VR pioneer, author, and studio founder Jesse Schell was interviewed by Meta on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Reality Labs. In this interview he talks about the beginnings, the present and the future of virtual reality.
When asked what he is most looking forward to in the next ten years, Schell said:
"The thing that’s going to change everything the most is going to be AI, and there’s going to be this crossover between AI and virtual reality that I think people aren’t going to expect because the power that AI brings is going to be these in-game characters that behave in a realistic way.
They speak coherently. They can have a conversation with you, and they can have real emotions, and that’s going to all seem very real. And combining that with the immersion of VR so that these characters are in the room, in the space, in the place with you—I think we’re going to see a whole new medium of story-based games that are largely about talking."
Jesse Schell predicts a genre he calls adaptive in-home story games and gives an example:
"Imagine a mixed reality game. You put on your headset, and you’re just looking inside of your house, and the doorbell rings. So you get up, and you go to your physical door. You open the physical door, and standing outside is a virtual character, who says, 'Hey, I need to come inside.' They’ve got a bag of groceries. And you follow them into your kitchen because the headset knows how your whole house is laid out. So the character starts putting these items down on the counter and says, 'I need you to help me.' And you start helping them. You cut the virtual bread loaf and slice vegetables and get everything ready. [...]
While that’s happening, the character explains to you what’s going on. 'The problem is up in your attic. There are these creatures, and you and I, we’re going to go up there and we’re going to get them, but first we need to finish getting the bait ready."'
Schell believes such mixed-reality experiences could be possible in a few years, with stories and AI characters that adapt and improvise to spatial conditions.