Kristian Emil Andreassen - Kanda at CopenX, September 2016

Thank you. And of course, I'm going to be talking about VR today. But before jumping into that, I want to take a little bit of a step backwards. And that is to talk about a black screen in Apple. No. I want to talk about storytelling. Because I think this is essential to figuring out how to make engaging content in VR. I personally love storytelling. I think it's the basis for communication. It's the basis for taking the experiences that I have as a person and moving this into the next generation. And I think it is especially important to think about how storytelling is done today when you're looking at how VR storytelling is going to be in the future. And one of the things I particularly love about storytelling is it's, of course, about what is said, what is being written. But in equal measure, it is about what is not being said, what is in between the lines. And the story, as it goes, behind this novel, is that Hemingway was sitting with a couple of friends, most likely in a bar, him being Hemingway. And there was a bit about him being able to write a novel, or a short novel, of course, in six words. So they were placing the bed on the table. And supposedly, he wrote this down on a napkin and won the bet. Now, if you're looking at the text, there's not much to work with. It's not much of a story. But we, as humans, have a tendency to put context, put meaning, and our experiences into this. So suddenly, these six words become a story about why are baby shoes relevant, why would you normally buy baby shoes, and the supposedly tragic story behind why they were never worn, and that you need to sell them. We don't know this. This is not something that we can know from the text. It's not something we can reference back to in previous text. But somehow, deep down, we feel that this is the story behind it. Therefore, you can call it a story. Images can have kind of the same effect. You can look at an image of a person. If you haven't spotted it, it's me some years ago. And suddenly, the context, the history behind people are opened up. Maybe you get a new view on me, or you get a new view on Pankras, or you're just wondering what the hell happened. Sometimes it's videos. Is there sound for it? Many of you feel bad for this lamb. That is because you're crazy. It has no feelings. And the new one is much better. It still brings almost brings a tear to my eyes every time I see it, because of course we feel with the lamp. Now, the story behind this is not accident. It is not a chance that this happened to be one of the few good commercials in the world. It is engineered to be that way. They are using what has been built on storytelling, a lot of rules that we have figured out over time about how they as a commercial agency can create feelings in us, the audience, or the recipients of this. And this is, to me, the essence of storytelling. That is probably also why you see all these courses in pitching, in communications, all of this. Because when you're looking at storytelling, when you're looking at communications in its most singular form, it is about me, what I know, what I feel to be true. How can I communicate this to you so you understand it in the same way that I do? And we see sometimes this is good, sometimes this is bad, but it all comes down to how good a presenter is at actually using these rules. Now, what I think is so interesting about virtual reality is that we are trying to bridge the gap. Chris Milks called this as taking the jump from this translation, you understanding what I'm trying to tell, over into you experiencing this for the first time. And this gives a lot of challenges in how to create a story, and it gives a lot of opportunities in what we can then do in creating experiences and how they communicate to people. The important thing to note now is that we do not know these rules. We only know that the rules that created the movies, the stories, are changing. And what I think is so interesting, and especially with an event like this, is that we're bringing people together who are experimenting in this. There's not a right or wrong. It is important to be out there and experimenting all the time. Now, why I think virtual reality has a potential to be so powerful is back to this old quote. You should walk a mile in someone, or you shouldn't judge someone until you walked a mile in their shoe. In that case, if you still don't like them, you'll be a mile away and you'll have their shoes. Of course, there's something deeper to that. There is that sometimes people you meet might be acting in a strange way because you don't know the context. You don't know the history of these people and why they're doing what they're doing. So we need to understand what they have been through to understand why they're acting like they are. And with virtual reality, we actually have a chance of doing that. So I usually bring the slides I usually present to industry customers. The main part about this is that you are noticing the smallest circle is games. Now, this is not to say that games are least important in VR. It's just that I think it is not the only one. There is a lot of opportunity within healthcare, within cinematic VR, and certainly also in business to business marketing. It is about going out and see what can the industry actually use these technologies for. Usually you have first movers, then you have industry adoption, and then you go to mass market, and then you have the success with normal consumer usage. Do you know where this picture is from? It's from a movie. You most likely didn't see the premiere. It is supposedly the first movie that was ever recorded, and something very interesting happened. And we, of course, have been laughing about this for quite a while. That when they showed, when it was played, this train was coming towards people, and people were running out of the theater in fear of the train hitting them. And of course, we've been laughing about this because it's a movie. I mean, they already, how can they think that it's coming out of the screen? Until we started seeing videos on YouTube about people putting virtual reality glasses on and going like, what the fuck? Then we found out that there was something about how humans perceive new things, that it takes us a while to understand new things and put them in a context and internalize it. And this is very much the stage we're at today. We're at the first baby steps of what this technology can do. This opens a lot of opportunities, and hopefully, by the time that people are not just awed by the new sense of immersion, we will have quality content that can help take this technology further from that step. So what have we been using this for? And I'm hoping David can stop me when I'm getting close to the edge. Well, one of the cases we've been working on is that if we're looking at humanity as a whole, we have been extremely successful in ending extreme hunger over the last few decades. And extreme hunger, when you look at it, is a fairly simple, of course, it's a complex problem, but it's a fairly simple solution. You need to get people who are about to die of hunger something to eat. It doesn't matter what they eat, as long as it has some nutrition. We have been very, very successful at doing that. It is a lot of these UN agencies, we are particularly working with WHO, whose job is trying to look at the next step. So once you have ended extreme hunger or extreme poverty in a country, you then get a whole host of new situations. That is often the follow effects of bad nutrition. This is especially relevant in babies and young kids. And if you have a country that is struggling to come out of poverty or extreme hunger, they usually don't have a very well functioning healthcare system. So one of the best ways of reducing or increasing the overall health of the population is looking at newborns. If we can give them the right nutritious food at the beginning, then they will have a better health overall throughout their lifespan. But this is a lot more complex to handle. Because once you are looking at not just getting people food, but getting the right food to them, you are competing with commercials, you are competing with a lot of different factors owing down to the problem that people have a choice. Of course you can call it a problem or an opportunity, depending on your mindset. We see it as an opportunity, but also one that can be used. So in a legislative process, you usually go out to a country, you see we want to reduce marketing of unhealthy food to adolescents, something like that. Then you implement legislation, this can take five to ten years. Then you have feedback on this, this can also take five to ten years. And then you can reiterate on this. It is an enormously long process. So what we did was saying, well, what is important when you are sitting and thinking about new legislation is how is this going to affect real people in their home environment. So we went out to, in this case, Dushanbe, it is in Tajikistan, it is close to China, but then what isn't these days. And we went out to a market, so where do people buy their food? We took these 360 images to show to some of the people who are actually making the decisions about what legislation should be passed on a global level. The idea is then maybe if we can try and iterate on this, maybe if we can take this image, we can go out and look at a suggested piece of legislation, we can edit out the, we can edit in the effects of this legislation. So how is this market going to look like after a specific set of legislative suggestions have been implemented? And then we can show this to the people who are deciding if this should be passed or not. And then show this is the effect for a person in Dushanbe in this market, in this part of the town. This is going to be their effect on their everyday life if you pass this. This is also in Dushanbe and in Chisinau, in Moldova, where we've been. So we're going to these countries, we're trying to see how do people buy food today and how can we have a positive impact on this. The very important thing to take away from this is we have not figured out, we do not know if this is a good idea, we do not know if it works, we certainly don't know if it has any effect on this, but we are out there experimenting and that is the most important thing you can be doing. Go out there, try and see what works, experiment, do your projects, don't worry about thinking about how can this be used or how is this fitting into a larger context, but go out there, experiment and try it out. And you know, when I first started talking with WHO, I didn't think I would have a chance to go to these countries to actually be part of an official UN mission, but there are people out there who are very interested, who are very interested in doing these initial survey projects. So they are out there and it's just about going out there and starting to talk with them. So that is what I'm going to leave you with. Thank you. We have seen that VR can give us good games and maybe solve world hunger. Is that what you are telling me? It certainly would be cool if it could. So what is the next step for you guys to the big goal of solving world hunger or stuff like that? It is reiterating. Thank God we are talking to people on the other side who can see that the UN system are usually famed for big solutions and really high quality and they should, they need to work like that. But it is interesting to see that these large organizations are also starting to be more open in how they experiment with projects, how they are bringing in new knowledge. I think that is very, very interesting to continue to work on. What's the business model in this? That's a very good question. So the way it kind of works is we have industry customers where we're doing traditional business to business marketing. We're doing a lot within training. We're doing a little bit in healthcare and then we're doing these projects which we really don't make any money on. But if you're a student, if you're a startup, then usually that is not so important. Okay. All right. Give Christian a big hand again. Thank you.