I spoke with Navid Khonsari, Vassiliki Khonsari, & Brooks Brown about Hero at Sundance 2018. See more context in the rough transcript below.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So continuing on my series of interviews that I've done with Inc. Stories over the years, today's interview is from Sundance 2018. It's about a piece called Hero. So this was an immersive installation that was about the war in Syria. You are like a civilian. You're walking around the streets. It's a large scale installation and has like this passive haptic feedback where there's a mirroring between what you see in VR and an installation where like there's a tire in the street and there's a tire in physical reality that you can walk up and touch. And it gives you this extra sense of embodied presence. And so at the request of the interviewees at the time, they didn't really want to talk around like what actually happens in this experience. And so the interview ends up being like talking around the experience, but it's around seven years later now. And I feel like I want to talk a little bit about what they actually did just so that, you know, anybody who's listening to this now or in the future can get a little bit more context for why this piece was provocative and visceral. So spoiler alert, I'm going to be talking around some of the different specifics of this installation. So in Hero, it is an aftermath of a bombing in the streets of Syria, and there's like a collapsed building that happens. And so you end up seeing this virtual hand reaching out underneath the rubble. And then when you reach out, you also like end up grabbing this hand. That's someone actually grabbing your hand. And so there's, again, this mirroring between this like passive haptic feedback of this whole installation and giving you this moment where it's really connecting you to that there's somebody underneath this rubble in the war. So that was like the main mechanic that was very protected in terms of this piece. And I'm not sure how much that's been talked around or if they're still trying to keep that under wraps, but I just figured that we talk around it and I just wanted to give a little bit more context around that. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Naveed, Vasiliki, and Brooks happened on Wednesday, January 24th, 2018 at the Sundance Film Festival in the New Frontier section in Park City, Utah. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:26.201] Navid Khonsari: My name is Naveed Kansari, and I'm from the studio Ink Stories as one of the lead creatives for the Project Hero.
[00:02:34.383] Brooks Brown: My name is Brooks Brown. I head up VR for Starbreeze Studios.
[00:02:38.157] Vassiliki Khonsari: And I'm Vasiliki Kansari. I'm part of Ink Stories.
[00:02:41.619] Kent Bye: Great. So maybe you could tell me a bit of the backstory of how this project came about.
[00:02:46.083] Brooks Brown: Over at Starbreeze, we publish a lot of different VR. Mostly, we spend our time in VR arcades with a lot more, I would say, traditional commercial titles. We have titles like Apex, where you're a giant monkey, as an example. John Wick, The Mummy, things like that. My producer, Mark Harwood, happened to be familiar with Naveed and the team at Ink Stories. And he asked me if he should reach out. Naveed and his team came up with a series of pitches, very good pitches, all of them, even though I passed on all but one. And I think, I still to this day, still think it was one of those pitches that you slip in on the off chance that the person will take a look at it or at least maybe it's a pitch you can, you know, maybe get some feedback for. I don't think he expected us to be crazy enough to take it on, but it was this idea around allowing you to experience tragedy and a moment in time in a very unique way. And, you know, my edict that I've been given, the rules at Starbreeze are that my job is to find out what is VR supposed to be and how far can we take the medium. And I know the work that they had done in 1979, and I know Naveed's sort of pedigree in the games industry, so I had no choice but to say, let's see if we can do this thing.
[00:03:58.232] Navid Khonsari: and so basically from there it became a collaborative process between technology but also with creative at the forefront of it being overly ambitious and not compromising at any level and recognizing that there's more than just putting on a headset to a vr experience and making sure that we guide that in a respectful way not only to the audience but to actually the content that we've created so that process became just as much of a prototyping process as we were on the technology side and we started from production probably from concept to completion within about six months and here we are at Sundance.
[00:04:45.180] Vassiliki Khonsari: And just to add, we were very fortunate to have the confidence from Starbreeze to really follow the process that would properly authenticate the final project in the way that we knew it needed to be handled. You know, coming from 79 and all the projects, I come from a documentary film background, visual anthropology, and we were all very careful and thoughtful in the process in which we researched, cast, photographed, and recreated the real world of contemporary Syria in Hero. And so we were fortunate to team with ICNA Relief Foundation, which places Syrian refugees here in the U.S., and were able to both interview them and photograph them and really recreate this world where the truth from these real people was echoing through this experience and I believe all of those intentions really manifested in what we're seeing here at Sundance as a remarkable reaction.
[00:05:47.133] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I'm curious to hear a bit more of the design process of this mixed reality experience, given that you were going to have some sort of constraints here of the space that you were going to have here at Sundance, but also building it out and also sort of the inspiration that you were taking maybe from immersive theater or other mixed reality experiences that you've seen that are out there, and to try to give that more of a haptic, direct experience in that process of this experience, and just hear a bit more about that design process.
[00:06:15.788] Brooks Brown: Yeah, so one of the big things I think on our side is VR over the last few years has mostly been about the potential of VR. People come out of experiences and say they can see how something's going to be, an emotion engine or an engagement engine or transportive, and they talk about VR very much as this immersive thing someday. So for us on our side, it's really about how the collaboration between tech and story began. It was about, for us, putting our money where our mouth was, as we've kind of complained about that on few occasions myself. And so early on, we sat down with our engineers and the designers and the storytellers over at Ink Stories, and we said, how exactly do we want to tell this story? How do we want to go about it? and my lead engineer Sinclair Fleming and his team basically set out to try to figure out how we could do things like fully allow one-to-one mapping of an entire environment. How do we allow Navid's team to design what they need to, but also be very aware that we need to eventually build it out in real life, which is a unique constraint you don't often have in the digital world. How do we do interactions and allow things to trigger inside of the engine we were using? How do you do all of these things? And we still found that no matter what we did, ultimately, we could continue to push it further. I jokingly always call it give a mouse a cookie syndrome. As people are in VR, if you do anything that's even slightly immersive, what you'll end up finding is that they test. So if you do one thing, they'll test for the second thing. If you don't do the second thing, they're out of immersion. If you do the second thing, they're going to test for the third thing. There's kind of this endless cycle. So it was very necessary that we work closely with the team over there as they were developing the story and figuring out how they were going to allow people to have this experience to ensure that we had everything from smell to touch to heat to... vibration to all kinds of stuff inside of the scene to really allow a person to never once question whether they're inside of an actual experience.
[00:08:16.405] Navid Khonsari: I mean, I think the interesting thing was that we as on the creative side, as the narrative side had a very definitive idea of what we wanted in the experience. We had a good idea of the immersive elements that we had experienced in other people's experiences that were not even VR related, but we felt brought us into the performance, into the experience. So we wanted to draw from that. I think for us, it was absolutely intricate that we be able to touch and feel that world that's around us. And what we were able to get from Star in particular was that they allow us to have the direction to take that leadership role and what we wanted to do in the end. And we're able to support it and then actually come back and say, OK, I understand what you're going for. What do you think about trying this, this and this and this? And then that became interesting. in line with what Brooks was saying, that process which we were able to kind of iterate and see what was going to work and what wasn't going to work. But that put aside, the haptic element of it forced us to actually look at narrative also in a different way, because you have to bring people into that world. And if you try to overwhelm them right off the beginning, the technology kind of stands out. and not the experience. So it was also not just a matter of having all these elements, but actually testing it so that first and foremost, and as always, it delivers the narrative and it frames that correctly.
[00:09:40.606] Brooks Brown: I just want to add as a very simple thing, the most important thing in VR is that the user believes they're in the world. The technology can be literally anything, from the most analog cheap garbage stuff you can put together, it doesn't matter. As long as the person believes they're there, you've made something special.
[00:09:57.932] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I'm curious to hear a little bit more about the process of creating this arc of the story. Because, you know, there's a certain part where, you know, you're sort of called to actually locomote through the space. Whereas, you know, initially it was sort of blocked off. But, you know, just the narrative arc of the story. And I guess I don't know where this is going to end up and at the risk of sort of spoiling it. So, yeah. Yeah.
[00:10:21.313] Vassiliki Khonsari: We very much believe that the impact and importance and journey of what Hero sets out to do can only happen if we keep all spoilers under wraps. So what we can explain is that it was a group effort to really walk through how we can deliver a humanistic experience and how we can pull together these key moments that can really offer people to sink into their shoes and feel the presence in that moment. And so that was basically our starting point in being architects and designing this experience.
[00:10:58.648] Kent Bye: I'm curious to hear what have been some of the reactions of people going through this throughout the week.
[00:11:03.770] Brooks Brown: The reactions have been simply overwhelming. People have come out and sat and cried for a good 10 or 20 minutes. And inevitably, that means that one of us is sitting with that person crying for 10 or 20 minutes as well. The reality is the moment you don't force a person into a role, so they're not playing... I love my John Wick game. It's great. But if someone's playing John Wick, they know they're an invincible, amazing superhero, and they play that role. They know they're Spider-Man. They know they're all these different characters, and they know what is expected and the rules around that person. The moment you say to someone, no, no, it's you. It's just you. You're the one. You're Brooks. Just go through it. It's your world. We're able to cut very, very deeply to an emotional core and through a lot of the sort of safeguards that most media allows us to have at a distance. And simply, it has left a number of people speechless. They come back to us two days later and say it was the most amazing thing they've been through. And it's an honor to hear it every time, but it takes forever to digest.
[00:12:08.772] Vassiliki Khonsari: The reactions have ranged from extraordinarily personal from I'm an observer and I guess that's really all I am and sort of recognizing their place in the world and their place in certain moments and allowing them to look at themselves all the way to acknowledging that they will never be able to look at the news in the same way because it's given them This very personal experience of something we all see every single day in some form or another in print or in video or online. And yet we have some sort of fatigue. But when it becomes your own experience, it means something entirely different.
[00:12:52.472] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I'm curious about that in terms of as you move forward, what happens to this experience and how you get that out there? If this is intended to be a location-based entertainment, or if this is kind of like a one-off festival experience, or what's next for an experience like this?
[00:13:08.792] Brooks Brown: So for Hero, we have a very particular pattern. We see a great deal of potential in premium VR, and we don't necessarily even call it entertainment. It's a chance to actually experience something. I've always likened VR to the old holodeck of Star Trek, the next generation. And if you remember back, people went in there for entertainment, people went in there for various story experiences, but they just went in to be somewhere, be somewhere else and see what that was like. And I think there's a great deal of power in allowing people to do that. So for now, we're going to be in Los Angeles. That's where my team is based. And we're going to be looking at festival circuits, looking at installations. We've gotten some invitations I don't think any of us expected to be considering, which is pretty powerful. But our goal over the next year is to show that this type of experience actually is something that is worth doing from a monetary perspective and not simply from a pure art perspective.
[00:14:05.976] Kent Bye: And I'm curious to hear from Ink Stories, what you see as your mission and your through line through all of your pieces that you've been working on, what you're looking at in terms of using the medium of both gaming and interactive narrative, as well as virtual reality, and how you see using that medium to tell these types of stories.
[00:14:25.973] Vassiliki Khonsari: I think, I can't speak for Naveed, but I think together we come from two different worlds. One coming from the video game film world. I came originally from the visual anthropology documentary world. And my passion has always been to communicate one person's story to another through whatever most effective medium we can. And that is the power of the different platforms we have access to. and particularly stories and voices that are often not represented, and those are the people's stories. And so I think, if any, that is one of the key through lines that we look to communicate, and we feel like those stories resonate both artistically and also general and wide audiences are really responding to those stories, which are often overlooked in marketplaces.
[00:15:19.789] Navid Khonsari: Yeah, I think to follow up on that, I think that we're living in a world where we're getting so much more thrown at us through so many different mediums. And that's causing, unfortunately, a desensitization. And that, as a result, is getting some people to be apprehensive and negative towards technology. And I think our goal, regardless if we're writing it with a pen and paper or if we're bringing it into VR, is to continually push for the celebration of who we are as people and the importance and the strength of humanity in the darkest of moments. And that's what we try to do is to to basically localize humanity for you and that's maybe the through line that you'll see through all of our projects is that we don't try to tell the lofty stories of kings or government leaders, we try to tell the story of people and that's something that connects us all together and do so by using the medium that's going to actually service that the best. With Hero, hands down, the challenge of bringing emotion at such an impactful level couldn't be done across any other medium and won't get the message across as visceral a way as we have. So that's kind of the focus that we have and the focus that we will continue with, which is to make us all feel like we're part of the same group, the same race, the same world population. and not to think as technology as a greater evil, but as technology that can be something that can humanize us more.
[00:16:55.795] Vassiliki Khonsari: And just to add to that beautiful summation, and what is key for us is to not underestimate our audiences.
[00:17:05.604] Kent Bye: What were some of the biggest lessons learned that you got from working on Hero?
[00:17:10.049] Navid Khonsari: I wouldn't say there's really any of the biggest lessons. I think we're kind of continually in that path. I think when you have broken ground like we have, and I say that not in an arrogant or egotistical way, it's just more from the feedback that we're actually getting from people, seeing them shake into the core. I feel like we're still very much in the learning process. We can get into the semantics of like technology and so forth and what we're learning from that. But quite honestly, that's something that every good development team and every good technology company works through. So I think for us, the larger learning lesson is still kind of coming to fruition as we take people through the experiences and continually get feedback on how we can grow, how we can make the experience that much more fluid, be respectful to our audience, and make sure that the way that we bring them in and the way that we bring them out of the experience is as tender as the experience that they have within the headset.
[00:18:06.801] Brooks Brown: Add one thing to that, and it is I'll take the arrogant side a little bit. One of the things as we've been working on this project for so long is we were very much making the bet that this would be something that would impact people, that they would feel it. And there's absolutely no way to know that literally until the day we debut it. And we have people coming through who are absolutely VR veterans, film veterans, people who have seen every type of moving, depressing, sad sort of thing it may be. We've had people say to us, VR veterans, this validates our medium. I watched 200 films in preparation for this festival, and I'm just in tears. we've started to actually be able to move from the potentiality of VR into what actually VR can be. And it's incredibly amazing to watch.
[00:18:56.084] Kent Bye: So what are some of the biggest open questions that are driving each of your work forward?
[00:19:01.263] Navid Khonsari: I'm not really asking myself a lot of questions these days. I think I'm just more kind of taking it in and seeing how we can apply it, not necessarily to the next project, but more to the philosophy and the ethos of how we want to kind of move forward to be able to create impactful experiences within virtual reality. So I think for us, that's kind of what's the driving factor, and I think I'd be foolish to actually think that I can start answering those now. Every experience that you make is unique and every experience needs you to be aware of what you've done in the past but at the same time throw it all out the window because it's not an equation, it's about that moment where emotion is fully, fully raw and people can connect with it. So there's no secret sauce for that. There's no actual equation for that. So I think rather than trying to be proactive, my approach has been to kind of take everything in and then consider that the next project that we do, how do we apply, but also not get too stuck to what we've done so that we can actually move forward in a way, keeping the philosophy of connection, emotional connection at the heart of it.
[00:20:17.881] Brooks Brown: For me, the biggest question, I tend to live more on the business side of things, is how long is it going to take for us to stop focusing on VR projects that ultimately would be better as a traditional 2D movie or traditionally better as a 2D game or 3D game, PC console, whatever you want, 3DS, Pokemon, any of those things. They're all wonderful. But how much longer before people start actually focusing on what I believe we've done here, which is work on VR as a medium, rather than trying to integrate the languages of so many other mediums into it.
[00:20:51.749] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you each think is kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:21:00.754] Vassiliki Khonsari: I think the ultimate potential is unraveling here at Sundance in this very moment. I believe impacting people, people want to feel and allowing them to take on a simultaneous personal journey as well as absorbing the context and some sort of story that you've designed and I think That's the ultimate and I can't imagine anything more than what we've been receiving here as far as feedback for Hero.
[00:21:33.153] Brooks Brown: The ultimate potential of virtual reality is the ability for me to add to my life tapestry by experiencing something I never would have otherwise. All we are is a collection of our experiences. We like to think we're a lot more than that, but it's just simply a string of symbolic order of things that have happened to us. And if I have a chance to actually experience something I wouldn't have otherwise. I grew up in Denver, Colorado. I moved to San Francisco and Los Angeles. That's basically the tapestry of my life. You can kind of imagine the various experiences for the most part I had there. One divergent from that is I was a student at Columbine, had a bunch of friends get shot and killed, shot by other friends of mine who then killed themselves. That one experience set me off in a drastically different direction in terms of what I care about, how I feel about things, plus years and years of therapy. But a lot of people are fortunate that they don't have those moments in their lives. But at the same time, millions upon millions of people around the world are not so fortunate. And the moment we can, people like my dad, people like my grandfather, uncles, you know, normal everyday working class people can actually start having experiences that broaden their life tapestry in a very unique way. It's not a documentary where I have a safe distance. It's not a newspaper article where I've read 70 times 30 civilians have been killed today. Instead, it's me living through a moment in a way that impacts me and becomes part of my symbolic order. That, I think, can change the world.
[00:23:01.216] Navid Khonsari: Let me ask you a question. I'll flip this. Tell me about your experience without actually talking about the specific and how you impacted you compared to other things that you might have experienced that you've done so much.
[00:23:13.503] Kent Bye: In Hero specifically? Yeah, I think it's, to me, I think there's a certain amount of visceral embodiment of an experience that there's different dimensions of our presence. There's embodied presence, there's active presence of expressing your agency, there's the process of mental and social presence, and then there's emotional presence. And I think that The thing that is so striking about what you're doing here is that you're combining the body and the haptics in a way that makes it so much more visceral, and you feel it a lot more. So I've seen well over 1,500 VR experiences and talked to lots of people about VR, but I think the thing that's new and different is the blending of elements of immersive theater with the visceral nature of the haptics and i think that it starts to speak at an unconscious level and i think that's the thing that's different in that when you're able to sort of incorporate the full spectrum of all the different dimensions of presence and you're able to actually reach out and touch things you get this level of presence but also i think it just is is more moving in that way so yeah that that was my experience so
[00:24:22.683] Navid Khonsari: Compared to other experiences, where does it still sit with you? Have you recollected it days after the experience for you?
[00:24:31.332] Kent Bye: I think the thing that's striking is that there's something that Vasiliki was saying, that there's something about seeing imagery on the news in a 2D frame, and that 2D frame is very abstracted. And even seeing documentaries here at Sundance where it's in war zones, but... it's a lot different than to actually have an embodied experience of it. And so I'd say that it is a little bit of like an embodied metaphor that allows me access to something that is happening every day. And even footage that I was watching and looking at and seeing a family that had gone through similar experiences. And so I think that I have a new access to empathy, I'd say, you know, being able to actually have an embodied experience of that, to be able to kind of live more in the privileged life, but to kind of have a wider range of empathy for other people in that way.
[00:25:19.498] Navid Khonsari: Thank you very much for that interview.
[00:25:25.061] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you guys would like to say now? Okay, awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me today.
[00:25:30.244] Navid Khonsari: Thank you. Thank you very much.
[00:25:31.705] Kent Bye: Thank you.
[00:25:32.466] Vassiliki Khonsari: Great. Thank you so much for your time. We appreciate it.
[00:25:35.967] Kent Bye: Thanks again for listening to this episode of the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
