virtual reality started for mein sort of an unusual place. it was the 1970s. i got into the field very young:i was seven years old. and the tool that i usedto access virtual reality was the evel knievel stunt cycle.
how will 3d printing affect the economy, this is a commercial forthat particular item: (video) voice-over: what a jump! evel's riding the amazing stunt cycle. that gyro-power sends himover 100 feet at top speed.
chris milk: so this was my joy back then. i rode this motorcycle everywhere. and i was there with evel knievel; wejumped the snake river canyon together. i wanted the rocket. i never got the rocket,i only got the motorcycle. i felt so connected to this world. i didn't want to be a storytellerwhen i grew up, i wanted to be stuntman. i was there. evel knievel was my friend. i had so much empathy for him.
but it didn't work out. (laughter) i went to art school. i started making music videos. and this is one of the earlymusic videos that i made: (music: "touch the sky" by kanye west) cm: you may noticesome slight similarities here. (laughter) and i got that rocket. so, now i'm a filmmaker,or, the beginning of a filmmaker,
and i started using the tools that areavailable to me as a filmmaker to try to tell the most compelling storiesthat i can to an audience. and film is this incredible mediumthat allows us to feel empathy for people that are very different than us and worlds completelyforeign from our own. unfortunately, evel knievel did not feel the sameempathy for us that we felt for him, and he sued us for this video -- (laughter) --
shortly thereafter. on the upside, the manthat i worshipped as a child, the man that i wantedto become as an adult, i was finally able to get his autograph. (applause) let's talk about film now. film, it's an incredible medium, but essentially, it's the samenow as it was then. it's a group of rectangles that areplayed in a sequence.
and we've done incredible thingswith those rectangles. but i started thinking about, is there a way that i can use modernand developing technologies to tell stories in different ways and tell different kinds of stories that maybe i couldn't tell usingthe traditional tools of filmmaking that we've been using for 100 years? so i started experimenting, and what i was trying to do wasto build the ultimate empathy machine.
and here's one of the early experiments: (music) so this is called"the wilderness downtown." it was a collaboration with arcade fire. it asked you to put in the addresswhere you grew up at the beginning of it. it's a website. and out of it starts growing these littleboxes with different browser windows. and you see this teenagerrunning down a street, and then you see google street viewand google maps imagery
and you realize the streethe's running down is yours. and when he stops in front of a house,he stops in front of your house. and this was great, and i saw peoplehaving an even deeper emotional reaction to this than the things thati had made in rectangles. and i'm essentially takinga piece of your history and putting it insidethe framing of the story. but then i started thinking, okay, well that's a part of you, but how do i put all of youinside of the frame?
so to do that, i startedmaking art installations. and this is one called"the treachery of sanctuary." it's a triptych. i'm going to showyou the third panel. so now i've got you inside of the frame, and i saw people having even morevisceral emotional reactions to this work than the previous one. but then i started thinking about frames,and what do they represent? and a frame is just a window. i mean, all the media that we watch --television, cinema --
they're these windows intothese other worlds. and i thought, well, great.i got you in a frame. but i don't want you in the frame,i don't want you in the window, i want you through the window,i want you on the other side, in the world, inhabiting the world. so that leads me back to virtual reality. let's talk about virtual reality. talking about virtual realityis like dancing about architecture. and this is actually someone dancingabout architecture in virtual reality.
so, it's difficult to explain.why is it difficult to explain? it's difficult because it's a veryexperiential medium. you feel your way inside of it. it's a machine, but inside of it, it feels like real life,it feels like truth. and you feel present in the worldthat you're inside and you feel present with the peoplethat you're inside of it with. so, i'm going to show you a demoof a virtual reality film: a full-screen version ofall the information
that we capture whenwe shoot virtual reality. so we're shooting in every direction. this is a camera system that we built that has 3d cameras that lookin every direction and binaural microphonesthat face in every direction. we take this and we build, basically,a sphere of a world that you inhabit. so what i'm going to show youis not a view into the world, it's basically the whole worldstretched into a rectangle. so this film is called"clouds over sidra,"
and it was made in conjunction withour virtual reality company called vrse and the united nations, and a co-collaborator named gabo arora. and we went to a syrian refugee campin jordan in december and shot the story of a 12-year-oldgirl there named sidra. and she and her family fled syriathrough the desert into jordan and she's been living in thiscamp for the last year and a half. (video) sidra: my name is sidra. i am 12 years old.
i am in the fifth grade. i am from syria,in the daraa province, inkhil city. i have lived here in the zaatari campin jordan for the last year and a half. i have a big family: three brothers, one is a baby. he cries a lot. i asked my father if i cried wheni was a baby and he says i did not. i think i was a stronger babythan my brother. cm: so, when you're insideof the headset.
you're not seeing it like this. you're looking around through this world. you'll notice you see full360 degrees, in all directions. and when you're sitting therein her room, watching her, you're not watching it througha television screen, you're not watching it through a window,you're sitting there with her. when you look down, you're sittingon the same ground that she's sitting on. and because of that, you feel her humanity in a deeper way.
you empathize with her in a deeper way. and i think that we can changeminds with this machine. and we've already startedto try to change a few. so we took this film to the world economicforum in davos in january. and we showed it to a group of people whose decisions affect the livesof millions of people. and these are peoplewho might not otherwise be sitting in a tentin a refugee camp in jordan. but in january, one afternoonin switzerland,
they suddenly all found themselves there. and they were affected by it. so we're going to make more of them. we're working with theunited nations right now to shoot a whole series of these films. we just finished shootinga story in liberia. and now, we're goingto shoot a story in india. and we're taking these films, and we're showing themat the united nations
to people that work there and peoplethat are visiting there. and we're showingthem to the people that can actually change the livesof the people inside of the films. and that's where i think we juststart to scratch the surface of the true power of virtual reality. it's not a video game peripheral. it connects humans to other humansin a profound way that i've never seen beforein any other form of media. and it can change people'sperception of each other.
and that's how i think virtual reality has the potentialto actually change the world. so, it's a machine,
but through this machinewe become more compassionate, we become more empathetic,and we become more connected. and ultimately, we become more human. thank you.
