For my last solowork, Blue Brute I went all out in cinematography, learning about lighting, camera angles and the like. Working now in VR I realize how different these two approaches are. The flat, cinematic screen has rules which don’t apply to VR and vice versa. When composing digital environments for screens, there a are lot of cheats and tricks to sell the image. You can’t get away with those in VR, you truly have to craft your worlds.

A big part of that, is that I feel we are so influenced by cinema, that even our memories are stored in a cinematic format, through some kind of virtual camera in our brain. Cinema and photography are not accurate depictions of reality, they have their own “sauce” and evidently, they are flat.

The current state of VR isn’t close to reality either, we’re still quite far away from that, it’s a different sauce, but the immersive qualities of true 3D are a different experience altogether. In the future, much more of our sensory perception and references will come to be defined with depth as a dimension.