I am convinced that this is not going to be an extension of cinema or 3-D cinema or video games. It is something new, different, and not experienced yet. The strange thing here is that normally, in the history of culture, we have new stories and narrations and then we start to develop a tool. Or we have visions of wondrous new architecture — like, let’s say, the museum in Bilbao, or the opera house in Sydney — and technology makes it possible to fulfil these dreams. So you have the content first, and then the technology follows suit. In this case, we do have a technology, but we don’t have any clear idea how to fill it with content.
Werner Herzog – “Werner Herzog Talks Virtual Reality, The New Yorker, Jan. 2016
Werner Herzog seemed quite skeptical of VR in an interesting interview with the New Yorker from 2016. Yet in the intervening years, I think that the community of VR developers has become surer of how to use virtual reality meaningfully — we’ve moved from tech demos and hesitant experiments to full-fledged, artistic expressions.
Are new content ideas growing out of the virtual reality medium, or are developers just getting a better sense of what kinds of stories or interactions are best suited to VR?