Could You Fall in Love Inside a VR Headset?

People have many different theories about why and how they fall in love - believing timing, compatability and similar interests to be some of the key factors in finding true love.

But an essay published in 2015, To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This, claims that a series of 36 questions may help to determine whether you've truly met your soulmate.

Tool of NA is behind a new VR piece that's released today on the Oculus store (available on GearVR as of next week). Fall in Love VR - directed by Kevin Cornish - allows the headset wearer to have a realtime conversation with another person as an experi see if they can get them to feel something, or indeed, fall in love through the technology.

Using AI and facial recognition software to make the experience as realistic as possible, It launched earlier this year at the Tribeca Film Festival, asking attendees to put on the headset and take part in the experiment.

We caught up with Tool of NA to find out what inspired the project and whether they believe true love can be found in tech.

Julia Sourikoff, Executive Producer, VR & 360

How did this project come about?

Tool was looking to sign VR and AR Directors that were generating their own original concepts for these new mediums. The first project that Kevin pitched to us was Fall in Love, and we knew immediately that he was a creator we wanted to sign, and that this was a project we wanted to produce. We spent the next couple months in development and fundraising mode until we secured Oculus as a partner and officially greenlit the project. The rest is history!

What considerations did you have ahead of shooting and how did you approach them during the project?

We wanted to shoot our actors stereoscopically so that they wouldn’t look like flat cards against a 3D environment, so we enlisted James Cameron’s stereographer from Avatar to help. We demoed a bunch of different rigs and tested their compatibility with the Interrotron (Errol Morris’ two-way teleprompter for capturing continuous eye contact for on-camera interviews). Our actors were cast based on their willingness to be emotionally honest and open on camera, so that responses to the questions wouldn’t feel rehearsed. We also had them bring their significant others to set to read with, to inspire a subtle degree of intimacy in their performances. The results are completely authentic, natural dialogues with real people, about topics that have the power to spark interpersonal connection between user and actor.

Kevin Cornish, Director:

What was the casting process like for the two VR interviewees? Were you looking for any particular features in the actors?

There are five interviewees that we casted for this project:

· Ramon Rodriguez (actor, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen)

· Logan Huffman (actor, “V”, Final Girl)

· Wole Park (actor, Premium Rush, Taking Chance)

· Grace Van Dien (actress, “Greenhouse Academy”)

· Maya Donavan (model)

It was really important that the performances felt as natural as possible and that nothing felt rehearsed. During the casting process, I was looking for actors who had a natural connection to their emotions so the end user would be able to easily connect to their feelings each step of the way through the experience. To ensure their performance was as neutral and authentic as possible, I shot it with the actors sitting across from their significant others ie. for Grace, her boyfriend was sitting on the other side of the camera, so she was having the conversation directly with him, which we filmed in real-time using Errol Morris’s The Interrotron.

It was also really important that this experience was with filmed actors and not CG characters so the human connection and little details, such as micro-expressions and eye contact, could be as impactful as possible.

What were the biggest challenges in bringing Fall in Love VR to life? And how did you overcome them?

Figuring out everything that needed to be done to pair the natural language processing with the character’s performance. We overcame this by testing a number of different language processors until we found one that matched perfectly.

We also worked with James Cameron camera team to shoot Fall in Love VR in stereo, and the challenge was getting the stereo perfect in a way it that matched the stereo coming out of the game engine, which we also continued to test until it met our standards.

Another challenge was balancing the image quality and the real-time light rendering with the performance requirements for the natural language processing. We overcame this by writing custom shaders.

You introduced the experience at the Tribeca Film Festival to huge acclaim. Why do you think people resonated with it so much?

There is something special about conversation, which from the beginning of time, is how we connect as humans. To be able to experience something so simple yet so satisfying in virtual reality was an eye-opening experience of where human connection can go in VR.