好英语网你能想象出20年后看电影是什么感觉？
For decades virtual reality (VR) has been prophesied as the future of filmmaking, capable of offering experiences infinitely more immersive than traditional cinema and television. In an essay written in 1955, titled The Cinema of the Future, the cinematographer Morton Heilig predicted that filmmaking would advance to the point where it can “reveal the new scientific world to man in the full sensual vividness and dynamic vitality of his consciousness.” Heilig outlined many of the properties of virtual reality – but didn’t use those words, given they hadn’t been coined yet.
几十年来，虚拟现实（VR）一直被认为是电影业的未来所在，能够为观众提供比传统影视更身临其境的体验。在1955年发表的一篇题为《未来的电影》的文章中，电影摄影师海里戈（Morton Heilig）就预言“未来的电影将会以生动活泼的形式为人们揭开新科学世界的帷幕”。海里戈概括了虚拟现实的许多性能，但当时他用的并不是现在人们所说这些词，因为当时这类词汇还没有产生。
Now, as the saying goes, the future has arrived – though filmmaking has a long way to go before it incorporates the mind-bending technology popularised in movies and TV shows such as The Lawnmower Man and Star Trek. With many filmmakers having swapped traditional cameras for 360 cameras (that capture views from all angles), the current moment is comparable to the intensely experimental early years of motion pictures during the late 1800s and early 1900s.
虽然要把《割草者》（The Lawnmower Man）或《星际迷航》（Star Trek）里那些匪夷所思的技术应用到电影行业还有很长一段路要走，但就像人们经过说得那样，“未来已经到来”。许多电影制作者已经用360度全景摄影机替换了传统摄影机。现在电影业尝试新科技的势头堪比19世纪晚期和20世纪早期电影勇于各种创新实验的阶段。
简而言之：我们现在正处于新的电影革命的初期阶段。一系列快速发展的技术使得电影行业拥有了激动人心的无限发展潜力，比如说增强现实技术（AR，即将虚拟世界与现实世界场景相结合交互的技术）、人工智能以及驱动数字世界的不断增长的计算能力。
What will films look like in 20 years’ time? And how will the cinematic stories of the future differ from the experiences available today?
那么，20年后的电影会是什么样的呢？以及未来的电影故事和现在的将会有何不同？
Getting personal
个性化程度更高
According to VR guru and artist Chris Milk, films of the future will offer tailored immersive experiences. They will, he tells BBC Culture, be capable of “crafting a story in real-time, that is just for you, that uniquely satisfies you and what your likes and dislikes are.”
虚拟现实艺术家谬可（Chris Milk）认为，未来的电影能为观众提供量身定制的身临其境的沉浸式体验。他告诉BBC文化频道，未来的电影能“为你量身打造一个实时故事，完全满足个人喜恶爱好”。
Milk prefers terms like “story living” over standard nomenclature such as “storytelling." He believes cinematic experiences will evolve to “feel as natural and as real as a day in your life, but have the amazing characteristics of the kind of exciting stories that we are used to being told.”
相比起“讲故事”这样标准的行业术语，谬可更喜欢用“活在故事里”这样的说法。他认为未来的观影体验会变得像日常生活一样逼真自然，但同时也能像一些惯常的刺激故事那样令我们感到兴奋。
Milk gave a watershed 2015 TED Talk about the artistic potential of virtual reality. He believes that advances in AI technology will allow computer-created characters to respond to audiences in real-time. Imagine a much more advanced version of Siri – but represented as a character inside a narrative experience.
2015年，谬可在TED的重要演讲上谈到虚拟现实的艺术潜能。他认为，不断发展的人工智能技术能让由电脑创造的角色实时回应真人观众。想象一下，Siri的进化版作为一个角色出现在电影中。
Milk acknowledges that “the technology doesn’t fully exist yet” for an AI character “that can be conversational and respond to you as if they were also human.” But, he adds: “I don’t think we’re 20 years away from it.”
谬可知道这种能够像人类一样与观众对话的人工智能角色目前还没被完全开发出来，但他认为“不出20年人类就能达到这个目标”。
Getting ‘volumetric’
越来越立体
The influential documentarian, journalist and entrepreneur Nonny de la Peña – who has been described as “the Godmother of VR” by The Wall Street Journal – says the first word that comes to mind when she thinks about the future of the medium is “volumetric,” providing a stark comparison to the two-dimensional screens of today.
颇具影响力的纪录片制作人、企业家拉佩尼亚（Nonny de la Peña）被华尔街日报称为“虚拟现实之母”。她说：“说起未来的媒介，我第一个想起的词是‘立体’，这与今天的2D平面电影截然不同。”
In the future, according de la Peña “flat media will still be there with us, just like the radio will still be with us. But there's no way that filmmaking is going to stay flat.”
拉佩尼亚说：“在未来，平面媒体将仍与我们同在，就像今天还会有收音机一样，但是电影行业绝不能在2D画面上停滞不前。”
Instead we will have “fully embodied, walk around, room-scale, volumetric experiences” because “younger audiences are coming up who are used to having embodied experiences...They're going to want to have their views, education, and everything else in an embodied form.”
取而代之的是一种“完全身临其境，可置身场景中走动，场景大如房间的立体体验”，因为“习惯于具象体验的年轻观众正成为主力……他们希望自己的观点、所受到的教育和其他一切都能以临场感的形式呈现。”
A virtual copy of the world
世界的虚拟副本
Eugene Chung directed the critically acclaimed VR film Allumette, which has been described as a “masterpiece” and seen the filmmaker compared to the likes of pioneering US filmmaker DW Griffith. Set in a futuristic city floating in the clouds, the production uses technology called ‘six degrees of freedom’ (or ‘6Dof’), which allows viewers to physically walk through its world.
尤金（Eugene Chung）执导的VR电影《艾露美》（Allumette）广受好评，被称为“大师之作”。人们认为他可与美国电影先驱格里菲思（DW Griffith）等人相提并论。该剧以一座漂浮在云端的未来城市为背景，采用了名为“6自由度”（或称“6Dof”，指可以上下、左右、前后移动）的技术，让观众可以在电影的虚拟世界中穿行移动。
Chung believes that in the future VR will become increasingly blended with the AR Cloud, which is essentially a digital copy of the world.
尤金认为未来VR与AR云技术的结合将越来越紧密，这对于构造世界的数码副本是很重要的一环。
“Think of a hyper-charged version of Google Earth,” he says, “where you're not just taking streets, you're copying the entire world. We’ll have that mixed with really high-end VR technology, which is already very impressive today.”
他说：“想象一下进化版的谷歌地图，里面所呈现的不仅仅是街道而是整个世界。如今的VR技术已经很先进了，未来我们会把电影与真正高端的VR技术结合起来。”
Chung says in the future there’ll be “stories all around you.” For example, “you could be waking up and next to your bed can be a table on which you can have a character you like. There are movies that point to this, like the movie Her.”
他说：“未来，身边一切皆是故事，比如说，某天醒来，你可以在床边的桌子上放一个你喜欢的角色。未来的电影都是像《她》（Her）这样的电影一样。”
‘An art of consciousness’
意识的艺术
The Emmy award-winning Lynette Wallworth, director of the VR experiences Collisions and Awavena, says the narrative experiences of the future, through virtual reality, will be able to offer new ways to explore neural diversity.
艾美奖得主、两部虚拟实景电影Collisions和Awavena的导演丽勒特‧沃斯（Lynette Wallworth）说：“有了VR技术的加持，未来的电影叙事体验能够让我们看到不同人眼中的世界。”
“We will have the ability to experience aspects of how somebody with autism for example experiences the world,” she says. “Levels of difference are able to be revealed through the senses in VR that are not possible in other art forms.”
她说：“例如，我们利用VR技术体验自闭症患者的世界。VR带来的感官体验能够让我们感受到不同人的感知差异，这是其他艺术形式做不到的。”
Wallworth also envisions VR and AR expanding the purview of traditional film, partly through headsets that will allow viewers to toggle between watching moments and then experiencing them immersively.
展望未来，沃斯认为VR和AR技术能扩大传统电影的观看界限，其中一种方式就是通过佩戴头戴式设备，让观众既可以观看电影又可以获得身临其境的体验。
“If you think about this in relation to watching George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, for example, you could view the traditional film in a headset that allows you to see the cinema screen then switch modes,” she says, “so that you’re now sitting next to Furiosa in the cabin of her truck, as she drives headlong across the desert landscape at full speed.”
她说：“拿乔治‧米勒（George Miller）的电影《疯狂的麦克斯：狂暴之路》举例，你可以戴着VR设备观看电影并切换模式。因此当电影女主角费罗莎驾驶战车全速穿越沙漠时，你就仿佛坐在她的旁边一样。”
With virtual reality technology advancing at a rapid rate, the possibilities – to borrow a hackneyed turn of phrase – are endless. Describing virtual reality as “dangerous” because filmmakers operating in this space wield less control than they do in non-interactive experiences, Steven Spielberg in 2016 cautioned that the virtual realm “gives the viewer a lot of latitude not to take direction from the storytellers but make their own choices.”
用一句已被人说烂了的话来说，随着VR技术的飞速发展，这种可能性是无限的。2016年，美国著名导演斯皮尔伯格（Steven Spielberg）认为虚拟现实是“危险的”，因为与非互动性电影作品相比，电影制作人在虚拟实景电影中能够控制和操作的功能将会小很多。他警告说，虚拟世界“使观众更加自由，可以不按叙述者的套路走，做出自己的选择。”
Many would regard this kind of future – where viewers will have the ability to shape the narratives they experience – as a positive rather than a negative. Viewers being able to make their own choices concurs with Heilig’s prediction that "the cinema of the future will no longer be a visual art, but an art of consciousness." The difference, perhaps, between ‘storytelling’ and ‘story living’.
但对未来电影的这一趋势，即电影观众可以参与对电影叙事的塑造，很多人会认为是好事而非坏事。电影观众能够对剧情做出自己的选择，这与海里戈的预测是一致的。他认为，“未来的电影将不再是一种视觉艺术，而是一种意识艺术。”这也许就是“讲故事”和“活在故事里”的区别。