Google Spotlight Stories

» see atap.google.com/spotlight-stories as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

spotlight stories sat in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember in the right way. the right way was through a google daydream headset on a pixel phone, and i never owned either. in 2013 i was 29 in ankara on a regular laptop, the only immersive-film exposure i had was an oculus dk1 demo at a tech meetup that did not include any of the spotlight stories work. the studio's actual audience was the small overlap of mobile-vr early adopters and animation festival programmers.

the studio started at motorola mobility's advanced technologies and projects group in 2013 under jan pinkava, who had directed presto for pixar. pinkava had been at motorola for the larry-page-buys-motorola period. when google sold motorola to lenovo in early 2014 the atap group stayed inside google, and spotlight stories came with it. the brief was "let's make a movie, but give the camera to the audience". every short was a 360-degree interactive piece you watched on a phone or in cardboard or in daydream, your head movement decided what part of the scene the camera pointed at.

across six years the studio shipped about 13 pieces. the breakout was pearl, patrick osborne's 2016 short about a folk singer in a hatchback, which won the first emmy for interactive original storytelling that year and got the first academy award nomination for a vr-native film in 2017. age of sail from john kahrs in november 2018 was the longer piece, 12 minutes with ian mcshane voicing a lonely old sailor. son of jaguar in 2017 and back to the moon in 2018 rounded out the visible catalog, with the aardman-made special delivery on the early end. for whatever reason the studio kept landing animation-festival prizes through 2017 and 2018 while the surrounding daydream vr ecosystem was already failing in the market.

~ the record ~

~ what it made ~

this happened more in the festival circuit than where i was. honestly, the studio worked on a contractor model. most of the artists on a spotlight stories short were freelance animators brought in for the project. close enough. the engineering side was permanent google atap staff who built the runtime that played the shorts on android and inside the early mobile-vr headsets like cardboard. the runtime itself was the secret sauce. you could swing your phone around like a window on a scene and the audio mix would shift to match the direction you were facing. for the 2014-to-2017 mobile-vr window that was an honestly impressive demo.

the pearl moment in 2017 was the high point. either way, the academy nomination was historic, a vr-native film had never been nominated before. the film itself was distributed for free on google's youtube channel and through the spotlight stories android app. for whatever reason the pearl win did not translate into a follow-up category of vr cinema at scale. the festival press kept covering each new spotlight stories release as a real cultural event, the consumer-audience numbers stayed flat.

~ what got buried with it ~

on march 13 2019 karen dufilho, the studio's executive producer, sent the team an email saying spotlight stories was winding down. variety broke the story the same evening and 9to5google had it by the morning of march 14. google did not put out a formal press release. the contractors went back to the freelance pool. for whatever reason the announcement did not include any migration plan for the existing shorts, the atap.google.com pages for each film stayed live for a while and then quietly stopped resolving.

by march 2019 the daydream platform was visibly in decline. the daydream view headset had been pulled from the play store, the pixel 4 in late 2019 would not even ship with daydream support. spotlight stories had been the prestige-content arm of the daydream pitch (or whatever it was called). when google admitted the daydream bet was not working, the prestige-content arm came down with it. by the time the studio closed the question was not whether vr cinema would happen, it was whether the next attempt would happen inside meta or inside apple instead of google.

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