Falling in love is the most intoxicating human experience. The rush, the vulnerability, and the flood of emotions make us feel alive in ways very few things can. But today, the process of falling in love has become less human than ever before. Text-based interaction has replaced face-to-face flirting. Between dating apps and social “liking”, romance is more likely to spark over a text exchange than a moment of eye contact.

With Fall in Love VR, the goal is to use VR to reverse the course of modern love by letting strangers fall in love with the human form in front of them and not the words on a screen. A user will put on a headset and encounter a whimsical forest where five framed portraits are suspended from the trees. The user selects one, and then engages in a real conversation with that person through VR.

We re-wrote the original 36 questions so that talent responses would be unrehearsed. We cast actors that agreed to be honest and emotionally vulnerable on camera.

People love to try to outsmart technology, so our next step was “fringe case” testing. We workshopped numerous scenarios that a user might undergo to trip up the program, and then scripted those for each actor to read.

On set, we enlisted the actors’ significant others to read with them while on camera. By using the interrotron, talent could make direct contact with their partners while simultaneously looking directly into the lens.

In post, footage selects are implemented into the unity game engine and 3D artists assemble the environment that the talent will be composited into. Natural language processing is leveraged to cue asynchronous video files. Face recognition software is used to seamlessly blend one video clip to the next.

For Oculus, this groundbreaking project will be a first-of-its-kind achievement on various levels. It’s the first non-gaming VR experience to merge AI and VR. It leverages the headset’s internal microphone as an input for natural language processing in a way that’s never been attempted. Its next iteration will feature emotional sampling, so that the AI can give an emotionally intelligent response based on the cadence, tone, and volume of their speech.

Premiering at Tribeca Film Festival to an influential audience of creatives and tastemakers positions Oculus as far more than a technology company. It sends the message that Oculus is becoming an entertainment brand, and quickly establishing a prominent name in the world of storytelling. The work has tremendous value for Oculus as it increases cultural relevance and builds brand reputation among an annual festival demographic of over 400,000 consumers, VIPs, industry and media professionals.