Virtual Reality for Chuches
By Jim Bask
By Jeff Chaves
Where are We Headed?
It’s always good to understand the past when we see something that promises to take us into the future. Over the long term, the church has done fairly well with mass media and communications. Think about the origins of the printing press. Wasn’t Gutenberg’s intent to produce the Bible? We saw great preachers take to the airwaves at the advent of both radio and television. Since the early days of motion pictures, producers have brought Biblical images to the silver screen. Today, just about every church has a web site and most have a method of delivering sermons either by audio or video. While not usually on the bleeding edge, it is clear that the church has adopted technology in significant way.
One VR expert I spoke with from Nokia, says that VR today is just like movies of the past. When people first saw the film of a train coming at them, they would jump out of the way. That may seem comical in our culture. However it’s no different than when a person puts on VR headset for the first time, and ducks away from the images. That, too, will seem funny in a few decades.
This expert adds that we are not seeing the next jump in video technology, like SD to HD. He believes that 360 video is something totally different. In the same way theater is different from pictures and moving pictures is different from television. Perhaps, as VR progresses, our televisions will become like our radios today. We will simply use the screen as background, and VR will be the primary source of information and entertainment.
The leader in VR technology for the New York Times told me that they view their “Daily 360” as the next step in the photograph. Old newspapers came to life when photos were added. They see the VR pieces that they produce as the same jump in electronic news gathering. (An outstanding example of this in a short 360 documentary called “The Fight for Fallujah”. The Times sent a VR camera with one of their embedded reporters to Iraq and created a truly unique perspective on the conflict?)