Virtual reality started for me in 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 used to access virtual reality was the Evel Knievel stunt cycle. – Chris Milk
Virtual reality is already affecting people on an emotional level much more than any other media, and it has the potential to scale: all you need is an attachment for your cellphone, and you can have this experience. – Chris Milk
When the protagonist breaks the fourth wall by looking at the camera in a movie, it’s generally been used for comedic purposes, rather than feeling like they’re looking into your soul. – Chris Milk
It connects humans to other humans in a profound way that I’ve never seen before in any other form of media. And it can change people’s perception of each other. And that’s how I think virtual reality has the potential to actually change the world. – Chris Milk
With virtual reality, I’m not interested in the novelty factor. I’m interested in the foundations for a medium that could be more powerful than cinema, than theatre, than literature, than any other medium we’ve had before to connect one human being to another. – Chris Milk
For a long time, I believed that a great piece of music on its own could do more to stir the soul than any other single art form. – Chris Milk
Virtual reality is a technology that could actually allow you to connect on a real human level, soul-to-soul, regardless of where you are in the world. – Chris Milk
I was born into a world in which the most compelling stories are through film. But that wasn’t always the case. Everything changes; everything evolves. – Chris Milk
So much of journalism is conveying a place and time that existed, to someone at a later date: giving a person the context and trying to make them feel as informed as if they were actually there. – Chris Milk
There’s three things that you need for virtual reality to work. You need the hardware that’s affordable and doesn’t make people sick, you need an audience that is willing to pay for it, and you need the content. – Chris Milk
We build camera rigs tailored specifically to the story we’re trying to tell or the shot we’re trying to capture. – Chris Milk
In virtual reality, it’s more about capturing and creating worlds that people are inhabiting. You really are a creator in the way the audience lives within the world that you are building. – Chris Milk
As a species, the look of another of our species into our eyes has a great power. It can mean a lot of different things: aggression, love. – Chris Milk
Video games as a storytelling medium are, from a mathematical standpoint, a branching narrative. You start at one place, you can go in multiple different directions, and there’s a multitude of different endings. – Chris Milk
Virtual reality is the ‘ultimate empathy machine.’ These experiences are more than documentaries. They’re opportunities to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. – Chris Milk
All these experiments I’ve done over the years with technology have been asking whether I can tell stories that affect humans in a deeper way than I could without the technology. – Chris Milk
My premise is that there’s something hardwired into our DNA, that we as a species came and evolved from caves and clans and tribes, and therefore, we as a species care more about the things that are local to us than we care about the things that are ‘over there’ from us. – Chris Milk
When people ask whether virtual reality will be a real thing or just the next 3D, what I always say is, ‘Take a headset, walk outside, and the next person you meet, put it on them and see what the reaction is.’ – Chris Milk
Every digital video player – RealPlayer, Windows Media Player, Vevo, Hulu, YouTube – all of them had different ways of getting you the video, but it was still always the same series of rectangles. The format never changed. – Chris Milk
In virtual reality, we’re placing the viewer inside a moment or a story… made possible by sound and visual technology that’s actually tricking the brain into believing it’s somewhere else. – Chris Milk
Film is this incredible medium that allows us to feel empathy for people that are very different than us and worlds completely foreign from our own. – Chris Milk
It’s weird: you do a TED talk on something, and people think that you suddenly have a lot of answers around the topic. – Chris Milk
