Atomu is a social VR experience that premiered at the Sundance New Frontier Biodigital Theater on Friday, January 24, 2020 by co-creators Shariffa Ali (half-Kenyan, half-Ethiopian) and Yetunde Dada (half-Zambian, half-Nigerian) who met growing up in South Africa. Atomu based upon a Kenyan Kikuyu tribal myth of Wacici, where if you walk around a Mugamo tree seven times then “a man may become a woman and a woman may become a man.”
The first half of the virtual reality experience features a volumetric capture dance performance of two people representing Wacici and an archetypal representation of self-love, and then the second half is an emergent, participatory movement piece with the four other audience members who are playing the roles of ancestors who are assisting in this ritual. These embodied actions are second order behaviors in that it’s really up to the social dynamics of the other participants that dictates whether the group achieves the full extent of a participatory movement piece, or whether it becomes more of a passive and static experience.
I had a chance to catch up with the co-creators Ali and Dada on the opening night to explore their experiential design process and deeper intentions in the creation of this piece that explores tribal mythic concepts of gender identity, and attempts to create a group ritual experience in virtual reality.
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Music: Fatality
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: the Voices of VR podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. So I'm going to be continuing on in my series of looking at some of the experiences from Sundance 2020, unpacking some of the immersive storytelling innovations, as well as the experiential design process. So today's episode is with Otomu, which is kind of like this group ritual where you're in this virtual reality experience with for other people, and it's a recreation of this ancient Kikuyu myth from a tribe in Kenya, where if you walk around a tree seven times, then a man becomes a woman and a woman becomes a man. And so it's this ancient African ritual that's around gendered fluidity. And so they wanted to bring this ritual to life and to talk about how there is parts of the culture before the colonial times that actually talked about these issues of gender. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Sharifa Ali as well as Yetunde Dada happened on Friday, January 24th, 2020 at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:15.540] Shariffa Ali: Hi, my name is Sharifa Ali and I'm the director and co-creator of Atomu.
[00:01:21.682] Yetunde Dada: Hi, I'm Yetunde Dada and I'm one of the co-creators of Atomu.
[00:01:26.208] Kent Bye: And so maybe you could give me a bit more context as to your background and your journey into virtual reality.
[00:01:32.125] Shariffa Ali: Well, the important thing to know is that Yetu and I go way back, all the way back to high school in Pretoria, South Africa, where we grew up. And this project for us has been a labor of love and a form of a long-term reunion, so to speak. It's taken us all over the country and to London and Paris as well. So it's been a wonderful opportunity for us to reignite our wonderful high school friendship. I enter the VR space as a theatre maker, so I am primarily a director based in New York City, and this is the first time that I am working in this form.
[00:02:13.515] Yetunde Dada: My background is actually in tech, so focusing on design of user experiences for people and then also iterating on feedback to improve future versions of the piece. So I guess Sharifa and I are like well matched to actually work together because we've always described Sharifa has the heart and then I sometimes have a brain.
[00:02:32.407] Shariffa Ali: Always, you have all the brain and all the heart too.
[00:02:37.430] Kent Bye: So yeah, maybe you could give a bit more context as to this experience that I just went through here at Sundance.
[00:02:43.380] Shariffa Ali: So this experience is based on ancient Kikuyu mythology. Kikuyu is a tribe based in Kenya and in this myth you are following a protagonist Waikiki. You play the part of an ancestor and Waikiki is performing a ritualistic dance around a Kenyan tree called a mugamo tree. This Mugambo tree is known for its mythic and magical properties and one of the many, many myths around this Mugambo tree is that if one were to walk around the Mugambo tree seven times, one could change one's gender. And that is explosive and crazy for us because that kind of negates some of the present-day sentiments around LGBT and gender fluidity in present-day Kenya.
[00:03:33.867] Yetunde Dada: So, I mean, when we hear terms that describe homosexuality and queerness as being un-African, we now have ways to actually start to question these things. Sharif and I consider ourselves as the storytellers of our generation to basically bring to life this myth and really have, I think, a great reflection on what pre-colonial Kenya was like. So we do kind of comment on that a bit in the piece, and we hope you were able to pick it up.
[00:03:58.313] Kent Bye: Yeah, so this was set up to be a multiplayer experience and there's been some technical difficulties actually not just in this experience, but in a lot of different experiences with whether it's Wi-Fi or connectivity, you know, I've had a number of different issues, but in this particular case, it's set up to be a group ritual. I didn't actually get a chance to do a group ritual because They just had me go through it as an individual because I wanted to have a chance to talk to each of you before you take off tomorrow. But hopefully I'll get a chance to see it again later this week. But maybe you could talk a bit about what you were trying to do with creating like a group ritual and how you see virtual reality can start to take some of these indigenous practices of these rituals and start to bring them to life in virtual reality.
[00:04:38.423] Shariffa Ali: When you think about African culture and particularly Kikuyu culture as a whole. Our communities are governed by our elders, our ancestors. We're often referred to in the collective term. So the idea of like being an individual in these spaces is somewhat foreign to those cultural practices. So we really wanted to make sure that our piece reflected that communal experience because back home that's what we do, we roll in packs.
[00:05:08.162] Yetunde Dada: And I guess the second part is maybe what we actually ascribe Waikiki to do in this myth. So Waikiki is not changing gender. Waikiki is on the journey to become the most honest version of themselves. And the fact that you get to do that within a multiplayer Ancestry based experience means that as a community, not only are we helping someone on their journey to be the most honest versions of themselves, but we also get to experience this lived expression of how all of us understand what it's like to not be yourselves. And that is like a human experience, we all go through that. So being able to see people in that space as you go through the journey is really powerful.
[00:05:48.570] Shariffa Ali: It allows for that connection, for us to acknowledge that you as well, you know? You as well.
[00:05:54.052] Yetunde Dada: You're not alone. You're not alone.
[00:05:56.853] Kent Bye: I'm wondering if you could expand a bit more on the role of ancestors in African culture, but also specifically in this piece, because as a user, you're taking on the role of an ancestor. So maybe could talk a bit about, you know, how the African culture sees ancestors.
[00:06:12.958] Shariffa Ali: Well, to begin to even imagine what it must be like to think or see or conceive of the notion of ancestors, we have to first bring up this idea of death, right? This notion of passing on. And, you know, in many African cultures, there is the belief that when you die, you're not actually gone. In fact, you are just transcending to another plane. And in this plane you have control over how your descendants are moving through this earthly plane. And so, you know, I'm a believer in the ancestors. I believe that the people who have come before me have carved a path for me and have broken, you know, away branches so that I can have space. And so I am in constant dialogue with the ancestors for guidance, for encouragement, and to make the path clear. And so our piece is based on that idea that we are connected to those who have come before us. And those who have come before us can also shed light on our current predicament.
[00:07:18.473] Yetunde Dada: It's actually also another reflection of how the ancestors would have the knowledge of what things were like before. So your role as an ancestor actually help us remember what things were like before and we accept you any way that you present yourself because this is how things are supposed to be now in present day and in future.
[00:07:39.794] Shariffa Ali: Yeah, there's that idea that maybe we as people in the present and now can be short-sighted and that once you maybe transcend the earthly plane, you know it all. We're everywhere. And so that idea is really potent to us.
[00:07:54.743] Kent Bye: I have a friend from South Africa and he was talking to me about these concepts of Africa time and he would say this phrase of just now we would say let's meet just now and you think just now means right now but it means like you know sometime in the future where we may collide again and so it's sort of this concept of time and the Western culture we tend to have a pretty monochronic linear concepts of time but My understanding of the Africa time is that it's much more either polychronic or cyclical or in the way that in some ways the ancestors are actually just as alive now as you have a relationship to them and you can be in connection to them. So just curious if you could talk a bit about Africa time and the connection to time and ancestors as well.
[00:08:37.223] Shariffa Ali: Well, to talk about Africa time, we can also talk about the timeline of this project. This project was created just now in that we've been working on it for in, I guess, Eurocentric time, three years, three whole years. And yes, that idea of time not being governed by, you know, minutes and hours and seconds, but rather that it is on a continuum. and that it is unceasing and unending. And I think when you start to think about life through that lens, you release yourself from some of the concerns of like, oh, I have to hit this career goal by this time, or oh, if I, you know, I'm failing if I haven't done this. I think it's a release, you know.
[00:09:19.633] Yetunde Dada: I think the reflection on Africa Time and what it means for this piece, this myth is old. It's really, really old. And the way that it's been passed down from generation to generation is obviously through storytelling. So I think it's actually powerful to reflect that it's a really old myth, it's been passed down orally, and now we're bringing to life this historical myth in present day. So yeah, I guess Africa Time really works well for Otomu, in that sense that we can bring it to life now.
[00:09:49.552] Shariffa Ali: You know, with that tradition of orality and oral storytelling, as stories are passed down from generation to generation, it's the responsibility of each storyteller to add the nuance or the intrigue or the drama to the story that they're telling. And so if we're to say that we are the storytellers of our generation, then our tools are these emerging technologies that we can use to bring our myths to the here and the now.
[00:10:18.996] Kent Bye: Well the other thread that I'm picking up here on this piece is that there was the myth and the very old story and practices around gender and then colonialism happened with a lot of making it taboo and really making it not okay to have this part of the myth and now there's a bit of a reclamation of that so maybe you could talk a bit about that sort of journey of what the concepts were around gender maybe in the myth and the relationship to it and then So the colonial influence and now the post-colonial recovery.
[00:10:51.379] Yetunde Dada: So for this one, I think working on Atomio has been amazing to actually uncover more mythology than we even imagined. So we originally came across the myth and then began to dig deeper into different African stories from around the continent and discovered deities or gods who were not bound by gender. You're not bound by the binary. So to really understand that this was like an old way of the way people viewed sacred aspects in their life has been very important. Obviously we do look at the effects of colonialism, religion as well in changing those perspectives and where we really hope Otomo is able to change mindsets is to really remind people of what things were. Because when you hear people reference that, you know, obviously gender fluidity and queerness is un-African, we now can start to have a very different conversation because they are.
[00:11:44.235] Shariffa Ali: This story is living proof that it is not un-African to explore a myriad of versions of yourself. It is not un-African to be queer. In fact, it is African. And it was.
[00:11:59.878] Kent Bye: Well, the other big striking thing about this experience for me is the dance and the dance performance, but also really trying to encourage people to walk around the tree. Like you said, there's this myth that if you walk around the tree seven times and that you're actually like raising your hands and sending energy into the tree and actually being instructed to say specific things together in this experience. So maybe you could talk a bit about levels of embodiment, both through the dance and how you were wanting to actually move people and give them an embodied experience of this myth.
[00:12:30.017] Yetunde Dada: And so this is actually when we envisioned how might an ancestor play a role in your journey. This is actually where most of these user interactions came into play. So we did wonder at one point, were we going to make you dance along? And we realized, no, that's not your role in Waikiki's journey. You accept Waikiki in whatever form they come in and whatever form they need to leave the experience in. All you can do is play a role of helping them on their journey. We know that Waikiki has to undergo obstacles in parts letting go of who they were and trying to accept the new part of who they will be. So your role really as an ancestor is based on those user interactions of how might we interact with Waikiki as we encourage them on their journey.
[00:13:14.867] Kent Bye: Yeah, there's another aspect of this experience where there's a myth that you're drawing from and then it's talking a lot about gender and unification. You have a splitting into polarities of maybe could talk about who are these different characters in this story and how that relates back to these original myths.
[00:13:35.553] Shariffa Ali: Well, the first one character that we have is Waikiki's father, who is not seen but heard in the experience. Waikiki's father says the words Shaitani, Shaitani, which means Satan, Satanic, Satanic, because Waikiki is being punished or criticized, chastised by their father for not performing in their assigned gender. The other character, Limo,
[00:13:58.816] Yetunde Dada: is actually the representation of self-love. That's why you see Limo stepping out of Waikiki's body and being able to pull them back and help them escape the tree and accept who they need to be and learning to trust their new self and learning to trust the process. And then we also have Waikiki themselves, and Waikiki is actually referenced as part of the only, I guess, the only written account we came across of the myth, which actually speaks about Waikiki. And the interesting thing about Waikiki's name is that it's both a female and male name. So it's used in either context, which really was a very clever feature. Waikiki as a character also features in a few other Kikuyu tribal myths as well. So, yeah, it was quite interesting.
[00:14:38.231] Shariffa Ali: The adventures of Waikiki. Might be a series.
[00:14:42.580] Kent Bye: Well, there seemed to be a body that, I don't know if it identified as male, I sort of projected onto that it was a man, but who was that character?
[00:14:51.688] Yetunde Dada: Interesting that you've mentioned body design because we actually tried to aim for a kind of like genderless body. Could I actually reference like whose body that we were... So we were using black African women's sport bodies to actually reference the strength and power of Waikiki's body, but still actually reference the fact that it's not genderless, but it's because it's a strong body that you're actually seeing. African women have muscle, and they're still women. So that wasn't even a question for us. Character design was very important to us.
[00:15:30.911] Kent Bye: Maybe you could talk about your first time that you heard about virtual reality and your point at which that you decided that you wanted to explore VR as a medium.
[00:15:40.392] Shariffa Ali: Oh my goodness, I remember encountering a piece that was shot on a Theta 360 camera and it was like almost a dinner table where I was at the center of the meal and so I would see people around me in 360 degrees reaching for food and talking and I was really moved at being able to be somewhat a fly on the wall and being at the center of this meal. So my first experience was watching a piece that was shot by some students.
[00:16:12.079] Yetunde Dada: I think the first time I realized how impactful the medium was, was watching iPhilip. It's actually a piece by Okyo Studio which focuses on the telling of you being essentially a computer and having a 360 degree experience of you being artificial intelligence and living in this computer and realizing you actually want to be human. So everyone around you is fascinated with the fact that this human presence is occupying. Who is the character based on Philip K. Dick? He's a doctor or scientist. He's a scientist. And realizing you want to be human but really being stuck in the computer because that's where you see everyone else there. And that's when I realized how powerful virtual reality could be for telling stories in new ways.
[00:16:57.847] Shariffa Ali: When I watched Notes on Blindness and got the experience of what it is like for a person who cannot see, I was blown away and left with such a profound sense of empathy, literally like rewired from the inside, and have since joined numerous voluntary organizations that provide support for people who are blind or partially blind because of that VR piece.
[00:17:27.650] Kent Bye: Well I know that there's this dialectic between the individual and the self and the group and the community and it feels like a lot of Western culture has been focused on the role of the individual and kind of reducing things down, a lot of reductive materialism and science. But I think there's also the other part which is being in relationship and being in community. and having more of a relational putting your friends and family and connections and indigenous ideas of all my relations of not only that you're connected to the moment but also the past is connected to the present is connected to the future and so I feel like there's something about groups and community rituals that gets you in touch with that more relational experience. And I'm just curious to hear a little bit more about the role of ritual and group ritual and how virtual reality might be able to help bring back some of those relational and ritualistic experiences.
[00:18:18.603] Yetunde Dada: So we're obviously still having issues with the technology. But I think one of the things that we've been so excited about with the multiplayer or multi-user experience for pieces is the fact that you're able to connect and experience empathy throughout pieces with many more people than you would have. Virtual reality in the way that it's currently developed is a very solitary experience. It focuses on the I instead of the we. But that's not how we live. So being able to actually have that we experience in virtual reality is very exciting for us. So we're really excited to see the technology develop further so that we can experience these things together.
[00:19:00.001] Shariffa Ali: And I also think that even if the technology doesn't meet us where we're at, I think that's our responsibility for all makers, even you listening at home, because we have to imagine what the possibilities are in order for the technology to meet us there. So I actually embrace the bugs, the glitches. I also embrace the fact that sometimes I feel like an imposter in this space. because I don't have a background in tech and I come to this as a theater maker, but embracing all those things is what will make this inclusive and exciting.
[00:19:35.357] Kent Bye: I saw the Ingrid Kopp's name, which I know she is from South Africa, but we also have Electric South. Maybe you could talk about Electric South and what that is doing to be able to bring about more virtual reality experiences from Africa.
[00:19:49.057] Yetunde Dada: Electric South is awesome. So Ingrid is amazing. She's a friend of Otomo. She's a friend of Atlas 5. So we know her and she's great. She's fantastic. I really appreciate the work that Electric South is doing in terms of empowering African storytellers to use the medium of virtual reality to tell stories. So in the sense that they basically have a rolling incubation program where you can apply. with the basis of what your story will be and they basically help with constructing the narrative with you and then eventually with the prototyping of those concepts. So, in a sense, they're allowing new types of stories to be told because of the role that they're playing there. They also obviously provide support financially in funding for the films to obviously bring them to light. So, funding, expertise, people that know culture, people that know the industry and how it works, really means that different stories will be told because of the work that they're doing.
[00:20:50.793] Kent Bye: And for each of you, what do you each want to experience in VR?
[00:20:56.354] Yetunde Dada: empathy. So I think we're most, even if we just reflect on the pieces that meant the most to us, it was this whole thing of VR as an empathy machine, which is obviously what it's quoted, but really being able to design empathy into a piece is challenging. But for me, empathy and understanding of whatever is being highlighted in the piece is what I'd always like to experience in virtual reality.
[00:21:20.862] Shariffa Ali: I want to feel seen. I think that visibility is so important. And I want to feel even in a VR experience that I matter and that we all matter. Great.
[00:21:34.990] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of immersive technologies and immersive storytelling might be and what it might be able to enable?
[00:21:45.596] Shariffa Ali: Whoa, that's a big one. we'll be able to create our own realities and we'll be able to embrace those realities and I think that that is incredibly, it's an incredible idea, it's an incredible notion.
[00:22:01.171] Yetunde Dada: I think for me what's most exciting is that we have new ways of telling stories and some of these new ways are actually more applicable to stories that were not told before. So I think that whole growth of new ways of telling stories telling new stories is very important for me. And then also I think, you know, obviously we've seen the evolution of things like mixed reality and maybe the haptics effect because now you'll be able to feel things as well with the technology. So I'm really just excited to see how immersive virtual reality can actually get.
[00:22:33.474] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the immersive community?
[00:22:40.048] Shariffa Ali: If you have an idea and you think it's impossible, it's probably not. And keep doing it. There is a need for content. There is a need for storytellers. So keep going. The community here is incredible. We have made lifelong friends in this process, in this journey. And it's a space that wants to be inclusive. It's a space that is hungry for community and connection. So keep going.
[00:23:07.137] Yetunde Dada: I think it's overall just realizing that we are two African women. We never thought that we would ever be here. So really just dream bigger and we hope that whatever you take from our journey that you are inspired to do your own things and really just persevere and try.
[00:23:26.825] Shariffa Ali: Use our piece as a ladder for your own work.
[00:23:31.942] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, I was really moved by the piece and really enjoyed it. And yeah, just all the stuff that you're bringing in and just happy to be introduced to and have this embodied experience of this myth. So thanks for all the long journey that you've had on creating this piece and for being here to talk about it. So thank you.
[00:23:46.266] Shariffa Ali: No, thank you. Thank you so much for having us. We love the podcast. So this is a full circle moment for us.
[00:23:53.208] Kent Bye: Awesome. Thanks. So that was Sharifa Ali. She's the director and co-creator, as well as Yotunde Dada, who's also the co-creator of Otomu. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, well, this was an experience that was a group experience. And when I tried to see it the first time, I only had a chance to see it by myself. I had a chance to see it again with other people, but at the time of doing this actual recording of the interview, the technology was having some technical difficulties. So I had to come back and do it again later. So I actually had a chance to do an A-B test of doing it by myself and doing it with other people. And what was interesting to me is that there's a lot of different second order behaviors that they're trying to engender within this experience, where they actually want people to do this group ritual. And I felt like when I was doing it by myself, I actually had this opportunity to move around unencumbered by any other social peer pressure. And I was able to walk around the tree like seven times. But when I actually saw it with a group of people, there was certain social dynamics that actually started to get into play where everybody ended up kind of standing there, not moving around the tree. So I think this is a design challenge in terms of how to best encourage people to follow around this experience. to give them explicit prompts but also to encourage within the experiential design that people would actually want to walk around the tree. So part of the problem I think with watching it in the group and why people were wanting to stand still is that there's this dance that's going around and the dance is actually moving around the tree. And what people ended up doing when I watched it in the group was to just kind of stand there and to, you know, have the tree was often occluding people from the other side, their view. And I think they wanted to maybe organically have people start to move, but then later in the experience, they actively encourage people to start to move around. But if no one started to move around, you know, I started to move around and other people didn't. So then who are the docents tried to stop me from walking around. So it was sort of a weird. situation where the whole point of this if you read the instructions of like okay this is a an ancient myth where you're going to be walking around the tree but how can you go about actually creating the way that the dance is moving around that actually makes it a better experience if everybody is walking around because if people are walking around at constant speed then they actually may be including themselves and seeing the main part of the story that is unfolding so either you're receiving what the story is trying to unfold or you're trying to participate in this movement, but yet if you feel like you're participating in that movement, you don't want to feel like you're being penalized by missing what the story that is there that's unfolding. And so when I went through it by myself, I didn't have to worry about anybody else's experience just because I was able to follow around the action as I was walking around by myself. And I felt like that embodied experience of being able to be moving around the tree while watching it felt better than standing still and trying to kind of peek around the tree. So that was I guess that's a bit of an open question for if you want to create an experience like that where you have people move around then if you want it to be an emergent behavior then how do you encourage that behavior or is there stuff within either the onboarding process where you sort of give the gist of what this is about you know feel free to move around or if you don't feel like moving that's fine but you know be aware that other people may be moving to kind of give the okay that you know there's going to be different social dynamics that may be emergent but whatever you feel like it's okay like you don't have to feel like you do one thing or another now the actual experience was volumetric capture of the dancing between these two people it kind of splits off and there's two people are dancing together but the symbolism of that is not necessarily intuitively obvious that this other split off represents this aspect of self-love And so it's one of those experiences that I think that the more that you know going into it, the more you extrapolate in it, but it's also like open-ended enough that just by the embodied movements alone, you may not get the full story. I love the opportunity to talk to both Sharifa and Yotunde just because, you know, they're able to really flesh out some of those different open questions. And I think that And when you think about experiences like this, it's like, how do you give a right amount of information that you would want? Is it in the experience? Is it the onboarding? Is it the offboarding? For me, it was like, I want to learn more about this experiential design process, but also the deeper intention. The other thing is that you do have different aspects of participating and you see yourself sending orbs up into the tree when you're participating in this, as you're lifting up your hands, but you can't see other people's. And that's something that they're going to add in at some point, you know, for whatever reason, technical limitations or time ran out, but I think it would help to give you this sense of participating in a group ritual. If you can see the results of the agency of the other people within the experience. And so as they lift their hands to see how they're sending energy into this tree as well. So there's a lot of aspects here about ancestors, about Africa time and the different conceptions of time and the different relationships that African culture has around ancestors and how it's about death and passing on and transcending into another plane. And that they have this active relationship with the ancestors and different rituals where they're actively honoring their ancestors. And I appreciated the fact that in this experience, you're embodying those roles of the ancestors. And so as they're walking around this tree, you have the opportunity to send energy back into the lives of people who are still alive, which I think is trying to allow you to step into the shoes of that ancestor and to participate in a ritual like this. And I think in general, I think this is a really powerful concept in terms of trying to bring back these different types of community rituals, because you are an individualized self, but you're also part of a larger community. And I think by being in relationship and doing these different types of community rituals, it really emphasizes that relational aspect of our lives. You know, it's just something that we can start to reimagine what types of rituals that people may have been doing even just a hundred or thousands of years ago, and to be able to rekindle these different types of rituals that really help bond and create a vibrant culture. So I'm glad that I actually had a chance to experience this experience both by myself as an individual as well as with other people. I think the experience of being able to walk around in a circle into this really large room and to feel like I was participating in this larger ritual, I really enjoyed the process of watching this experience as I was walking around. And I think there's a bit of a design challenge and experience like this when you do have a big tree in the middle. And as you walk around, there's kind of an optimal place where you can be walking and to still follow the narrative. So yeah, just thinking about how, you know, if you do want to have people walking around as a group, then how to maybe give everybody an equal experience. So like maybe you, you have. the people that are dancing around in a way that it's not necessarily included for them as they're walking around. You know, that's logistically, I think, a difficult problem to solve exactly, but something like that, where maybe you have five people in, but, you know, they're not experiencing the same spatial experience, but whatever they're seeing, they're able to see the optimal experience for wherever they're at. They're not going to miss anything within the narrative that's unfolding. or to dial that back and to rely more upon these different embodied interactions. I think it's a really difficult problem to solve, which is this balance between if you want to have these second order emergent behaviors to allow people to feel like they're making these choices on their own free will and to participate in this embodied ritual, that they're not going to necessarily be occluded or missing out on some of the different aspects of the story. Because I think that you know a lot of people when they're context of a film festival they want to see what the story is and if you're being asked to participate in a ritual where you're trying to do these embodied actions that trying to have you be in a specific place and time to be able to see part of a story that's unfolding then that's just part of the experiential design trade-offs that you have to make in an experience like this is to You say, okay, now is a time where you're going to be able to walk around. You're not going to miss anything. And I think they did do that in the end, but I think it's like, how do you put that into the experience to kind of break different aspects of social pressure to, from the very beginning to just kind of stand there. So is there something at the very beginning where you can encourage people to maybe move around right off the bat? So they don't have this inertia of not movement and then asking them through the dialogue that's being communicated through narration. So are there other ways that you can encourage people to move as well? I think this is a bit of an open problem for how do you design around this and try to encourage these different types of second order behaviors. But I think overall it's a fascinating topic and I'd love to see a lot more of these different types of rituals be reimagined within virtual reality. So that's all that I have for today. And I just wanted to thank you for listening to 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 list to support a 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 Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
