’s fine.

The fact that you’ve changed the technology, and people are excited about it, doesn’t change the underlying difficulty of the compelling narrative story. Just like books aren’t the same things as movies. They don’t have to be.