JUX2POSITION's DAVE KRICK: VR PURIST?
by Michelle Bienias
Sometimes, what sounds like criticism, gets our backs up, and perhaps makes us a bit defensive, can turn out to be a positive experience. This was the case when our Editorial Director, Marco Trezzini, responded to an online comment about our recent article on Hans Nyberg: Virtual Evangelist, of Panoramas.dk. Constructive critiques by knowledgeable persons without an axe to grind, but who are merely defending their own esthetic values, which are based upon deep and sound thinking and experience in the field, are always welcome. This was the case with Dave Krick, who we call the ‘VR Purist’ for obvious reasons. We were pleasantly surprised to discover that he also backs his words with high-quality thoughtful work, available at his main website www.jux2position.com. For more on his discussion with Marco Trezzini, read the interview, below.
 Dave, can you tell us a bit about yourself, your background, how you got into the industry and your influences?
 I have several degrees in non-related fields and one in graphic design. I have always been interested in photography especially panoramic photography. As a hobby I am an avid climber and canyoneer, the further I penetrate into the wilderness the happier I am. I would come back from these trips with widelux (140 degree field of view) transparency's that would always have a large Gee Whiz factor to people who saw them. I saw my first QTVR online in the late 90’s and was fascinated with the technology and realized its potential. At that time the only way to produce the medium was QTVR and that was only available on the Macintosh platform. It wasn't until Macromedia came out with Flash 5 and its object orientated programming language that all the components of a completely interactive VR tour could be produced in one program and displayed using a widely available plug in that was download friendly and cross platform compatible did I feel that VR tours could be presented in a unique and effective manner where the only limiting factor was the designers creativity. This is when I started designing and producing VR tours and object displays.
What about jux2position.com? Why did you decide to focus on VRs in particular as your niche market?
Jux2position.com was my creation with the goal of producing unique and fully interactive VR tours and object displays that would be exciting, entertaining and educational to the viewer. The goal of an image is to graphically represent something. The problem with a single still image is it is still and you can never see what is juxtaposed to it. With panoramic photography you can display the big picture leaving no doubt in the viewers mind as to what the subject really looks like. Make this panoramic spin around immersing the viewer in the scene, add some creative interactivity, link multiple scenes together, have each scene communicate with a navigation map and an interactive message prompt, add a drag and drop compass and the result is a unique and powerful display.
Presently Jux2position.com is my solo venture but when a large job is commissioned with a short production deadline, there is great local talent that I hire to assist in the production.
All of the VR tours presently at Jux2position.com have an outdoor theme because to the general population they have bigger “Wow Wee” factor but we can display anything in this format from the restaurant on the corner using multi node panoramas to show the ambiance of the eating establishment and using object displays showcasing the dinning specialties to a large manufacturing conglomerate showing the production plant in multi node fashion with object displays of the final product(s) produced. A great shot would be to have the CEOs (or any employees) photographed sitting around the conference table with the image taken from the center of the table so the panorama spins around and the viewer sees the people and the employees themselves are hotspots linked to their personal profiles. I am sure after I say this it will be done.
Jux2position.com would love to get the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the United States Geological Survey contracts to produce multi node VR tours showcasing and educating people about theses places and the services they provide. It is a shame that the U.S. taxpayers support these institutions and places yet most Americans rarely see them not to mention the elderly and the handicapped that could never have the opportunity to see them in person yet their tax dollars support them.
In your view, what is the perception of VR out there in the broader marketplace? Are there common misconceptions about VR that you've encountered?
There is no question that this medium has a negative stigmata attached to it. The potential of VR tours and Object displays in the commercial market is unlimited. The problem is the general population and marketplace needs to be educated or reeducated on what these mediums can provide and the present state of the technology. Designers tend to classify the medium into categories based on the modality (or plug in) used to view the medium. Everyone else classifies the medium as a collective whole and we are all judged based on the last tour or object that they have seen.
A large portion of the Internet population has never seen a VR tour or an object display and many do not even know what a browser or a plug in is. I get lots of feedback saying I love the photography but the images didn’t rotate and the problem was the viewer didn’t place the mouse over the image. Jux2position.com built an interactive help screen on the Bistibadlands VR tour to try and rectify this; does the end user click on help? They sure don’t, so the point is designers have to design with the lowest common denominator in mind.
Those who have experienced this type of medium most often have had a bad experience with a plug in issue or a large file size to contend with or viewed a poorly designed display of the medium and labeled the medium ineffective. So the main issues are lack of exposure of good designs within this medium, and education of the potential clientele about the present technology available within this medium. Unfortunately most designs are carbon copies of what the designer has seen in the past. They design from a recipe mindset and continually produce the same results whether the design is good or bad and there are a lot of less than optimal designs on display.
Commerce needs to rethink their marketing strategies. They invest millions on television campaigns based on the far chance that the target audience will have the TV turned on and tuned into that specific channel at that specific time and are consciously paying attention to their 15 to 60 second spot. They will also budget similar amounts of money for print ads that require the target audience to purchase a specific magazine, turn it to a specific page and consciously be aware of its content and try to invoke a consumer response from it. Both the TV and print ads have the company’s website listed so both of those mediums drive the potential consumer to the website and only a small fraction of the ad campaign budget is allocated to the website and it is reflective in the website display.
The website is the place where you can get detailed about a product and or service and make the sale. The website is not constrained by time or space. The use of VR tours and object displays force the user to interact (unlike TV and print) with the product or service making the user become conscious of the product or service and can lead the consumer directly to the shopping cart. The Internet is open 24/7 and VR tours and object displays provide great advantages to making a sale but again websites receive the least amount of the advertisement campaign budget.
Bandwidth is a current issue and download time will always be an issue. Screen resolutions are on the rise and the larger the screen resolutions means the larger the graphics have to be to fill in the white space. Larger graphics equates to larger file size and larger download times. Even if everyone were connected with broadband, download time would still be an issue. For those readers who remember a time before microwaves, it took 30 minutes to bake a frozen pizza and this was considered efficient. Now it takes 3 minutes in a microwave but most people still complain that it takes too long and stand there watching the timer. Immediate gratification and impatience are a human condition, when was the last time you saw anyone let somebody else in front of them while standing in line at the bank?
Object VRs seem to be a no-brainer in terms of advertising or displaying certain products, yet we haven’t really seen much increase in their usage aside from the auto industry. The high-fashion industry, for instance, seems like a logical user of object VRs. Do you have any thoughts, theories or first-hand experience to share?
Object displays (I don’t like the term object photography because we are using photography to design and display an object, we don't call them Virtual Reality Photography Tours, and I find the term confusing to clientele) suffer the same present fate as VR tours. Some clientele are familiar with this media and complain about the plug in issue, file size, etc. and frequently respond with all they do is just spin around. Other potential clientele has no exposure to the medium.
Again education or reeducation is needed for both designers and prospective clients for this medium to become effective. Most object displays on the Internet do just spin around and spin around in a plug in that has been around and problematic since this mediums infancy.
Potential clients have to be educated that object displays are not just simple spinning around modalities. Object displays can be entertaining, educational, and stand-alone works of art showcasing their product. Object displays are the leading technological medium to reproduce a consumer shopping experience. Typical consumer behavior is to walk into a store, pick up a potential purchase, examine it, view all sides of it, measure it, open up its compartments if it has any and explore the product. The higher the price tag the more the consumer wants to examine and edify themselves with the product. Object displays can simulate this entire consumer purchasing behavior providing an experience the consumer is familiar with and at the same time giving the user a sense of confidence with a purchase and lead that consumer to make the purchase right there at that time.
Potential clients also need to be educated that object displays are not just for showcasing the product. Object displays can be used for customer support and customer service and even product assembly. Great customer service and support creates a repeat customer, which generates more revenue.
On the designers’ part, most object displays just have the product spinning around and they serve this up right out of the gate. The design should show the product and then ask the viewer if they want to interact and get to know the product in more detail (AKA: content on demand). Consumers do not pick up everything in a store, just the products they are interested in so don’t display everything in object displays right off the bat. Inform the viewer of the file size and hopefully the design is produced for a widely accepted plug in that offers more than simple spinning around, also providing the user with an escape if they don’t want to see the product after they click on it.
Another design issue is too much interactivity which may result in slowing down the final display and/or creating a sensory overload to the viewer, I see this in VR tours and a few objects. The more interactivity you design into the display the bigger the hit on computer processor and a big processor hit translates into poor displays. Designers tend to have the best computers and the design plays back flawlessly on their systems. A seemingly great design on a lesser processor may (usually will) play back slow and clunky. A good designer produces good designs by cross platform checking, cross browser checking, cross processor checking and cross screen checking (flat screen, flat panel and regular monitors). A design that has lots of interactivity also should have some form of on screen computer processor check (see the Canyonlands Micro VR Tour and the special VRs for VRMAG Readers at jux2position.com) so the end user can be given some feedback if the object display or VR tour is not responding well.
So the haunting past is still making object displays difficult to get a stronghold in the marketplace. Once an individual experiences something bad it is hard for them to give it another chance. How many times do you intentionally touch a red-hot stove after you have been burned on it? I believe object displays will open up in the marketplace very soon and it will pave the way for VR tours.
You and our Editorial Director, Marco Trezzini, have had some discussions regarding full-screen VRs, which you find inferior to the traditionally sized panoramas.
I do have some issues with full screen displays, cubic formats and fish eye photography. If the end user or the client really wants these than by all means provide it but display it in a logical design fashion.
My arguments against full screen displays are file size and it is not a panoramic display. An 800 x 600 display or any other screen resolution is not a panoramic display. The beauty of a panoramic display is the long in width and small in height format. Does anyone sell or purchase a panoramic photograph that is almost square? When I think about designing a panoramic display my thoughts are trying to reproduce a scene the way a human would visualize it if they were actually there. I choose a specific lens in an attempt to reproduce human binocular vision and choose a display format that reflects the average field of human peripheral vision. Interactivity can be added to the panoramic display to simulate depth such as foreground and background content moving at a different rate.
There is nothing difficult about producing a full screen display and it is much easier from a production standpoint than a panoramic display. If a full screen display is the format of choice it should be presented as an option. For example: would you like to see this in a panoramic format or a full screen format, informing the viewer that the full screen format is going to be a longer download and if your full screen display fills the entire screen tell the viewer how to escape or get back to where they started before hand. I am very concerned about first time viewers to this type of medium, especially if they are on dial up and have to wait 10 minutes to see a full screen display, they might wrongly perceive that all the VR tours (or single scenes) are designed and formatted in this manner and initiate more problems getting this medium utilized in the future.
Cubic formats are great but there is no reason to produce cubic formats unless you have something to graphically represent cubically. I see a lot of cubic formats where there is nothing but lots of air. Spend some time watching end users navigate around a cubic format. It is easy to get lost inside a cubic format if there are no points of reference to visualize. I see many end users getting frustrated trying to navigate around cubic formats. Just because one can do it doesn’t mean it should be done.
Fisheye projections as well as one-shot systems do not reproduce the scene that simulates human vision. Humans do not process their sensory visual input through fish eyes and this effect becomes more pronounced when the playback is cylindrical. In some cases it is the most optimal way to handle a shoot especially if you have moving subjects. Some call this art but I see more and more fish eye displays and most clientele I speak with don’t like their media displayed in distortion for the same reasons every family portrait, hanging on the walls in everyone’s house is not displayed in fish eye distortion. It is virtual reality not altered reality. Here again a first time viewer to this medium gets introduced to a distorted panorama and they have nothing else to compare or contrast it against and walks away from the experience saying all VRs are produced with distortion and never gives the medium a second chance. Do designers make an attempt to explain that this is a fish eye projection and why this format was chosen, usually not? So the VR community has to hold itself partly accountable and take some responsibilities for the lack of use of this medium in the marketplace.
Any VR photographer you admire in particular?
There are many great VR photographers and I am sure I haven’t seen them all but I would say Scott Highton would stick out in my mind. I haven’t seen much of his latest work but his early work really pushed the envelope and inspired me, and I am sure others, to try to replicate his mastery. I frequently go back and look at Scott’s kung fu, especially the underwater shots and look forward to reading his upcoming book.
Tony David Cray’s 'Sydney Opera House' (SOH) is a fantastic example of a well designed and produced Multi node VR tour. If I were to make any constructive criticism of the SOH tour, it would be the use of sounds.
Not everyone appreciates the same sounds so it is difficult to choose the appropriate sounds. A sound that is enjoyable to an individual can quickly become irritating when heard repeatedly. Sounds can also add considerably to file size and when used inappropriately can cause a huge processor performance hit slowing down the timeline resulting in a poor playback. The SOH VR tour does a good job with the application of sound but they might have considered giving the end user a choice of options to turn the sounds off (they may have this option and I could be missing it).
The SOH VR Tour uses sound on mouse events and preloaders as opposed to an underlying sound track so from a design standpoint it might be difficult to turn all sounds off globally. One potential way to handle this scenario is to ask the end user up front, before the tour loads, if they want sound or not giving the user icons to rollover to preview the sounds and then decide. I am always amazed when watching end users view a site with sound and complain about the sound never realizing they can mute all sounds on the computer or turn the speakers off. Again, here is another example of when designing the designer should be designing for the lowest common denominator.
A tour of the SOH magnitude on a .gov site might also benefit by having an option for multiple languages (if the target is Aussie tourism). When designing keep in mind if it is displayed on the Internet it is accessible to everyone on this planet.
What do you think about VRMag and what would like to see us do that we aren’t doing?
Honestly, I just discovered VRMag. The Editorial Director, Marco Trezzini turned me on to the publication when I contacted him about some VR related issues. I think it is a great publication and is a huge step in the right direction, getting this type of medium some badly needed positive public exposure. I was extremely impressed with the Parma tour and the integration of multiple playback modalities incorporated into one site. If VRMag is lacking anything I would say it is relatively void of object displays but I am new to the publications and may be missing them (my search on the topic only pulled up an article on Scott).
Check out some object displays that Dave put together especially for VRMAG readers:
Cordless Drill Object VR
Digital Flat Panel Comparison Object VR
Dave's collection of 10+ Object VRs on his website.
VR Panoramas
email: jux2position@idcomm.com
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