I did an interview with Kiira Benz and Joanna Popper during my remote coverage of Venice Immersive 2020, where her Finding Pandora X project won the Best VR Immersive User Experience award. This is a second in a trilogy of interviews with Benz, and you can check out our conversation about Runnin’ and our latest interview conducted at Meta Connect 2025 where we do a bit of career retrospective of her journey into the realm of immersive storytelling. In this conversation, we talk about her immersive theatre production called Finding Pandora X, which she brought into VRChat during the pandemic. Be sure to check out her “The Making of Finding Pandora X Documentary – Virtual Theater” to get even more details on it. 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 second of three trilogy of immersive storytelling sidebar from MetaConnect 2025, this interview is from 2020 with Kyria Benz and Joanna Popper and Todd around the immersive theater piece of finding pandora x and so just to contextualize it back into metaconnect because we are diving into my metaconnect coverage and i'm including this because i did have a chance to talk to kira at metaconnect 2025 to get a little bit more update of all the things that she's been working on but at metaconnect at the keynote at the end mark said they're seeing a shift towards more immersive storytelling and more 3d storytelling and And it's going to be one of the more exciting developments in the coming years. I think it's going to drive a new wave of adoption of virtual reality in glasses. And I totally agree. I've been hot on immersive storytelling, what's happening on the film festival circuit for a long, long time. And I think it's probably some of the most compelling content that's been out there. And I think Kira has been on the forefront of that. After I did the interview with her about running in 2019 at Venice Immersive in 2019, she had another piece called Love Seat, which was doing this kind of hybrid production of virtual reality and theater. And so they had like a live theatrical performance at Venice while it was also people in VR headsets. And so you could also be in VR watching the same performance at the same time. And so they had like a live audience, people just watching live. the performance, but also people in VR being able to see this kind of more hybrid experience. So after that, then she went on to do Finding Pandora X, which was right in the middle of pandemic and a fully immersive theater type of experience where people were walking through this world. And at some point you make a choice and go on one of two different directions. And so you have this immersive theater actors who are guiding through different interactive experiences. There's a lot of group discussion and trying to figure out how to translate the Greek chorus into like this live immersive thing where you're in an audience going through a story, but at the same time, inviting the audience to participate in different ways, either by solving puzzles and more of an escape room context, or being able to be led through this larger narrative and story that they're telling within the context of finding Pandora X. And so, um, super innovative and really kind of set the scene for this intersection of immersive theater within the context of VRChat, which, you know, afterwards we see a lot more with the Ferryman Collective and other pieces that I think at the same time Jason Moore was working on the Metamovie Project. So there's kind of like these parallel ways in which people were using these immersive technologies with different traditions, in this case, the theatrical tradition. And so I had a chance to talk to both Kira, who is the director and creator of Finding Pandora X, but also Joanna Popper, who at the time was working at HPE, their go-to-market and location-based entertainment division, where they had supported Finding Pandora X. And so I had a chance to talk to both Kira and Joanna back on September 18th, 2020, after they had won a prize at Venice Immersive back in 2020. So becoming all that and more on today's episode of voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Kira and Joanna happened on Friday, September 18th, 2020, as a part of my remote coverage of Venice immersive 2020. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:03:23.831] Kiira Benz: I am Kira Benzing and I am a director these days, directing in VR XR and working heavily in live performance and VR theater.
[00:03:34.924] Joanna Popper: Hi, I'm Joanna Popper and I work at HP and I focus on our go-to-market as well as location-based entertainment. And in this particular case, we supported Kira on her project.
[00:03:47.589] Kent Bye: Great, so I'm wondering if you could each give me a bit more context as to your background and your journey into XR.
[00:03:54.059] Kiira Benz: Background these days, and for the last 10 years, has been directing. And I've worked everywhere from doing live video, working quite a bit with performers coming from a theatrically based sensibility, so dancers and theater actors, and then transitioning from making hybrid documentaries into VR.
[00:04:17.062] Joanna Popper: My background, I spent nearly a decade at NBC Universal in a marketing role for Telemundo and then moved from there to San Francisco and led marketing at a tech organization and then moved to HP about almost now three years ago. And I've been working in virtual reality for about four years now.
[00:04:40.140] Kent Bye: Okay, yeah. And Kira, I know that you've had a number of pieces, including Running, which was a collaboration with the Intel Capture Studio, as well as with Reggie Watts. And then you followed up with a live theater performance that was at Venice in 2019 called Love Seat. and that you were expanding that concept of doing live theater within the context of a virtual world this year with Finding Pandora X, which was one of the winners of the Venice Film Festival of the Best VR User Experience Award. So first of all, congratulations on that. But maybe you could give a bit more context as to Finding Pandora X and how that project came about and how you started working with Jonah and HP and have each of you kind of share that side of the story as that came about.
[00:05:23.507] Kiira Benz: Absolutely. Yes. So you've seen a number of pieces over the years, Kent, and then one that made its way started off in New York City, a piece that I'd done prior called Cardboard City, which evolved then into an interactive installation. So I've definitely been doing the interactive side of XR experiences and really heavily focused on the role of the audience and looking at them as a player and how they can engage with a world and with a story and run in their engaging with the world as a dancer. They are hopefully moving their body freely throughout the piece and then eventually exploring the piece through Love Seat. There were two sides to the audience where we had a live physical audience and a virtual audience and I was exploring this kind of split audience and duality of audience and how those audiences could eventually connect, which was the goal of this current production. But of course, we've had to change things significantly for Finding Pandora X. The hope again was that it would be a hybrid format where we would have a live audience in Venice and a virtual audience around the world. And due to the state of changes in our world and this pandemic that we're still existing through, we made everything just fully immersive and virtual.
[00:06:35.026] Kent Bye: Yeah, and Joanna, when did you come on this project? I don't know if you've seen those previous projects, and what was it that made HPE decide to help fund or become the executive producer of this piece?
[00:06:47.396] Joanna Popper: So I've been following Kira since I saw her project running. I think I knew about who she was and about her before that, but loved, loved, loved, loved running the work she did together with the Intel Studios team and Reggie Wise and everything. It was so visionary and groundbreaking. And what I loved about that project was Kara's vision for bringing the content experience together with movement. When you were in that project, you talk a lot about being in VR and being embodied in VR and how the interactivity and engaging with your full body is part of the magic of virtual reality. When I first did that experience at Sundance, you know, I just could not stop dancing. And, you know, Reggie Watts was all around me, upside down, inside out, you know, everywhere. And then I just kept dancing, dancing, dancing. I just loved the way that, you know, that Kara's vision came to life there. And after they premiered it at Sundance, it won at South by Southwest. So that was really great to see the project get such accolades in the industry. And then after that, Kara premiered Love Seat at the Venice Film Festival. And we actually, I think we supported You know, Intel certainly was a primary sponsor and primary partner on running, but I think we helped out with some things along the way, you know, through our partnership directly with Intel, of course, with HP and Intel. So we, I think we supported with computers and headsets and stuff, you know, along the way on the running journey in certain instances. And then for Love Seek, Karen and I started talking about that project and we ended up supporting with technology, supporting with our headsets, as well as some of the VR backpacks, as well as I think some workstations, which was a big feat to get everything to Venice into the island, you know, into first onto the island of Lido and then onto the island, the VR island. So that was great. There was just so much VR technology there that Kira and the team accessed. And that project was really beautiful. And what I loved about Kira's vision there was that it was so future facing, you know, it was kind of taking the fact that most, you know, those of us like you, like me, like Kira, we're so lucky that we get to go to all these festivals or in the past, we all got to go to the festival and be there and experience all of the amazing content. And most people don't, right? And so the project of Love Seat had the vision of, if you were there in the festival, you could see it inside the headset, you could see it outside of headset, there were live actors to interact with, or if you were home, you could see it from anywhere in the world in high fidelity. And that was such a, you know, premonition of like the world we live in now, right? Where, you know, so, but I think, I think Kara was probably the first person to do something like that at a film festival for VR that I've seen. I haven't, prior to Love Seed, I didn't have, I'd never seen a project that incorporated people at home, you know, also getting to experience along with people that were in the audience at the Festival. So I loved her vision for that. And then for this project, for Finding Pandora X, I think we always just kept in touch and talked about what was next for her and what she was going to be doing. And it seems like she likes working with the HP technology. So we love that. She likes the high resolution, the high performance, and really pushing the envelope on what the technology can do and using her creative vision for that. And so, you know, I don't even know, Kira, when we started talking about this project, but we started talking about it a while ago.
[00:10:08.546] Kiira Benz: When we were working on some of the experiments in digital storytelling, we were supposed to run something off Broadway with La Mama Theater in New York and Culture Hub. And they just wanted us to present some early work, just some experiments. They were like, just, you know, show us something that you're working on. And right after Venice last year, we started working on the story for Pandora X and And building out the story world and the rules and what those things would be and, you know, the journey of this protagonist. My team knew we wanted to do Greek mythology. We wanted to have special superpowers in there, of course, gods and a mythological world. We wanted a female protagonist and a POV from a female character. We haven't written that show yet now. Finding Pandora X is the prologue to that show. And it was just supposed to be 20 minutes. And now the show had evolved into an hour and even longer if our audience stays in there to fly with us. So it's been a really interesting journey and evolution. And we've been, I mean, we started working on that production a month after Venice, so October of 2019. But I mean, who knew? We never anticipated that we would even apply to Venice again this year, let alone be working entirely remotely from each other throughout this entire pandemic. All of our actors scattered across the United States And so the things that we did with the technology last year where we built a local network on the Venice, Plaza del Dovecchio, Medieval Island, with 14 computers, right, all networked there, definitely a first for our team to load in and network that amount of tech. And also, you know, really some amazing support that we had from the team at High Fidelity also that jumped in to help us with that local network. And now, you know, when we were supervising and helping our actors and making sure that they were carefully tethered to their computers and like everything was logged in for them, now it's such a flip on all of that. The actors have to take care of that themselves. And we've been supporting them in other ways, but they have really had to learn to become their own technologist. instead of having each of us have a dedicated technician for them, which is how we did our show in the past.
[00:12:24.224] Kent Bye: Yeah, I know I had a chance to see, I guess it was a preview of Pandora X or maybe the first iteration that was on May 16th, 2020, where there was people that were live as the Greek horse in this VRChat world, but I was watching just a live stream of it. So I was watching like a 2D representation of this live performance. And so what was the connection between that? Was that what you had mentioned there that there was an early prototype and then that was what helped get that expanded out into be shown at Venice?
[00:12:51.579] Kiira Benz: Exactly. Yeah, Culture Hub had asked me, along with the Mama Theater, to just present something, something rough and processed. And so we thought, okay, we know Zeus is a character in this show. We know Hera is a character in this show. I was looking for the right Pandora and was really to find the right actress to play that role. And we were taking our time with material and we just thought, okay, you know, we started to... experiment again we'd been looking through different platforms and looking for the right new social vr home since high fidelity had pivoted their plans and just kind of finding where are we going to build mount olympus and this was all pre-pandemic and so we'd been revisiting and we spent time going to social vr platforms regularly anyway as a team and then i remember that there was actually a thread that popped up in the xr industry that a lot of people piled into And as the pandemic hit, everyone started going into social VR. And I remember thinking like, ah, great, more people will come and join us here now. We'll have more players in these worlds and more people to collaborate with and have conversations with. And that just seemed so exciting to me. And then I would watch some of the conversation happening in there about you know, oh, but I can't do this in this world and I can't do this. You could see the kind of limitations and pros and cons of each of the platforms right now. And that was also really interesting. And so we had made our decision to settle on VRChat to build our new home of Mount Olympus. And I think it was interesting to see that group kind of cycle through a bunch of platforms and also decide what was right for them and for different purposes. Sometimes you just want to socialize. But if you want to build a story world with certain level of interactivity, and for us, we're running live light and sound cues. And having all kinds of mechanics and animations get triggered throughout the show, we have to have a certain robust enough system to meet the artistic goals.
[00:14:41.442] Kent Bye: Yeah, I know that VRChat has launched with the udon scripting, and I know that back in May of 2020, you had mentioned that you're starting to use some of the early iterations of that scripting. It's a bit of like VRChat's own sandbox scripting language. It's not like you have full access to everything that Unity can do. Because VRChat is an application on top of Unity, then you are able to get some access to that interactivity. And so I was really curious to see, you know, different approaches that happened this year. You know, the meta movie was using EOS VR, which I think is got this trade off where you probably have a little bit more freedom to do more complexity of scripting, but you have the user interface complications and it's like, you have to do a lot of things to make it simple for users to use. VRChat probably has a little bit less capabilities. And the other thing I'd say about VRChat is that it's actually very difficult to send somebody a URL and be like, click on this link and you'll get joined into this world. And to have the whole system of private rooms and then you have to go in and become a friend with somebody who's in the show and then you have to get invited in. I think there's a lot of user interface flow that VRChat wasn't necessarily designed to have like public screenings in this fashion to like require people to bring their existing VRChat avatar and identity and to then have them become friends with all these actors. There was a level of stress that I was like, oh my gosh, I have to like get accepted. I have to get in. It's like the show is going to be starting. And so it's probably on both sides where You know, like I sent an invite to be invited to this private world. I don't hear right away. And then I get into the discord and be like, Hey, am I going to get in? And then it's like, it's not open yet. So there's like this anxious energy that I had trying to get in.
[00:16:24.421] Kiira Benz: We have it too. We're like, how do we help our audience get here faster? And like, oh my God, they're still in their home world. And I mean, we've got emails coming into us. I've got private mess, even with the audience discord. And that's sort of our way of like, here is an hour of additional tech support and help to help you get in the right place. And then I'm also just learning from, you know, all kinds of people in the industry that have VR headsets that are super savvy, that are just like, they have no idea how to navigate it. And I think it is totally nerve wracking for, for someone to get in and try to feel like, how do I make the show on time and just like learn controllers and teleporting and all of these basics. So, I mean, we had planned to build a whole additional onboarding space because we thought that there are certain things that you can learn for sure in the VRChat Hub, but that like additionally for attending a show, there are other things that help make your experience more comfortable. And because our narrative branches, you end up in different worlds and it is also possible that you can get lost or your headset dies and you go back home. And then how do you rejoin in the right place? And that's why we have you right now accepting all of these additional friends in the show so that wherever you go, you're friends with one of the right people and we can get you back into the right place, but it's not a perfect solution right now. And we're definitely doing our best to kind of hold the virtual hands of our audience, but not fully able to take care of them because of the layers of UI that are in the way right now.
[00:17:52.214] Kent Bye: Yeah, I expect stuff like that to be ironed out over time where there's going to be more use cases like this and just generally having public events and something like VRChat because there has been like this move towards doing a lot of private worlds, but it is difficult to just like send a single URL and that's all you need. And I think that's like the future that we'd be going to. And plus, because you're having the same persistent world, then you would need to have like some token to be put on there to say, okay, this link expires outside of this time, because then if somebody gets access to that URL, then you don't want them to just show up to another show that they're not registered for. So there's all these things around ticketing and onboarding that I think we're just like, this feels like a very early first iteration. But aside from all that, because that's just the logistics of getting into the experience, let's just talk about like your process, your creative process of actually putting this together. Because I think one of the other interesting things about this piece is that, you know, you're not just doing like a theater piece, but you're actually engaging the audience in different ways, both in giving them the ability to locomote through a virtual world, which I think is something that I think is relatively new to take a world and do that world building process and then to have a story that moves through that world. Of course, there's lots of locomotion issues with people as they're navigating. But for folks that are comfortable locomoting through virtual worlds, then you have this ability to go through these different locations and tell the story. So maybe you could just, as you're putting together Finding Pandora X, where did you begin as you start to construct this and start to decide how you're going to start to innovate with what is now possible with what you can do in a virtual world?
[00:19:25.663] Kiira Benz: I wanted to do more of the kind of level of interactivity that we have right now in Finding Pandora X in Love Seat. We didn't get there with Love Seat because we built that production in only six weeks last year for Venice. So from like drafting the script to casting to 3D modeling the world to finding lodging for all of our actors and arranging with HP, coordinating 14 computers and setups. That was done all in six weeks last year. So I did intend for that production to be a lot more interactive because that's a really important part, I feel, in all of my work that I've been continuing to experiment and push. But definitely knowing that we wanted people to interact with the story and feel like they were a part of something The other thing that someone has pointed out to me in the last few weeks is that there's a strong sense of community that seems to thread through my work over years. And ironically, it feels like that's become really important these days. And so the sense of belonging to a group of people, that you're part of a greater collective, that you can contribute to a group that is greater than yourself, and when you contribute... more voices and more thoughts together, more intelligence together that maybe helps us solve a problem. In this case, the problem is that the gods are disappearing, they're fading away, and they need help from the mortal realm. And so we have this kind of push towards each of the groups in the audience. At times it's the group of them, and then at other times that group splits and they have to come together, but it's only on their reliance of each other and bringing their gifts and discoveries together can they benefit the greater good. And that I think is just something that's just important to me in general, that if we can create good inside a virtual world and empower ourselves and feel like superhumans and have the gift of flight and cooperate and collaborate that maybe we will take some of those lessons and abilities out into the real world.
[00:21:26.333] Kent Bye: Yeah. I wanted to dive into the acting and my experience of the piece, but first I wanted to pull Joanna back in because as you were executive producing this piece, how was your interaction and collaboration as this was developing? Like what was your other roles as this continued to evolve and develop?
[00:21:43.578] Joanna Popper: Well, we started working with Kira, you know, I was trying to remember earlier when it actually was in the calendar, but I think it was probably early, probably at some point in the spring, when coordinating with her about how we'd come in, what we would work on, and what kind of support we would give the project. And so, you know, just worked really closely with Kira on helping, you know, in any way that we could to help her bring her vision to life, not just with Kira, but with the whole Double Eye Studios team. And, you know, as she's doing the workshopping and as she got, you know, closer and closer to the final production and trying to bring her not just technology, but other skill sets and abilities that HP has from the communication side and the press side and, you know, technological support. And actually it was our, it was our team that taught quite a few of the actors, the actors, how to use the technology and kind of get, you know, acted as a troubleshooting help and support for them as well. So. I'm grateful to Keith and Ryan and some of the people on our HP team that helped out with all of that. Snaps to Keith.
[00:22:46.310] Kiira Benz: Yes, Keith was amazing. Keith and Ryan. And I think all of our actors, we've actually been waiting for him to come join us in Mount Olympus. So maybe he'll listen to the podcast and I'll come there. Everyone will like fly around him and shout lots of joy. I think that one of the really cool things that happened in this process was the goal of bringing in newer actors. And I said to Joanna early on, I think we need to get some equipment over to actors that have never done VR. They've maybe never even been in VR, let alone now they're going to perform in it. And I'm going to train them. And we worked on them to get them their headsets and equipment first. so they could learn all of this because there's so much that they have to do, setting up, downloading different pieces of software, and it's new for them. So, you know, we take it for granted going to a festival. All of it's done for us. We have such a, you know, a nice cushy time. The developer is always fixing something to the last minute, putting you in the headset, but it's like a beautiful, smooth experience. Now they have to figure all of that out themselves. And if something's not working, you know, there's some time that we could pad into it to get them to learn these things, but then... Come showtime, they really need to troubleshoot and we're there for them, you know, answering on a channel as well to kind of answer and help be like, okay, something's not working. How can we help them through this? But they definitely spent some incredible time with the HP team, setting up their equipment and asking lots of questions and just learning and challenging themselves to get familiar with VR so that they could perform in this show. Even our stage manager, she's brand new to VR. So she also learned this just for this production.
[00:24:20.620] Joanna Popper: You know, Kara did an amazing job of pulling together this great team. One of the actors has been on Broadway as Rapunzel, but she was new to VR. Other actors, you know, had been in The Tempest and some of the actors had been in Kara's love seat in the past. And so she brought together this just amazing group of actors and a mixture of people who had different skill sets in the technology. There's a stage manager and there's the technologist. And so there was an amazing avatar designer who Kira found. And there was an amazing composer and just such a great, great group that we were so excited to be working with all of them. And it was really interesting to hear the actors' types of questions and understand their experience because... you know, Ken, like when we, for example, when we, if we go to Venice and we are working with the technology and experiencing the technology and, you know, embodied as a character, but we're not worried about like so much, you know, how do we appear to others? You know, how do we appear in VR? And so their experience of, how do their arms look? You know, how do their arms look in the avatar as they move? You know, what's intuitive, like the way that they're going to move and the way that they're going to be maybe intuitive, but maybe that doesn't appear right as an avatar. And so they talked a lot about practicing in front of the mirror and, you know, getting that sense of like, what is it to be an actor that is presenting as an avatar? And so that was a really cool element, I thought as well.
[00:25:44.898] Kiira Benz: Yeah, we built a virtual mirror in our space. It's sort of one of my first steps when I'm bringing in a new actor that is performing in VR and they have to get used to how they're translating their body and gesture into that of the body of the avatar. And how do they connect that and understand that? Because it is a different kind of extension of their body and mind.
[00:26:06.364] Joanna Popper: Kira, maybe talk also about some of the stuff you've done with improv, because I think that's really fascinating and groundbreaking, the work you've done there.
[00:26:12.856] Kiira Benz: Sure, yeah, we worked with High Fidelity prior to Love Seat and I was brought in to direct as a director with a team and then help build that team and assemble that and bring in some New York City improv actors. So we started with some internal research that we did for High Fidelity to explore some ideas and concepts there and then continue to work with New York City actors. And we did an improv show and an improv class there. which was really, really fun to actually run those events and just see how their player base, their user base, I really like the word user. So I'm always trying to change that around. Their audience would respond and how their avatars really wanted to participate. And that was the thing that I just started to see more and more in these virtual worlds. I think people really want to engage and participate.
[00:27:03.010] Kent Bye: I think that was the striking thing about this piece is that you have a choice. There's, you know, maybe we're getting to spoiler areas at this point. So if you want to see it, then I'd recommend folks to go check it out. Well, first, before we do that, is it going to be available? Is it going to be a show run that you're going to be doing here soon?
[00:27:18.075] Kiira Benz: Great question. We are exploring the possibility of a ticketed run. You know, we would like to open something up to the public. There is more thoughts that need to be had around that, but that's definitely an exploration.
[00:27:30.595] Kent Bye: So yeah, in this piece, you know, I wouldn't say that like I'm a character in this piece because you have everybody, interestingly enough, change avatars to be the Greek chorus. And maybe you could give a bit more context as to what the Greek chorus is and why you chose that to be an avatar aesthetic. But there is a bit of being able to participate and there's questions that are asked. You make some choice to go with one of the main characters and go on a little adventure. adventure and exploration and solve puzzles and then you're kind of there's a bit of leading the audience towards this collaborative puzzle that you're trying to solve here through the experiences that you have and I'll leave it at that but there's this ability for the audience to be able to participate in different ways and so maybe you could talk about the Greek Chorus and how as you were creating this piece how you wanted to not just like do a theater piece but to make it an immersive theater piece but Not that we were named actors, but we had a little bit more agency than like, say, Sleep No More, where I'm just a ghost and I'm not even recognized as being there. I'm not quite a ghost, but I'm just like one step beyond a ghost without going all the way to the other extreme of being like a full character that's trying to be embodied and be a part as an equal with the cast.
[00:28:43.965] Kiira Benz: Exactly, you're not ever fully put in the center of the stage. And I think that that's part of the reason of my thinking that I haven't done that yet is because I don't think that everyone is comfortable with doing that. And that even if you are comfortable with being in the center of the stage, and other people watching you, then you might become uncomfortable at some point. And if you're stuck there, how do you get out? So for me, that hasn't fully worked in my brain, but I think that other people are exploring that, and that's also a really cool trajectory and totally worth exploring. I have always been about the ensemble. I studied theater many moons ago, and I studied ensemble-based theater at the National Theater Institute. And then I later went on to do my post-grad at Lambda, the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art in classical acting. And I've always felt the power of the Greek chorus. They represent so many things. I always love to hear their unified wisdom. And this is a full adaptation on this myth. I mean, we are not following the myth anymore. by note, by any means. And of course, we haven't even gotten really to the myth at all in this production. We're just hinting at it. You don't even get to meet Pandora in this story. She's not even here. We can't even find her. We're looking everywhere. But what I do think is important is allowing people to begin to express their voice. And we have to do that in a kind of respectful, controlled fashion. So we're just testing the limits on that right now. There's places where we ask people to step up with individual thoughts. And I love those moments. They are new every day. It gives Zeus something totally different to respond to. It happens in all of the puzzle moments when the audience splits. We can hint at that. That's totally fine. I think, you know, we have a branching narrative. We have these two different quests that happen in the middle of the story. One audience goes with one character, the other half of the audience goes with the other character and they go on these pretty action heavy quests. adventure-oriented journeys and solve puzzles along the way. One is more action-heavy than the other one. The other one is a little bit more logic-based. They've both become pretty adventurous, and it's funny because my colleague Michael Woods just finished editing our trailer, and I've realized how much running our audience does. They're just constantly on the go. There's a couple scenes where they pause, and I love to also watch the audience there. The player is just kind of just sort of take in and like very respectfully watch in those moments. And I think that they know that that's their time to watch. So it's really interesting to kind of watch us go from the action scenes where people are picking things up and moving things and uncovering things to the just kind of respectful listening of the action and dialogue.
[00:31:21.071] Joanna Popper: There's also a lot of choice points for the audience. Definitely, that's part of the interactivity, right? There's choices that you make, things that you do. There's the branching narrative. And so there's quite a few moments where, I mean, as an audience member, I wouldn't say I felt like one step up from the ghost. I felt fully, fully. I felt fully involved, you know, maybe not the star, but fully, I felt very, very involved in that I was making choices throughout the entire story that could potentially impact the story. That was my sensation when I was there as an audience member.
[00:31:55.657] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think there's the being a character that is a part of the narrative. And so there's actual narrative consequence to that embodiment. And then there's the narrative is pretty much on rails here where there's like a little bit of the choices that you're making. They're not impacting the outcome of the narrative. I guess I'd say that there's a little bit less agency having impact on how the story unfolds, which is a whole other route that is possible, but it's also exponential in terms of trying to figure out how to aggregate collective action and agency and behavior to try to drive towards a singular narrative. So I did see that there was opportunities for me to kind of explore around. Like I felt like that was still bounded within the pretty set narrative trajectory that was going to be unfolding, whether or not I did anything or not. But there was a sense of trying to figure something out. So it was like a collaborative puzzle solving feeling that I had where it's like, there was opportunities for people to try to like figure out based upon what the clues were. And there's a little bit of like the main actors that were there having to help really handhold and guide that discussion. So it was more of like a group discussion based upon experiences you just had. Okay, let's figure this out. That was kind of neat. I haven't seen that a lot, but in terms of the narrative structure that I think, it did feel like, you know, for me, at least just one step up of being a ghost, just because like the other extreme would be that it's an open world and I can embody a character and it's like Westworld where you could start to then have to adapt based upon the character that I want to be. If I want to come in there and be Ares or, you know, Mercury or Hermes, you know, like I'm embodying this mythological creature, then everybody would have to like sort of know what that meant. And I think we're pretty far away.
[00:33:37.829] Joanna Popper: Yeah, you just need to come in and tell everyone you're Ares and see what happens. You see how our actors respond.
[00:33:43.495] Kiira Benz: They're ready.
[00:33:45.659] Joanna Popper: Change your avatar and say like, here I am, Aries.
[00:33:49.558] Kent Bye: There was a moment there at the very beginning where there's like these columns of light and you're making an offering to one of these Greek gods. And I thought that was interesting. One of the things I would like to see is like maybe like some sort of like statue or embodiment or to try to embody the archetypal character of each of these. Because at this point, it's like, oh, do people know who these mythological gods are that I'm making an offering to? Yeah. Maybe you talk about that very beginning because there's a bit about this like ritualistic moment where you're able to start to then make a choice and participate and it's a part of like I'd say like the first step beyond the gate and you're entering in and this is part of trying to enter into this magical world. So you're still entering into the space and you're having an opportunity to have a little bit more of a direct relationship to the characters that are featured within this piece.
[00:34:37.637] Kiira Benz: Exactly. Besides our cloud space, which has a lot of onboarding and probably even more that we got to continue to build into it, Kent, even because you came to our very first opening night and that space continued to shift and evolve. But it's really your first interactive point. So you get to meet Corey and then she tells you a little bit of the story of what's been happening in Mount Olympus and how hope has gone. Actually, that scene where that first bit of interactivity happens is and your first choice of where you're going to dedicate basically your offering, which god you want to pick. That is this light for a scene, and that came out of something that I really wanted to do at the start of COVID, where I really wanted to make a kind of memorial forest for people that had passed, and give a place where people could dedicate offerings and gather people that was not a religious place, but just a special place. And we do a lot of user-generated content in a lot of my other pieces. And we've done some with experiments in digital storytelling. And I really had this goal of us sourcing from the crowd additional Pillars of Light that we would add into the show daily. That's a crazy idea. That means we're building every day, which we did anyway. But I really wanted this user-generated content that we would enable people to actually dedicate Pillars of Light into the forest in addition to the gods that had disappeared. And that it didn't have to be memorializing even a person, but it could just be memorializing a thing that you've lost during the pandemic. So some people maybe miss going to a movie theater, so they might feel that loss. And I thought that could be worth. remembering right now, but we just ran out of time and bandwidth and we decided to cut that. But that's not in full intention of that light forest. And I also wanted pictures of things to come up. So definitely some idea of a Greek cod initially was supposed to be in there and maybe we'll have that in the future. But right now they're just the concept and a very basic form.
[00:36:29.872] Kent Bye: Yeah, and because the pandemic started back in March, and the first time I saw this was in May, and you've been working on it for a while, but because you're casting actors who had never been in VR, what was the casting process like, both being in a pandemic, but also what does it mean to act within VR?
[00:36:47.799] Kiira Benz: I did a lot of video calls actually with actors to just start to get a sense of them and just even just have a conversation. Are they up for the challenge? I think that in one sense, it's totally an opportunity and they're going to be empowered and get to learn a new skill and on the other side, they are learning a new skill and they're responsible for it. And they do have to troubleshoot and be ready for every show. And we can't help them connect a wire in on their end. We can't do that for them physically anymore, where we would. We would totally change their batteries and their controllers and take care of them. but that's not something that we're able to do right now with all of the distance. On the flip side, it means our cast can be not very widespread across the nation. We can be international. We have more members in our virtual rep theater that are international. And that is something that's really important to me. I think also makes us perhaps more accessible in other ways that we can actually expand The possibilities of casting. And so that was really exciting. I really, it's a risk to take to bring very new people into VR and to also do it, especially when we knew that we had a premiere, but it felt really worth it because we get to expand the group of people that can do this now. Yeah.
[00:38:04.312] Joanna Popper: The other thing I would add to that too is what's really special about this is that right now, you know, Broadway is closed, right? Most theaters around the world are closed. And so it gives these actors opportunity to keep acting and, you know, to hear some of them talk. They said, you know, I'm back on stage. I have lights. I have camera. I have makeup. I have stage manager. It's like the world's a stage, you know, wherever you are at stage. So it was so gratifying to hear that these actors were getting to live their passions and be back. performing for audiences and theaters and sharing their gift through this production. So that was really a beautiful part.
[00:38:41.704] Kent Bye: Yeah. What was the process of actually trying to direct and rehearse this piece? And was it like all written? Was there like an iterative process or what was it like to actually put it all together? Because there is a lot of audience members that are there. So I don't know if you're like testing it with a bunch of people as you're moving on or, you know, just talk a bit about that, actually putting it together and rehearsing for this piece.
[00:39:06.516] Kiira Benz: So my process has continued. I feel like I have a sense of now how long it takes for me to be working with a new actor coming into VR and what I need to jump certain people forward. And we have to be pretty off book before we can start to block in VR. So for Love Seat, we had two types of blocking and also sensibility of audience in two formats. There was the live space, so we had live blocking. There's parts where the actors needed to be taking their headset on and off, where they needed to be talking to different audience, sitting in places. And then there's all the virtual blocking. And in both Love Seat and this production of Finding Pandora X, we have flying. There are flying, literally, sometimes there's flying paths, other times there's just fly from this point to this point, but they're is flying they have to hit those marks as if they were hitting you know an x on a cinema stage you know like get here you know and then we're running live light cues and they need to be in their light and stand in their light was so funny once we finally got the lighting cues working in the system and there's quite a number of them they're really beautiful the lighting just changed our whole world in space we had a wonderful woman lighting designer Beth Cates from Canada that worked with us And I remember just like in the real world, when the actors need to walk into their light, they're not used to it. You know, like again, like they were just totally standing in darkness and I had to be like, hey guys, you've got light now, walk into it. And that happened again, just like happens on the real world, which was really amazing for them to just kind of find these moments and us to kind of curve out and highlight what's happening in the scene with lighting and sound so that was really really wonderful to start to bring that together and we had a little bit of that in love seat but we had many more cues on this production
[00:40:55.000] Kent Bye: Yeah. And I remember talking to you last year at Venice, after you've done a few shows of Love Seat and you made the comment that with Love Seat, you're actually doing two productions. You're doing the live production, but also the virtual production where you would actually have to have like entire crews that were almost like doubled in order to like run a single show. So that was quite interesting to hear how you're like replicating a lot of those same actions and to other people that have to do all those similar tasks, whether it's camera work or lighting or sound, all that stuff. But in this case, at least with finding Pandora X, you don't have a physical component. So you're still doing all those same production behind the scenes stuff. But you don't have to do it twice, at least for this project. So maybe you could talk about that process of what you have to do behind the scenes as you do the show. It sounds like you're actually doing like lighting and other things as a director. You're like helping to manually do some of these cues and whatnot. And so maybe talk about that balance of how you build the world and do some things that are encoded within code, but sometimes maybe easier just to have a person that does it rather than to try to automate it.
[00:41:59.853] Kiira Benz: Exactly. I mean, these things are, they still require humans. And I think that's what's special. It is live and it's going to change on the fly. And we don't know how long the audience is going to take, how long the players will take to respond or generate new ideas in certain moments. So we have some things that, you know, we have a sense of how long a lighting cue takes, but when we're going to call that exactly gets nudged along. by milliseconds. And it's important, I think, that that changes because that makes it special and it's formed out of the energy of that collective audience that is there. So we're kind of meeting what they bring into the space. And those are the things that I think just make live performance really unique, that it is a little different every night or very different every night. And definitely we have a number of technologists on the back end and they all we're hosting different domains and running different elements and triggering different things. We also give certain abilities to the actors to do throughout the production, but those are secrets. I'm not going to talk about them. And then we do have lighting and sound right now. I have been running them for the productions, but ideally in the real world, it should be a board operator who runs those things. And I think that that's just what excites me right now is we can expand a kind of virtual workforce and bring all of the theater professionals into this world. We've now trained a number of stage managers to come and work with us. We're bringing more and more actors in, but it would be great if we could also have lighting and board operators, ushers to be working with our audience and talking to them and helping them through. It's different than just showing them to a seat with a flashlight, but there is an additional technical element that has to be learned and conversation that needs to take place, but I think that when that can happen we could build, you know, a fully different kind of workforce, a fully virtual workforce.
[00:43:55.834] Kent Bye: Yeah, I wanted to ask you about the liveness of the live. Because I know last year at Venice, there was a piece called Cosmos Within Us, which went to the extent of having like a full band orchestra and all of the narration that happened was like being done live. And when I did the experience, I had no idea. It wasn't until like... I saw people performing it that I was like, oh wow, actually they're doing all of this live. And I was like, I couldn't even tell. So there's a part of like that live experience that I, because I didn't have agency or wasn't interacting in a way that I was able to really interrogate that liveness, then I didn't even realize it was live. It was all, it could have all been prerecorded and I wouldn't have known. There are elements.
[00:44:35.277] Joanna Popper: They had people with the fans and the people with the stents coming around and fanning you and putting it under your nose is pretty amazing in addition to the live band.
[00:44:43.817] Kiira Benz: They're kind of dancers. Yeah. I don't know, which maybe they hadn't incorporated that when you saw it, Kent.
[00:44:48.601] Kent Bye: No, they did, but I just didn't. I mean, they did have like the smell docents and the other things that were happening. It was just, I wasn't thinking about it. Like, how is the smell getting into my nose right now? I didn't, I didn't imagine that there was somebody standing there with a stick in front of my nose. Like, and that was their whole job was to be the smell docent. Like I'd never even heard of such a thing.
[00:45:07.395] Kiira Benz: He did it in an elegant way, right? They kind of wafted around, they danced around you. Because often when you're at a festival with a piece, you so rarely get to see other pieces. But I did get to watch that piece. And I was one of the kind of a handful of people that watches from the seat and sees what's happening of the person in the chair. And that, yeah, that was interesting. I do remember a choreography of them with the smell.
[00:45:27.835] Joanna Popper: Because in that piece, that wasn't a behind the scenes scene. action because they had the two different roles you either were the person in the headset kind of like what you talked about earlier like you were the hero in a way or you were in the audience watching and so it was a choreography and it was still interesting to be in the seat getting to watch the person be in the experience and see what was happening on screen for them but then also see that choreography of the smell docent that role although i have a feeling they have a different efficiency the smell dancer
[00:46:00.492] Kiira Benz: The sense dancer.
[00:46:01.573] Joanna Popper: And they were the, yeah, they were the props or the stage manager is probably their official title, but Spelldosen is also good.
[00:46:09.718] Kent Bye: Well, it was that exact experience of like, I was immersed within the experience and then I saw the behind the scenes. And then once I saw the behind the scenes, I had a new appreciation for everything that happened because I hadn't noticed that there was all these extra things that were happening. I just wasn't thinking about it. And I didn't even think like, why would they go through all that trouble to do all of this live? It was just like, It was so many things. But I guess the deeper question I'm getting at here is the liveness of the live. And what's it mean to be live? Because there was another La Comédie Virtuelle, which is having live dancers, and they were being live motion captured. But because there was a 30-second delay on the video that was showing there, it was hard to even actually see that this was happening live. And there was no audience interaction to really interrogate that liveness. And I think that Finding Pandora X has certainly some moments where there's conversation and dialogue that makes it feel like it's live, but there's also other performative aspects that also kind of slip back into like, well, this all could be theoretically prerecorded and how do we really actually know? Like it's obviously not because that would be a lot of work within VRChat, but you know, when you're thinking about the future of virtual performances, I think that's going to be a question, which is like, okay, how do we know like what they're doing right now is actually happening right now? So I'm not sure how you've reckoned that in terms of how to bring that quality of liveness to the live performances in a virtual space where everything could theoretically be prerecorded.
[00:47:34.534] Kiira Benz: It's my goal to continue to make live performances and bring live performers into these spaces to share with a live audience. I think there is something magic that happens with the live element. And that's just something that I feel very deeply about. I think that we talk about AI and the powers of AI and other types of characters that can be created through AI. And I think that's also powerful and interesting in its own way. It's not where my heart is. I think that that could be an element of our work going forward. And it would certainly help us if we ever have to have an army or a marching band, or a lot of robots invade from another planet. There's so many possibilities where we could absolutely use AI, but I don't want that to take away from the special quality of having a live audience present in the same space with a live performer. And now that space, just due to COVID, that space is totally virtual. In the future, I think we'll be able to get back to exploring our hybrid formats of the past where we can also have a physical space and connect these things even further. That's just been a dream of mine to continue to bridge these worlds together. I was coming up with ideas for that, but then we just tabled them all when the pandemic hit.
[00:48:56.135] Kent Bye: What do you think it is about that liveness? Why is the liveness so special? If you were to try to characterize the quality of the liveness of the live.
[00:49:06.834] Kiira Benz: I think it's the reason I've gone back to theater and been called to going to theater all my life. There's something that happens when you sit in a collective space with other humans and you undergo the same story together and you have enough distance from the story that you can project Things from your life into it that gives you additional meaning. And so I'm pushing that right now because I also have a deep belief that VR needs to be interactive and that's what makes VR really special. So I'm kind of mixing like all of my beliefs right now. And I'm just trying to see what sticks and just continue to figure out how we can tell better, more meaningful stories. So we have these moments of meaningful decision making throughout the show. That's something that's been a trend in my work over years. But what else can we do beyond that? Now we're enabling to give you a voice. In Run-In, you got to pick. You got to have agency to pick where you wanted to go and change your perspective. and decide how close you wanted to get to a dancer and whether you wanted to affect a dancer by moving your wand, your magic glow stick into them. Now we're changing things in other ways and we're building out a much larger story world and universe that you can play inside of. And I think there's even more that we can do beyond just this production now that we have all of these worlds. We've been talking about a kind of live at Mount Olympus series where we can have panoramic panel discussions in there, Kent, maybe you'll come join us and we can actually bring you in via avatar. We can do flying lessons for our audience. We can teach them all kinds of new things. I think there's just a lot of really amazing possibilities and it will never take away what's special about us being connected in the real world. But there is something I think about us being in the same space together and knowing that it's happening in real time.
[00:51:06.064] Kent Bye: Yeah. Well, one of the things that's really interesting to me, at least with VR in real life, is that you can start to see what's different and what's the same and what's lost and what's gained. I think of something as an example of like going to say a meditation retreat. Like if I meditate at home by myself, I can tell that I'm like alone by myself meditating, but... When I meditate in a group, there's something that is on some sort of non-physical, etheric, like just being the presence of other people. Meditating is qualitatively different for some reason. But the same thing goes for the art of gathering. So when you gather together and you're with other people, there's something magical about getting together with other people. And there is a quality of that when I gather with other people in VR, but there's also something about Something that's missing of like what that means to sort of be in physical presence with other people. Maybe it's just a bandwidth of all the emotions that you can detect on people's faces, body language, a lot of other subtle things, but also could be just a physical consciousness thing that we haven't really yet fully figured out, but As you've been gathering people and doing these different live performances, have you been able to qualify or quantify what that difference is between what translates, what feels like you're still gathering, and then what's missing from these virtual gatherings?
[00:52:27.029] Kiira Benz: I think the biggest thing that I feel is missing is eye contact. That's just something that we can't replace. And I think we'll try and mimic it, and we'll get closer, and that will be convincing to some degree. But I never like to think about virtual reality that this is a place where we want to live 24-7. To me, this is a place where we come to do a special experience We come to explore a special thing. We come to challenge ourselves. We come to learn something. But it is not meant to replace reality and the other really wonderful and still very magical things that can happen in reality. So I mean, the great thing now is we can take our audience to fly. you know, it's still helpful to remind people to double check their surroundings so they don't go walking into their walls. But we can essentially take audiences to fly and keep them very safe. And that is something that we know we cannot do. in the physical world. So there are these opportunities, I think, that come out of VR and those sort of magic moments. And I think, especially right now in the pandemic, gathering has turned into one of those really magical things, which has just been a through line in our work, like bringing community together, gathering, whether it be physical, whether it be digital, we've always been doing that for years with my team of Double Eye Studios, but now, It just feels like it has even more importance. And as we've been bringing audiences in, going back to our early experimental work in March, we were just getting all this feedback of people like, thank you. Thank you for creating a space where I could feel like I'm with other people.
[00:54:08.649] Kent Bye: Yeah. And Joan, I wanted to ask you in terms of like this project, because it's a, it's a live theater project and HP used to be very involved with location-based entertainment. And so just wondering strategically, if there's other things that are happening and the type of experimentation that is happening with Kira and Double Eye Studios kind of experiment a little bit, like what the other strategic interest for HP is when you look at a project like this?
[00:54:33.336] Joanna Popper: When we look at a project like this, it's about a track record of work, you know, whose vision do we align with? You know, some of the core values we have are around, you know, continuing to push the creative spirit of the technology forward. You know, the legacy of HP, it's our 81st year and our... We're the founding fathers of Silicon Valley, two founders working together with Walt Disney. So, well, Kira's, I guess, in a very long line of illustrious media moguls that we've worked with at HP, starting with Walt Disney for the movie Fantasia. But, you know, HP has a very strong interest in the media and entertainment world in general, certainly in VR, but beyond VR as well. You know, I think something like 80% of all the Oscar-winning films films for graphics effects films were created on HP workstation. So, you know, we see our technology as a tool to improve upon people's lives. And in this case, it's a virtual reality technology as a tool to empower, empower us to connect, to collaborate, to create, and to learn. And so, you know, Kira did all of those things really with this project. And, and, you know, she just, she has, she's, she's an award-winning director. She's a, brings together a great team. And she also focuses heavily on making sure that she has a representative team, an inclusive team. And so those are some core values for us as well. And they just do such great work with the technology that they use that full power of the HP reverbs and of our workstation. So everything about the project really aligns with our core values. Hmm.
[00:56:07.250] Kent Bye: Yeah. And Kira, maybe you could talk about what it was like to be at Venice with nobody actually being at Venice this year, but also you won an award, a golden line for the best VR user experience. Maybe just like talk a bit about being honored with that.
[00:56:22.042] Kiira Benz: Yeah, we won a lion award. Yeah. Yeah. For this best VR immersive user experience, which I think is really interesting actually, because I do think about the user, or I like to call them player, you know, so keenly spend a lot of time thinking about how we get them through, which is why I also like this early onboarding is, you know, still something that I want us to get to figure out. But, you know, we just do have some layers of of UI that we can't necessarily affect ourselves. It was really interesting being at a festival this year when so many festivals have either had to postpone or cancel. And I really feel for all of the festivals having played on many of them over the last several years. I feel for the programmers and the festivals and how do they maintain their identity And so much is around their location, which we cannot get to in many cases. And Venice did a really interesting version this year where they had a kind of hybrid format where they did show some films in Venice and they built new venues that were outdoors. And then all of the VR section, Venice VR Expanded, happened virtually online. And I think that was genius of the programmers, Liz Rosenthal and Michelle Rayak, because they they were able to keep within the festival dates and do what VR is best at, which is being virtual. We can still embrace our category and see ourselves represented and put the work out there for this year. We don't have to wait for the typical doors to be opened. So I thought that was a really smart decision and really innovative on their part and kudos to the whole festival for organizing this. I did feel a sense of community I remember going into the Venice VR garden that they built and just standing in the fake sunlight, the virtual sunlight and feeling like, oh, it feels just like the sunlight in Venice. I mean, that felt real to me. And it was, you know, a nice exploration outside of Mount Olympus where I've been living for the last few months. So I don't know. And they had dolphins jumping around and some playful elements. And I did get to bump into people that I would normally see at festivals and meet new people and have conversations with players that had come through our show and said, oh, I love the Greek chorus avatar and I'm going to keep wearing it. They would wear it through the rest of the festival. I mean, I had some wonderful interactive moments. And of course, it's not the same as sitting down in the lounge at Venice in the garden and having like a proper cocktail and a nice conversation and feeling the heat on you. Those things are not there, but it felt like a really close proximity to that.
[00:59:06.576] Joanna Popper: It's interesting because all three of us have been to the Venice VR Festival in the past, in the Biennale. It'd be interesting to know how that experience was. So for us, we know what they're creating and what the piazza is normally like and what the Lido is like and what the VR island is like. and why they made the choices they made for the specific environments that they made as gathering areas for the festival. So it'd be interesting to talk to people who also had never been to see how that experience was. There are a couple of other things I wanted to add to this. I think they also did actually do some, I think they picked like 14 places around the world and did some level of hybrid where you could actually go. And Ken, I think Portland's one where you live, where you could actually go and get in Headset and if you didn't have VR technology at home and have that experience of engaging with some of the content. And then on the awards, I think we have to talk about the actual logistics of when Kara was given the award and the announcement because it was incredibly funny. So I think we have to talk about it. I'll talk about it from my point of view. So we were all in the garden and there was a screen put up and we were all in there in our avatars and watching the official awards ceremony that was live from Venice. And so those of us that were sitting there and watching and lots of great actors and stars from around the world were on stage and giving awards, often in Italian. And then Kira had done a tape. And so she did a tape, I think, the night before. And it was an amazing tape that she did it in English and in Italian. And so that was fantastic. So Kira, I don't know if you want to talk about that. But then we also have to talk about the actual moment where they gave the award and the funny things with the avatars and all of that.
[01:00:52.231] Kiira Benz: Right. I mean, these are the moments that we're still working through, right? Like, how do you pick up an object? So like Wonderful, Liz and Michelle are like presenting the lion to me, this award, and just being able to pick up the object. And there was something that they'd done to protect the stage, of course, but it did not allow anyone to approach the stage and then pick something up. so it was just like the typical moments of like oh great and how do we how do we pick this and how do we just hold it upright so it's like presentable and it's you know honored this you know hugely respected and very special object right like we don't want to turn it upside down we certainly don't want to drop it on the ground like everything you know that could possibly happen by accident right not intentionally but like just kind of jumping around it was The lion came to life, let's say that maybe. Yeah.
[01:01:44.321] Kent Bye: This is like trying to recreate the process of winning an award, getting up on stage, receiving your golden lion, which is a virtual golden lion to give your acceptance speech. And you are trying to get up there on stage and there's an invisible wall that is preventing people from like, rushing onto the stage and so they couldn't figure out how to turn that off and i i remember i tried to get on and i remember like looking to my left and seeing a big long line of avatars who were trying to like somehow get onto the stage but they were all being blocked by this invisible wall meanwhile you're about to go accept this award and give your speech but like you can't even get on the speech and not only that you can't even get access to your virtual statue that was of this big moment of you winning this big award. But yeah, it'll be one of those moments that it's like the early days of VR of how- Right, right.
[01:02:34.317] Kiira Benz: Exactly, right. We all tried. Everyone tried with full hearts and best intentionality. And of course, keep in mind, this was like 20 minutes before we were opening our show. So we had one more show to be running and backstage, you know, I'm juggling a couple different things and have my head in some important places. So I'm needed back there still right now. So that was, it was a good juggle. And I wanted to thank so many more people. And I remember just feeling like, and my audio was just glitching out because it was just at its max at that moment. So like, you know, I was totally unmuted. My microphone was working, but no one could hear each other. It was just great. all technology pushed to its limit. But I feel like that's the point, right? Aren't we supposed to push these worlds to their limit? We're supposed to figure out how much we can do until we break things. So, you know, we almost broke the ceremony. We pretty much broke it down as a collective group. So everyone that was in there, I feel like we're all responsible and we're all part of that grand experiment and moment in time of breaking the first virtual Venice Awards ceremony.
[01:03:38.804] Joanna Popper: And there was that portal. Remember, there was a portal we had to go to. We had to go to some portal behind, and I think both you and I... It was a secret portal. We had to jump on these stones to get to the spot where the portal was, and we both fell, and we respawned, right?
[01:03:53.252] Kiira Benz: Eventually, my technologist, my lead developer, Mark Sternberg, actually managed to find a way, like, figure it out, because, of course, he's a dev, so he knows how the world was built. I actually made it to the stage, too. And you made it to the stage, but he gave me the trophy, and so then, yes, I was hopping across stones, teleporting while holding the trophy. It was like totally not natural things, right? Only in the virtual world would that happen. And my avatars wearing heels, that would have totally gone down south in the real world, right?
[01:04:17.645] Joanna Popper: It pats off to Michelle and Liz for putting that ceremony together and making it. And of course the team for VRChat and Vroom too. They all did such a great job.
[01:04:29.933] Kiira Benz: They did an amazing job.
[01:04:30.914] Joanna Popper: It was definitely memorable. It was very memorable.
[01:04:35.106] Kent Bye: And, uh, and finally, what do you each think is the ultimate potential of virtual reality and immersive storytelling and what it might be able to enable?
[01:04:45.036] Kiira Benz: The ultimate. Wow. That's a big question, Kent. Um, I feel like there are so many things that I want to see this medium become, and I believe that it will happen. It's just going to take time and we'll have to see where the first level of innovation comes from. First, you know, the best that I can do is continue to make stories and try to keep experimenting trying new things and pushing the limits and breaking the world and breaking the mechanics. I feel like the ultimate will be that we will feel liveness and presence and magic that we don't have in the real world. And we'll want to have these experiences as communities together. While to also have solo internal moments and exploration, meditative special moments and journeys alone as well and challenge ourselves. I think that there's a lot that can come out of this that is way beyond entertainment. I don't just see this as an entertainment medium. I think the power for education is there, the ability to take yourself to another world and another reality and really experience something, and way beyond that of a 360 video. So I think that there's just much more to come from this medium, and we're just at the very beginning.
[01:06:08.697] Joanna Popper: Yeah, I agree. I agree with that. I would say, for me, this is the future of computing and all that that brings. And so inside of that, that means It provides us the ability to connect, to collaborate, to create, to learn and way beyond media, certainly in media and way beyond. And so what that means is that we're in the process of creating it now. And we have that ability to have a tremendous amount of impact in the direction that this industry goes and the direction that the future of computing goes. And in the past, the past eras of computing were not particularly inclusive or representative of all of society. And so today, working with people like Kira and so many others in this great industry, we have the possibility to bring so many voices, unique voices and representative voices to the table and to create this next wave of computing so that it works, really, really works for everybody.
[01:07:09.161] Kent Bye: Great. Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the immersive community?
[01:07:14.264] Kiira Benz: Join us in Mount Olympus, wherever we might be, you know, just come into our world and fly with us and have more friends by headsets. I mean, I just want to see more people in the space and people becoming comfortable with being in the space and embodying that of an avatar and wanting to interact. I want to see people, you know, step away from the chair and into something. I think that there's just so, so far that we can go, but we also need our audience to be educated to come there with us.
[01:07:44.531] Joanna Popper: I would say first, just, you know, thank you to Kira and Double Eye Studios and to everybody, you know, the actors and the cast, the crew and everybody who worked on this production, because it was such a huge accomplishment and huge, huge lift to make it possible. And yeah, You know, just thank you for working with us and working with our technology and bringing us in. We really are appreciative of that. And yes, definitely echo what Kira said about virtual reality made this production possible in a way that it wouldn't be in today's world. And so just grateful that this technology exists and the people like Kira and her team exist to bring it to its full potential.
[01:08:23.697] Kent Bye: Very cool.
[01:08:24.277] Kiira Benz: Thank you, HP and Kent for also being part of my journey. I mean, HP just supporting us with all of this and Kent for having these intelligent conversations and adding to this discourse and thought process. It's really important, I think, for everyone's minds to be thinking in these ways.
[01:08:44.269] Joanna Popper: Kent's a hero.
[01:08:46.191] Kent Bye: Thanks, yeah.
[01:08:46.651] Joanna Popper: Kent is a hero, even if he sometimes only feels like a ghost. We all know he's the true hero.
[01:08:53.100] Kent Bye: Very cool. Well, Kira and Joanna, just thank you for joining me today and for working on this project. I think there's a lot of really actually interesting blending of theater and gaming and world exploration and storytelling and agency. It's an interesting mix. On top of the social element, I think is also relatively new when it comes to the types of virtual live performance I've seen. So that group experience is something that I think I'm interested to see how that continues to evolve. And What's it mean to kind of go through these different worlds to help tell the stories. So, yeah, thanks again for putting this all together. Congratulations on the win at Venice. And, uh, yeah, thanks for joining me here on the podcast. So thank you. Thank you. 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 this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
