Lohmann: After a year of virtual reality, a taste of actual virtual reality

Bill Lohmann Mar 15, 2021 Richmond Times Dispatch

Mark Lambert stands near the top of the Burj Khalifa, a skyscraper in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, that is the tallest building in the world.

The last time I sat down and interviewed someone face to face — and I don’t mean staring into a Zoom meeting on my computer screen — was more than a year ago.

It was March 10, and I spent the afternoon at In Your Ear Studios in Shockoe Bottom, visiting Mark Lambert.

Considering all that’s gone on since then, it seems appropriate we were talking about virtual reality.

Anyway, things started getting real squirrely really fast in the days following that interview as almost all of our attention began to focus on this weird virus that was starting to march across the world like a damn invading army. Events were canceled, places began to shut down, life changed. Within two weeks, I was working remotely — actually living in another city, in order to steer clear of a hospital worker in my household. Another story for another time.

Bottom line: I got sucked into the vortex of the pandemic, and I never got around to writing a story about Lambert.

So, a year later, as we begin to emerge from this mess, I checked in with Lambert to see how he’s made out and what he’s up to. We talked by phone.

Lambert runs VArtisans, a virtual reality production company, and we had met a few weeks earlier when I interviewed Craig Martin and Earl Bridges about their television show, “The Good Road,” in which they explore the world to tell stories about people doing good work in often remarkable places.

Lambert had begun producing a virtual reality component of the program, employing 360-degree filming. He put a VR headset on me that day so I could take a test-drive — it was very cool — and invited me to meet again to talk about virtual reality and his work, which is how I wound up at In Your Ear on March 10.

Over the past year, I’ve done hundreds of phone interviews — even interviewed one person, both of us masked, while walking along a trail in the woods. But the last time I interviewed someone inside a building? That would be Lambert.

So when I emailed him to see if he’d like to talk again, apologizing for never having gotten around to writing anything after the first interview, I included the subject line “Better late than never?”

His gracious reply: “No worries. COVID has indeed been a vortex!”

Lambert told me one of the more enjoyable things he’s done over the past year is to play golf with friends. Virtual reality golf. He puts on a headset, picks up a “club” in the form of a controller and walks a virtual course with his playing partners, who might be in places such as Luxembourg, Germany, Seattle or New York.

“We get together on Friday afternoons,” he said. “Instead of hitting the golf ball, you sit there and finish your conversations, talking about work or home life. It’s just great to be able to get out and play a game of golf. It’s a little bit of a video game, and it’s fun. It’s that social interaction that’s great.”

Virtual reality, as a concept, is not new, but it’s also still kind of “out there” in terms of widespread usage by the general population. Yet, Lambert, 59, has a deep background in what he refers to as “bleeding-edge” innovation — things that are leading-edge for sure, but also risky in many ways.

“It’s tough way to make a living,” he said.

Lambert started in computer animation in the 1980s and wound up in Hollywood in the 1990s, working in visual effects. He developed the first commercial software interface to a proprietary 3D rendering software for a then-fledgling little company named Pixar. He licensed the interface to Sony Pictures, Warner Brothers and other studios, he said.

He led visual development groups on films such as “The Polar Express,” “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe” and “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” in which one of his tasks was supervising a team that brought a Quidditch field to life. He also worked on “Men in Black II,” “From the Earth to the Moon” and “Stuart Little.” More recently, he worked in visual effects supervision on “Turn” and “Mercy Street,” television series filmed locally.

He’s been “creating worlds” for years, so working in virtual reality is in many ways more of the same; he actually developed software in the 1990s for one of the first companies to develop and sell virtual reality products. He founded VArtisans in 2015 and has traveled the world on projects with his 360-degree cameras, finding his way to some pretty remarkable places — such as atop the Burj Khalifa, a skyscraper in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, that at more 2,700 feet is the tallest building in the world.

During our interview last March, he showed me a selfie he shot with his 360-degree camera from his perch in the open air on the tower’s spire when he visited in fall 2017.

“That’s kind of insane,” I said.

“Very insane,” he said.

He didn’t quite go to the very top — the tippy-top is about another 60 feet above him, he said, but the platform was only big enough for the other members of his crew — but when you’re a half-mile above the earth, what’s a few more feet? I’m not much of a fan of heights, so when I saw the picture, my hands started sweating immediately. They’re sweating right now as I think about it and type these words.

Reaching that point required an elevator ride and then a much less fancy workers’ elevator, then climbing steps and ladders, and, well, you get the idea. He said it was so hot and that with no shade, his camera kept overheating. He also mentioned an airplane, taking off from the nearby airport, flew right by.

He also called his wife, Dale DeJarnette, from the top.

“Hi, honey, guess where I’m at?”

He told me about assignments filming endangered species (this for an aquarium in Dubai) around the world: mountain gorillas in Uganda, whale sharks in Tanzania, lions and white rhino in South Africa, sea lions in Australia.

He had me put on a headset and took me on double-decker bus rides in London, Paris and Rome, scenes he filmed from actual double-decker buses. By turning around, I could see everything you would see, in all directions, if you were actually on the bus. How, I asked, do I convey how this is different than watching a movie on a circular screen?

“I’m trying to think of the right way to put this,” he said, setting on the Eiffel Tower, which I had just seen, as an example. “You could see it on the screen, but when you see the Eiffel Tower, and you can turn your head to the right or the left and it’s your choice, that’s different than somebody saying, ‘I’m going to put you right here and you’re going to see it this way.

“It’s just more like being there.”

Virtual reality travel has the potential to hold great appeal — imagine how it might have played over the past year when people were stuck at home — and to that end Lambert has produced not only films from bus tours but also a cross-country trip of America that he filmed with a 360-degree camera secured to the front of a car that he drove from Virginia Beach to Ventura City Beach, Calif. He has another, filmed with drones, that gives the person wearing a VR headset the sensation of floating above the Alps in a hot-air balloon. AARP has posted some of his travel pieces on its Alcove website for virtual reality content.

Toward the end of our interview last year, he had me “walk” through galleries of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in a prototype he had designed for the museum. I could turn and “teleport” myself closer to paintings and other artifacts and read informational panels on the virtual wall. I could even “pick up” items if I wanted to and “drop” them when I wished.

I asked if I could break anything by “dropping” them?

“Luckily no,” Lambert said, “because those are priceless Faberge eggs.”

The current state of virtual reality and the marketplace is a “Catch-22,” Lambert said. Not many people, relatively speaking, have headsets, which means for those creating content, there aren’t a lot of people consuming it.

“It’s going to take a while,” he said. “As people buy [headsets], it’s going to take us a couple of years to get the content together.”

He likened it, somewhat, to when televisions were coming into vogue in the mid-1900s and there wasn’t all that much to watch once you got one.

Meantime, he’s eager to travel again to exotic locales — or even mundane ones — on projects. His world was already being turned upside-down when we met last March. That week, he had been scheduled to film a project in Saudi Arabia’s holy city of Mecca, but the Saudis shut down the city in February because of the spreading virus, and Lambert’s trip was off. Another project in Italy also was canceled.

From his home studio in Chester, Lambert has been pressing ahead through the pandemic with at least one project: Conscio VR, which aims to bring a virtual reality approach to health care. The largest program in the works now is a multiyear project that would offer an innovative approach to substance abuse therapy. Conscio VR was founded by Lambert; his wife, Dale DeJarnette; their daughter, Ginna Lambert; and Nick Brown.

In the prototype, they’ve created a virtual space they call “The Retreat,” which looks like a lodge in the woods and serves as an “immersive, distraction-free world where patients can focus on their recovery,” according to a promotional video. The idea is that patients can put on headsets and experience “The Retreat” outside of regular therapy sessions.

Conscio VR has received a grant from VCU Innovation Gateway, which facilitates commercialization of university inventions and also invests in projects it believes have commercial promise. Lambert’s technology is among the latter, said Brent Fagg, a licensing manager with VCU Innovation Gateway.

As a supplement to regular therapy, Lambert’s project had potential, but Fagg said the pandemic sped up interest in it by displaying the importance of alternatives to in-person therapy when in-person therapy might not be available.

“You might be in therapy for only one hour a week,” Lambert said. “What we’re doing is sending you home with a headset so you can revisit the principles of your therapy at any time during the day.”

Or, he said, “You can put on the headset and go meditate — or hit some golf balls.”

wlohmann@timesdispatch.com