Here is my third and final interview of a trilogy of interviews with Kiira Benz. This was conducted at Meta Connect 2025, and serves as a sort of career retrospective of Benz’s journey into immersive storytelling. You can check out our previous conversations with our interview about Runnin’ from Sundance New Frontier 2019, our interview about Love Seat from Venice Immersive 2020, and then our interview about Finding Pandora X from Venice Immersive 2020. 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 continue my coverage of MetaConnect 2025, as well as with my final interview, a trilogy of interviews with Kira Binns. I had a chance to connect with her at MetaConnect to kind of do a bit of a career retrospective of her journey into the space, because at MetaConnect Keynote, we Mark said, there's a shift towards more immersive storytelling and 3D storytelling. 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 so I wanted to catch up with Kira because she's been on the cutting edge of pushing forward what's happening in immersive theater and XR. Also, there's a couple of unpublished interviews that I hadn't gone out I have those in the previous two episodes of her piece called Running, but also Finding Pandora X. But she also went on and worked within Meta Horizon Worlds and did a piece called Skits and Giggles. She also is working in accessibility. It's a project called Territory that she presented at XR Axis, trying to consider like screen readers and other accessibility features that they had to build out for that as well. And, you know, just more of a holistic career retrospective of her journey into the space and looking at the ways that she's trying to bring in lots of different elements of interactivity in the context of immersive storytelling and VR for more of this blend of immersive theater in the context of VR. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Kira happened on Wednesday, September 17th, 2025 at the MetaConnect conference at Meta's headquarters in Menlo Park, California. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:47.918] Kiira Benz: Hi, I'm Kira Benz, and I've now abbreviated my name from Benzing to Benz, so that's a little bit of a shift if anyone's been following in the last decade. I have been working in the XR space for a decade. I am the founder of Double Eye Studios, and we make immersive, interactive experiences. A lot of that focuses on live performance and the mix with XR and immersive technology.
[00:02:09.063] Kent Bye: MARK MANDELMANN, JR.: : Great. Maybe you give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space.
[00:02:14.761] Kiira Benz: I started off as a classical actor. I trained at Lambda in the UK and I did other theater training all over the world in Russia and in France at the Sorbonne. And so I took all of those journeys and pathways together from experiential feelings physical, spatial storytelling as an embodied actor and then director in the theatrical space. And when I found my way into physical production and was working in documentary film, but I was always staging things in a theatrical way and making this kind of hybrid cinema where I was mixing big dance musical numbers and closing down streets in New York to make these long spatial shots with musical numbers in film. And the format felt too restrictive and constraining, and I needed a bigger space. I needed something, a medium that was spatial and also nonlinear. And when I found the transmedia world that was playing with different forms of technology and utilizing space, I felt like that was the perfect marriage of using independent filmmaking, theatrical storytelling, the physical body and space. And I found my way to start making 360 films, but also, again, trying to make them interactive. So I entered Samsung's contest and was the only winner from New York at the time. Nice.
[00:03:39.361] Kent Bye: And I know that we've had a number of conversations over the years. What was the name of the theater piece that was at Venice back in 2019?
[00:03:46.164] Kiira Benz: That was called Love Seat, and it was the largest production at the time. Venice was really generous to give us the largest space on the island, and we built a theater for 50 people and then another 20 that joined us in virtual reality. So it was a hybrid production and a format that I'd been playing with for about five years in New York, but to very closed private audiences working out of ThoughtWorks.
[00:04:07.170] Kent Bye: Yeah, and so in the other unpublished interviews that we have, there was running, I believe it was at Sundance 2019, which was a really amazing piece with Reggie Watts.
[00:04:16.363] Kiira Benz: That's right. It was with Reggie Watts. Reggie's always been at the cutting edge. He's always been a great improviser and experimenter and lover of technology. I met him at Sundance on a dance floor and pitched him an idea. And a year later, we came back with a piece that was the first XR production that had ever been directed on the world's largest volumetric stage at Intel studios.
[00:04:38.004] Kent Bye: which is no longer existing and creating a creator of proprietary formats, which I've talked to a number of creators over the years who shot stuff there, but we're still trying to figure out how to decode it. So, yeah, unfortunately, no longer with us. And then another project that we talked about in this era as a part of this trilogy was around finding Pandora X, which, you know, you had done Loveseat, but, you know, to do this kind of immersive theater type of exploration of this intersection between live theatrical performance and theatrical staging within the context of a social VR platform, figuring out the onboarding, all the stuff you had to sort through to even do that. And I know that it was a very cutting-edge piece at the time. And then did it come afterwards that there was the Tender Claws with their theatrical performance that they did on the context of The Tempest, The Under Presents? So did Finding Pandora come before that? No.
[00:05:30.243] Kiira Benz: Finding Pandora came after we were in development at the same time. So I remember meeting Samantha Gorman at a conference. We spoke together at the Woodstock Film Festival. And she was like, we're working on this really secret project, mixing VR and theater. And I was like, my team is also mixing VR and theater. That's really cool to know there are other people in this world, even on our continent, that are doing this. And how do we find each other? And I've always been a fan of Samantha and Danny's work. Their work is really playful. It's really whimsical. They really understand the medium well. And our approach is different in what we did with our players and our audience members, but I think that a similarity that we share is looking at the audience as a group of people that can play within the storyline and be participants.
[00:06:13.462] Kent Bye: Yeah. Now that I recall that at Sundance 2020, they had a demo like off into a loft that I went to go see. And then later after the pandemic had kicked in, they had a lot of these out of work actors that were then being able to be employed within the context of immersive theater. So I know recently you just produced a whole kind of retrospective of Finding Pond or X or a documentary. Maybe you could just say a few words about that.
[00:06:35.273] Kiira Benz: Yeah, that's right, Kent. Thank you for your great memory always to all of these things. I feel like you're storing a catalog of our industry somewhere in your brain and we need to make a proper metaverse library for you for that, an experiential version where we can all be like inside Kent's brain and accessing the little library files. I see myself as a player in that world, pulling little three-dimensional files out. So yes, I did put together, I'd been working on that film. We actually filmed that during the pandemic to this day there's so many things that were done in that stage i was very busy during the pandemic and i think a lot of people maybe in the creative space in the film festival world maybe wondered what happened to me i actually got hired by striver and embodied labs to do a lot of really important work on the medical side where we were making pieces that i think were really critical to the caregivers that were taking care of people in our nursing homes and people also in the food supply chain that were restocking our shelves and just people that were getting burnt out really fast and getting injured on the job. So I directed over a dozen pieces in the healthcare and aging space. And I think that work is really important. I haven't talked a lot about it, but I think it is a really great use for what VR can do and how it can put people in another time and place, but also inside another body And I think it's just amazing for storytelling and for training.
[00:08:01.322] Kent Bye: And so, yeah, just a quick follow on that, because I know Stryver does a lot of training. And so were these pieces that you were directing, were they training videos for who was getting trained?
[00:08:09.997] Kiira Benz: They were workers that were getting trained. So on the embodied lab side, they were health care workers and caregivers. In some cases, we were developing, my team at ,, we were developing branching narratives. And we were enabling people to switch between bodies of being in the elderly body or being in the caregiver body. We did a piece about two years ago with them that rolled out to the state of Arkansas that was enabling people to go on a search and rescue mission where they had hundreds of different pathways that they could end up in. And we were shooting all live action video for that, but also using gamified narrative to give them an option to. make choices and either choose the right path where they are able to save this woman with dementia or potentially choose the wrong path. And then we shot multiple endings and you could not get there in time and it would be pretty critical.
[00:09:00.984] Kent Bye: Yeah. To go back to finding Pandora X, I saw it a couple of times and there was things that you were kind of playing with where you're like onboarding people through this certain path. And then the second time I saw it, they were like, okay, we're going to give you like a little extra immersive experience where I bypass the onboarding that most people went through. And I like. cut straight to a scene where there were some actors that was more of a interactive conversation with some of the key players. And so it was playing with this idea of like social VR, kind of a group guided tour, but really playing with like social dynamics in the context of a theater in a way that I felt like actors were also like group facilitators of discussions and really trying to figure out how to tell the story where the audience was kind of like the Greek chorus going to the piece, but talking out loud and trying to make sense of it, but still having story beats where we would stop and have more of a cinematic or theatrical moment. But it felt like trying to mix together the affordances of emergent social dynamics and conversation in a way that you're trying to tie the story together. So just curious as you think back on it now, how you're starting to take the forms of theater and really blend together some of these new possibilities for emergent social dynamics in the context of VR.
[00:10:16.440] Kiira Benz: That's a great memory, again. And there was a lot that we were trying in that piece. I'd said to myself, coming off of Love Seat, which was a show that we wrote in three days. It was a 45-minute, almost one-hour show that we wrote in three days. And that we fully produced trained actors to be able to perform and have the stamina with a headset. That whole production was six weeks, like, All 3D modeling, rigging avatars, training actors, finding places to stay in Venice, building a theater. Because, of course, when you get to Venice, there's nothing there, not even chairs, right? So, you know, you have a great imagination to fill a box, right? now make it happen. And so we did all of that work for Love Seat in six weeks. I said to myself, we will not do that again for the next show. We'll take a year. And then the pandemic hit and we had so many people writing into us asking us to come into the Love Seat world where I think because a lot of social VR platforms at the time, if you could end up in a room that felt really toxic, where you might not feel comfortable and you might feel Like you don't understand the UI or you might get harassed really easily. And I think people felt really safe in our little loveseat world. And I felt like it never quite reached the aesthetic that I was hoping for because we had to 3D model it so fast and there wasn't time for iteration. That whole production was like building an airplane and flying it all at the same time. So I said, no, we will build a new world. And we had been developing this show called Pandora X that was meant to take place in a dome. So I was like already dreaming about domes in that time of 2019 heading into 2020, moving an audience through immersive worlds, branching narrative. I wanted it to be a hybrid production, but obviously we couldn't do anything. So hybrid meaning physical reality and virtual reality. We couldn't do that. So instead, I said, OK, we just have virtual reality left, I guess. We don't know what's happening in physical reality anymore. So we'll embrace the potential of virtual reality. And we'll build a branching narrative show there. But it can't be what we want for Pandora X. So let's make this prequel called Finding Pandora X. And then we sprinted again. And we built a show in eight weeks. So not much longer.
[00:12:31.114] Kent Bye: You had some custom avatars in there as well.
[00:12:34.660] Kiira Benz: All the avatars were custom. Zeus, Hera, Zeus is this kind of over-the-top character, larger than life, that loves fashion. And so he changes costume multiple times, so he has like eight, almost ten avatars in the piece that he's just changing between. And of course he's losing his power in the piece, so he's also losing limbs. as a representation of losing power and learning that he has power in a different way and that it's not about the physical reality that he was used to and his powers can come from a different place and that can be listening and working with a group of other people and this is where the Greek chorus comes in so he's not able to just dictate and do things the way he's used to so there's a lot going on that production and one goal was to start to play more with branching narrative to involve the audience to do collaborative storytelling in it. So as you were remembering this kind of guided component, but the audience really having conversation with the actors, we were opening up in the structure of the story these moments where the audience could improvise with the actors. And the actors still had to stay within the same land, the same story beats, but there were these flexible time moments And I think what was kind of interesting to me about the show overall is that it would always land pretty close to be the same time. But we had these branching narratives with very different quests where half the audience follows Zeus into the underworld and their journey is much more active and they're breaking things and smashing things. They have some puzzles to put together, but they also have to fight a cyclops. And then Hera's journey that takes the audience into Futura City is much more logic driven. It's more puzzle driven. It's the audience kind of working together in this other way. There's a little bit of physical risk taking where, I mean, physical and still virtual, but there is a jump where they basically two people have to grab these grappling hooks and swing across and build a bridge for the rest of the audience to come over. Yeah. A lot of play and, you know, I think we get a lot of feedback of people saying it's like a mix of game and theater and something else. And I think I was trying to figure out really fast. Of course, we'd been building on our work at R&D from years of having been mixing VR and theater. But now we had an opportunity to try more within this format. And so even to this day, I feel like I was just throwing all my favorite things in and some of my teammates' favorite things like I do. Mark Sternberg, one of our developers on the piece loved escape rooms and it was like, okay, great. How do we work some of that into this new structure?
[00:15:06.683] Kent Bye: And how did the decision come about to make the film and documentary about that project?
[00:15:11.843] Kiira Benz: We had a lot of people that said it's really hard to explain to people what this was. And I think this is true for the entire VR industry. It's a medium that you have to live. It's a medium that really is embodied. And it's hard to do it justice when you're not in it. And I think a two-dimensional visual... trailer is helpful, but it's not quite enough. And so I felt like we needed more context and storytelling around the experience of people. And I also needed, because I was able to do this in Love Seat and in my other work in New York prior to this, I was able to show physical actors and the virtual representation of them and project them onto screens. So the audience gets to see the physical actor making a choice and using their body in a way that is making that avatar reflected and so for the actor i think of it a lot of people compare it to puppeteering i think that's a good example i also think it's very close to mask work which i studied a lot in russia and in the uk and i think that there is a component of these things that you really need to see and expose to the audience but if we're not joined together in physical reality and we're in a headset, how do we get that? We don't get a sense of what the actor is doing. So I felt like if we could make a documentary, we would be able to show and do some split screen work or cut back and forth to be able to explain to the audience that these are real physical humans making physical choices.
[00:16:43.584] Kent Bye: Nice. Well, this will be a great recap and contextualization of our previous conversations. And it sounds like you spent some time at Stryver doing some more training and educational VR in the context of, you know, seeing how storytelling could help in the training context. And so my most recent encounter with some of your work was at XR Access, where you had also produced a piece. Was there any other big pieces that you did ahead of that after Stryver or anything else that you may have also worked on before we talk about that other piece?
[00:17:10.447] Kiira Benz: Yeah, Skits and Giggles, which is we're sitting here at Meta right now, and so we built the first variety show in VR. I remember seeing that.
[00:17:19.927] Kent Bye: What year was that? Did that come out?
[00:17:21.756] Kiira Benz: 2023 at Raindance. And it's funny because I'm here at Meta having just played with all these Gen-AI tools. And the MetaHorizon world's platform is now mobile, which is enormous to see. It's kind of amazing to be able to open a little handheld portal and jump into a world really fast. And I know that there are a lot of haters out there that don't like this platform. But in 2022, in 2021, when we were brought in by Meta to experiment with the platform, it was in beta. It hadn't been released to the public yet. And of course, when things are in that stage, they're not stable yet. That's OK to me. I really like building with tech companies when things are still being shaped because we're able to say, here's from our experience how these things can work together and communicate more closely with the platform as they're building them. And I saw the promise, and I really loved world building with my collaborators in there. I mean, we had to build everything for that world in Headsets. So it's primitive objects and primitive shapes and colors. But you have this real-time collaboration. So you could have four world builders at a time. And you're able to scale yourself in there. So you're able to kind of go into this god mode and place your physical objects and get a sense of the piece. And you can drop down into a more regular avatar size. And it was beautiful and playful and I think quite brilliant. And I know that it took on a certain character and style that I think a lot of people just didn't accept. And of course, coming from having worked with High Fidelity and VRChat and all these other great platforms, I've done lots of research, spending time in other platforms like Sansar. I mean, they're amazing. I wouldn't trade any experience away. I have enjoyed living through all of those great platforms and experiences, but there was something that I really liked. loved about Horizon, and I was disappointed when the rest of the XR industry wasn't ready to give it more of a chance. Unfortunately, we couldn't have enough audience members at a time. It was very small, and that's because of, and this is something, again, that I've seen over the last decade, every social VR platform hits these milestones where you can only host so many avatars in a world. Like, we're moving geometry, we're trying to synchronize audio, there's huge components that make what's possible for a live story to happen in a social VR space. So I felt for them when they hit those benchmarks that I had been through with High Fidelity before and been through with VRChat, and then I could see, like, they're going to get stuck here and we're only going to be able to have a handful of audience members. I've done that so many times. And so those shows were written. We trained a new crop of actors. I was really interested in growing more theatrical performers to come into the space. And I think still to this day, we don't have enough performers and we could use more. And I think that they need to feel comfortable with the tech, feel comfortable with their body, what's happening with their avatar body. And it was great fun. And so we built a variety show. The audience jumps through four different worlds. They end up in a grand finale with a can-can. At the time, there weren't legs in Horizon. And I think that was one of Charlie Fink's most favorite moments. We had a lot of laughter and audience applause there. And I think it was fun. And I mean, many of our actors and one of our writers is on Broadway now in a show called Oh Mary, Jen Harris, who's a phenomenal talent, had been with us in Love Seed and Fighting Pandora. Another one of our actors, McKenna, is in a TV show on Paramount called Tulsa King. And I think it's been great to catch these great performers at these moments where they're curious to explore this other technology and storytelling medium as their careers grow and I feel like hopefully they'll have a soft spot for XR and they'll come back to it at some point.
[00:21:07.355] Kent Bye: And my recollection of Skits and Giggles was that there were the four different worlds, and was there a portal that we went through, or was it all in the same world that you created?
[00:21:17.304] Kiira Benz: Yeah, because, again, there were limitations on worlds and what you could do in them, but it also felt like we could have different things ready in different worlds, so it gave us an opportunity to almost use the world as a curtain. We could have portals. Some of our actors, they were ahead of time and used that as a transition. I'm giving away some of the secrets of the sauce here, I guess. But yes, we jumped through portals every time. MARK MANDELBACHER- OK.
[00:21:39.780] Kent Bye: Yeah, I couldn't remember. My memory of it, it was all one seamless experience and so. But there was, at the time, jumping from portal to portal and still being able to maintain the same instances, which isn't always possible. So if you have private instances that you're the only one that's doing it, then it's probably a little bit easier just to ensure that everyone stays in the same place.
[00:21:59.764] Kiira Benz: I think that was quite a feat to do on Meta Horizon Worlds at that time when it was still in beta. And just protecting our audience and trying to keep strangers out, all of that was really hard. And of course, we built another queuing system, which we've done so that we can run live lighting queues and live audio queues. And actually just getting original audio to play back in there was a real challenge. I remember we had... people that were getting onboarded into the system that hadn't built in there yet, like our friends at Atlas 5. And they were like, how are you doing this? And I feel like we're always, that's the thing that I think my team and I love to do is to figure out the thing that's really impossible. And so we recorded a real original song for the piece that we choreographed audience movement to. And so we played that throughout the show and at the big top of the show and bits of it throughout the show. And then we played a big Can Can musical number that we also recorded in the studio, especially for that project.
[00:22:58.435] Kent Bye: And as you're talking about that, also having a memory of WebXR Awards, like live version, you did some sort of dance performance or some sort.
[00:23:07.100] Kiira Benz: Yeah. Yeah. Good memory, Kent. Yeah.
[00:23:09.906] Kent Bye: What was that about?
[00:23:10.366] Kiira Benz: You're reminding me of all the things I've done in the last decade. So yes, we did. Ben Irwin got in touch. He was looking for us to get involved and do something special. And we proposed that we work with the volume at Zero Space and also with DepthKit and create something with that amazing technology. He had this wonderful researcher and human in our space, activist in our space, Britton Heller, who is receiving the Ombudsperson Award, which is a special award looking at what's happening at our rights in the space, our human rights, especially in the virtual space. And Britton is definitely an advocate for those things and has been protecting us, I think, as a human population. Her work is really amazing for anyone that hasn't looked at it. Look up Britton Heller. And I wanted to find a way to honor what she was doing in a performative way. So I brought in two dancers, Lynn Needle and Jeanette Dishek, and we choreographed a piece that synchronized with visuals and was a representation of a young girl's data being taken from her, a young woman's data being taken from her. And then this kind of figure that I looked at as like the protector is what I called it, which was supposed to be a representation of Britain, who came in and essentially was, you know, trying to safeguard her in some way. And, you know, the curiosity of what we are opening ourselves up to when we're playing with these new technologies, but what is happening to our data. And I think there's a lot still for us to learn.
[00:24:46.308] Kent Bye: Nice. And so any other big projects before we talk about your latest piece around the XR Access project?
[00:24:51.536] Kiira Benz: I think those are all the big ones. And then there's just been a lot of other little client work in between.
[00:24:56.281] Kent Bye: Okay. So let's talk around this XR Access. I had a chance to be there a couple of years ago to do an in-depth like 14 or 15 hour series of a lot of the work that's happening around accessibility. So it's a really great conference. I haven't had a chance to attend it since 2023, but it's usually right around like Tribeca and Sometimes it was like the weekend after or sometimes it was like a couple of weeks and then it makes it more difficult for me to attend. But yeah, some just really great conversations around how to make XR more accessible. And so maybe talk a bit about how you came about this project that you were presenting there at XR Access and just how accessibility is on your radar in terms of trying to figure out how to make some of these different immersive stories and immersive entertainment more accessible to more and more audiences.
[00:25:44.389] Kiira Benz: I just want to say thank you for being invested in that part of the space. I think it's a space that gets overlooked. And I think just my exposure now to the industry and these incredible artists and minds is that we might not be even realizing that technology and things can be leaving them out. Basically, my studio was presented with an RFP from Kinetic Light, a disabled dance company led by the artistic director, Alice Shepard. Dr. Alice Shepard, if we bring in her academic title, which she doesn't talk about as much, but she's really an amazing person. And I was really drawn to their work. I felt like we were the perfect fit for them because we have an understanding of live performance. I've worked a lot with dance. And then what they were trying to do is to build a piece that they could take into the experiential world. But they also wanted to build a virtual world. So they knew that they needed to shoot against a green screen. And I thought, okay, well, I've done probably so far one of the most difficult productions having worked on Intel Studio stage, so I understand getting data off a green screen stage and building a full virtual world and holding the whole vision of what those components need to look like together. And what we started to figure out, we had a very short pre-production window. It was around two, two and a half weeks, and so we jumped right into R&D testing. And I kind of knew Volumetric would be out because they're doing aerial choreography in this piece. So it comes from one of their dance performances, Wired, that they've toured internationally. And it's a beautiful piece of work. They had a story vision for it. So they wanted to use choreography from that piece that's looking at the technology of wire and barbed wire specifically. I also learned a lot about Barbed Wire on this production, which was something that I wasn't as familiar with coming into it. And basically, they had this concept of looking at how they could take their performance, tell the story between these three sets of characters. the guardians that live in this truce with what they call the agents of the wire, and that there is this herald character that's facilitating things between these characters. And so the agents of the wire are doing all of this aerial choreography. So just picture that for a second if you can in your mind. You have disabled artists in wheelchairs that are flying in the air doing aerial choreography. It's beautiful.
[00:28:24.194] Kent Bye: So this is in physical reality, not in virtual reality.
[00:28:26.556] Kiira Benz: We're talking physical reality right now, right? This is happening in physical reality, so it needs to be captured with physical cameras. And then we need to try to represent what's happening and capture all of that height. They need a certain amount of height, which means a volumetric studio is out because... we're not going to be able to get the depth and volume that's needed for them to perform their aerial choreography, and they really need to be on their set. So getting a volumetric setup in there is just out. That's number one. Number two, how many volumetric setups are used to producing and understanding how to separate the data and keep the data from the full disabled person? I wanted to see if we could get depth because I love working with volumetric and getting the sense of a full body. So we tested another setup and we were playing with different depth cameras. But again, they're performing at such a distance. They have a velocity in their performance that's engaged. And so they're just swinging across space. So the depth just wasn't working for us. So Mark Wendell, who was our supervisor, VFX supervisor in the production, and has worked on some amazing productions in the years, like Lord of the Rings and Star Trek and Harry Potter, he suggested that we have to go with a 2D captor. But that we could potentially expand the characters a little bit, like inflate them and then relight them to give them a sense of depth. And then what we could do is an old Hollywood technique and layer them as video cards and create a foreground, midground and background to create a sense of depth of the characters. So there are over 100 video cards playing back in Unity, which is a technical feat for anyone that works with video playback in Unity.
[00:30:12.338] Kent Bye: Wow. I'm really curious to have a look at this. So is this something that has been released or what's happened to this project now?
[00:30:19.442] Kiira Benz: We just premiered this summer at Jacob's Pillow. We're the first VR production and we opened the Doris Duke, the brand new center for emerging performance there.
[00:30:28.999] Kent Bye: Is that, I know Andrew Snyder was presenting a work somewhere upstate New York. Is that the same place?
[00:30:34.420] Kiira Benz: Same place. That's right. Yes. It's in Massachusetts, in Lenox, Massachusetts. Okay.
[00:30:38.621] Kent Bye: And it's, it seems like it was a new, like immersive theatrical, like what, what is this location?
[00:30:44.262] Kiira Benz: Jacob's Pillow is a great dance festival in the world. Actually, Lenox is not the city. It's in Massachusetts. I'm blanking on the city right now. And they opened this Doris Duke building and center for performance, looking at the future of dance.
[00:30:58.519] Kent Bye: Okay, nice. Yeah, and Andrew Snyder had a piece of Now Is When We Are, The Stars, which is an absolutely incredible piece at South by Southwest. It absolutely blew me away. Have you had a chance to see it?
[00:31:09.153] Kiira Benz: You recommended it, and I saw it on the way to the airport.
[00:31:12.088] Kent Bye: Oh, wow. How was it?
[00:31:13.689] Kiira Benz: It was beautiful. I was really taken with it. I was really glad that I did it. I looped through it twice because I wanted to sit in different places and move through the space when my eyes adjusted and I got more familiar with the darkness. And I think it's experiential and beautiful and very reflective.
[00:31:32.765] Kent Bye: Yeah. And talking around themes of death and loss and grief and just some moments in there that just hit me like a ton of bricks and just, you know, just like emotional cathartic moments. And then conversation I had with Andrew afterwards where it kind of brought up a lot of those same memories. So, yeah, that's a really amazing piece. And I think speaks to the different types of experiential design that's coming from a theatrical tradition that I think has a very peculiar meaning. way of thinking around the entrances and just, you know, the staging and the hiding of the speakers that are this way field synthesis array of like hundreds of speakers creating these audio hallucinations that are really just quite magical when you are able to experience it. But a lot of it's like occluded and hidden and yeah, just this idea of the theatrical tradition melded with all these XR traditions. And, you know, when I talked to Andrew, he was more from the theater world and this was like an opportunity to kind of show his work for more of an XR centric audience. So, yeah, I just was really impressed with, you know, his bringing all those things together.
[00:32:34.804] Kiira Benz: Beautiful immersive work, yes. Bobby McElver did the sound design on that piece and that spatial audio system is really incredible and it gives you, I mean talk about spatial audio, the opportunity to kind of move through the room and really hear things in a whisper in these different places that feel like they're really just speaking to you. And you're right, I think that the poetry of the piece, which is a real strength of it, is just very human and also really hit me emotionally.
[00:33:01.506] Kent Bye: So I want to get some of your reactions from Venice, but before we go to Venice, I want to also talk about the reactions that you have from XR Access, because that is an audience and crowd that tends to be a lot of academics that are looking at this, but also people that are from the disabled community. And so a very interesting intersection of people who are looking at the frontiers of human-computer interaction and user interface and trying to figure out how to make XR more accessible. And by doing that, it makes XR more accessible to everyone because everyone benefits from the XR accessibility features. Being here at MetaConnect, I'll just have to say my own personal reaction of Meta not always paying attention to people who wear glasses, like the Oakley vanguards I can't use. Even the new Meta Ray-Ban display, I wear glasses and I couldn't really see anything and they weren't offering any options to have lens corrective lenses and that even if they were, they only go up to like negative four to positive four and I'm negative 5.5 and so like there are ways in which that the accessibility of some of these products are not really put at the forefront and that's really discouraging as to someone who can't use something because it's not made in an accessible way. But this larger community of XR access is thinking around all these questions above and beyond just people who are deaf or hard of hearing or blind or low vision. So you have all these people who have different sensory impairments that are thinking around holistically how to make XR more accessible for them, but also for everyone. And so just curious to hear a bit of your own reaction from showing this piece and engaging with that community.
[00:34:36.562] Kiira Benz: Yeah, so we did a demo at XR Access before we premiered at Jacob's Pillow and the piece is called Territory that Alice Shepard and I have co-directed. And I think one of the things that is the mission of Kinetic Light, I'll do my best to speak to it, is about creating aesthetically artistic, accessible work. And so they're mission-driven into making sure that all of their work is reaching all of their audience members. And so they're designing for this at all times. So when we started pre-production with them, we were learning about what accessibility meant. And we were thinking automatically with them from the beginning through to the end, not like accessibility was added on as a layer in post-production. It was discussed from the top of pre-production. And we were talking in every single meeting, during the production process about all of the layers of accessibility that would happen. So what would be happening with closed captions, audio description, the experience of the piece from the top of the menu, and the haptics, the haptic design. So it wasn't just a visual experience or as some people maybe come from more of an audio background, it wasn't just spatial audio. They were thinking about how people would experience this at all times. So I looked at it as like we were building a layer cake with them. all the way through production which I've never experienced in any other production before and I've never been in a room with so many people that are so thoughtful to be thinking about all the members of our population and just working on this with Alice at this time I was opened up to so many incredible artists and because we had deaf and hard of hearing artists working on the piece We would have ASL interpreters being brought in all the way through the production experience. So what was really special about the piece is that we had to design systems that didn't exist in XR and for a VR headset. So we had to build in a screen reader to work through the menu at the top of the piece. We had to create audio description tracks The Kinetic Light team works with a lot of incredible artists on the audio description side, and they had recorded about nine tracks that ended up getting combined into five. So there are five audio description options. I think maybe some people have experienced audio description in a VR experience. Kent, have you ever experienced audio description?
[00:37:08.625] Kent Bye: Only at XRXS.
[00:37:10.467] Kiira Benz: So we have five choices. So that's a lot of options. And for some listeners, they might want more than one track that's layering a lot of different voices. But for them, that's giving a really rich experience. And so it is an immersive experience, which is what this art form is supposed to be. So, for people that haven't experienced them before, what I loved was encouraging them to try them. And I think from the XR Access experience to the Jacob's Pillow experience, they were really different audience experiences. So, for XR Access, people were excited to try audio description. We built a spatialized closed caption system, which I think is probably one of the first, if not the first, in the industry. It is probably the first spatialized artistic closed caption system. So the captions are placed spatially, but they're also mirroring leitmotifs that are happening with the characters and the audio design, and that's in shape and color, and that's all around the world. And then you also have music closed captions. And then there's haptics. And we were definitely the first team to work with Meta's haptic system. In fact, there was a limit on the amount of time that the experience could be. And we worked with our engineers to enable it to encompass the whole experience. piece of the length of this experience that we had created. And those haptics were built with the Mach 1 and Q department team with Draj and Bosniak and Jackie. And they are running this kind of beautiful leitmotifs also for the characters through your hands. So you have a lot of options. You can select all of these things. You can have haptics, spatialized closed captions, and audio description, or you can have none of them. You have an opportunity to set your menu as you want and do as much as you want or as little as you want.
[00:39:00.424] Kent Bye: Wow, that sounds incredible. And I know that Apple Vision Pro has built into more of the core operating system a lot of these different accessibility features, but then once you go to like Unreal Engine or Unity, there's basically, it's like a black box where you don't get any of those benefits and you have to basically build everything from scratch. And so are you building all this just on top of Unity?
[00:39:20.633] Kiira Benz: That's right. Yes, it's all custom code in Unity from scratch.
[00:39:25.387] Kent Bye: Gotcha. And what happens next with either all these systems that you've built or where you want to take this here in the future?
[00:39:31.886] Kiira Benz: So the piece premiered at Jacob's Pillow. I think it was really beautiful to see these audiences. I felt like for the XR Access audience, they were really eager to see something utilizing all of these accessibility layers, but new to experiencing dance and something totally abstract that maybe they were trying to understand like, wow, what is this choreography? What's aerial choreography? What does dance look like in the space of XR? For the dance industry, I think they were really excited to see what was happening with accessibility and something really different. To each of them, I feel like they had their language represented and then they were learning something new. They were both experiencing something different. So I feel like that was really wonderful. And to get to open the Doris Duke Center with this VR piece was really, really special. In terms of what's next, the piece will travel with Kinetic Light as they tour internationally. And I would say stay tuned to the Kinetic Light team to see where they go.
[00:40:26.923] Kent Bye: Beautiful. And we both recently had a chance to go to Venice where there was 69 projects and nearly 30 hours worth of content. And I managed to make it through and see all the content. And I have around 31 hours of interviews that I'll be diving into here, hopefully within the next couple of weeks. I don't know if I'll be airing my MetaConnect coverage first or Venice coverage, but either way, I'll be diving deep into all the different stuff that was there this year. What were some of the highlights or things that you're taking away from what you're seeing at the frontiers of immersive storytelling?
[00:40:56.351] Kiira Benz: I was really excited to see the work by Craig Quintero. I also haven't had a chance to see Wayne McGregor's work or Blanca Lee's work. And of course, I'm always a proponent of seeing more XR and theater and live performance mixed. I really want to see audiences mixed. experience this, embrace these technologies mixed in with live performance. So I'm just excited to see the medium grow and I was curious to see how they're using it because I've heard so much about their work and I thought it would be great to meet some of them. So I did get to see Blanc-Ali's piece L'Ombre and I got to speak with her very briefly and a little bit with Etienne and I thought that the choreography there was really the star of the piece and the kind of live performer that was there. I also got to experience Wayne McGregor's piece, On the Other Earth. In fact, there was a moment where we flew through what felt like a suspended volumetric point cloud and I was like, I'm so excited. Then he used it in a different way and I was like, I should really talk to Wayne about that if I ever get to meet him. It was great to see those pieces, totally different pieces. They're using technology in a different way, very different audience experience. But the highlight for me was Craig Quintero's piece Blur, which was blurring physical and virtual reality and also just mixing in a lot of other forms of media. And I thought it was just really beautiful. Like my congratulations to his work and to the actors who I just thought did an incredible job there. keeping a really special tempo and rhythm in a place where you can get really caught up in the hustle of everything. I thought they were very disciplined and grounded and it was very touching. I will remember this moment where they wrote the number two on my wrist that like stayed with me and did not wash off for days. And I felt like I was carrying Craig's piece into the reality of the world as I moved from Venice to London and traveled beyond. And I'm now in California. It's worn off by now at this point, but two went with me forward. But really the blend of media, I think he's doing a great job of storytelling. And it was, I was really just, you know, really, it felt very evocative. I was just, I was really drawn into it, to what he was doing.
[00:43:12.489] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I was disappointed that the jurors did not award it with at least in the top three. I thought for me it was the top experience, one of the hottest tickets to try to get in Venice. And it felt like after seeing everything that the jury this year, and the jury ends up being like three people, and I've been on juries before where I really enjoyed something in the jury. Each individual can have widely different opinions on different stuff. But I just felt like the way that bringing the theatrical tradition and then melding it with location based entertainment where you're actually moving your body through space and then blending in 360 video and blending in mixed reality and blending in the live theatrical performance elements of that. And then, yeah, just having these kind of magical moments that, you know, transcend all your expectations.
[00:43:57.381] Kiira Benz: Like there was set, like when I entered the space, I was like, something smells like it's been on fire. And I didn't know what that would mean. And of course, I think anytime you work with scent, creators know like that will linger in your space. But it was okay that it lingered. Like now that I step out of it, I was like, that was so brilliant. It's like foreshadowing for what's to come. The piece was beautiful. Like hats off to you, Craig. It was beautiful. I did not get to see two of your recommendations. One you recommended I did get to see, which was five grams...
[00:44:26.034] Kent Bye: Less than five grams of saffron, which I think ended up winning the third place prize. Exactly.
[00:44:30.039] Kiira Benz: Less than five grams of saffron. It was beautiful. It was a beautiful piece.
[00:44:33.723] Kent Bye: Yeah. The pieces that did win were in my top five. I recommend people see The Long Goodbye, Less Than Five Grams of Saffron, The Clouds Are 2,000 Meters Up, and then Blur, and then Dark Rooms, which I think were also really hot tickets. Yeah, I'm excited to dive into all the coverage. And, you know, one of the things I was honestly a little bit surprised to see today at Metaconnect during the keynote was, I don't know if Mark said immersive storytelling, immersive entertainment. He sort of like was really saying that what we really will need is storytelling. And what was curious about that for me is that there's been a lot of this immersive storytelling and then storytelling. Meta has been a huge proponent of sponsoring and funding a lot of these different projects over the years, and then they kind of just evaporated and went away. They weren't really funding anything anymore. They went to funding into more stuff into Horizon Worlds, which is projects you worked on. They were funding some more mixed reality stuff now, but it feels like some of the different experiences that I saw were kind of leaning into more of the cinematic tradition, more traditional media consumption, but adding immersive components on top of that. There's some demos here of Fire and Ash from James Cameron with more of a 3D cinematic experience, which you're just watching a 3D movie, which watching the Avatar on Apple Vision Pro is an incredible type of experience. And I think that Meta's trying to do that as well, although the frame rate was a little low. In my judgment, it just felt like a little juddery compared to what I saw with Apple Vision Pro. Maybe just it was a smoother experience because the fidelity was a bit higher in Apple Vision Pro. But they're also putting up screens and then watching a movie, but adding mixed reality to extend that into more of a spatial context. So it's more using the cinematic tradition, but then expanding it out, which is what Cosm has been doing with The Matrix, which I'm excited to go out.
[00:46:18.604] Kiira Benz: A bit of extending the reality out. Yes. Oh, we've also done some R&D with Cosm. That's another thing we did. Yes. Yes.
[00:46:25.967] Kent Bye: Yeah, so when I'm in LA next time, I hope to go check out the Matrix and to see what they're doing, but it feels like Meta is starting to try to use XR as a general media consumption device, which is something that was a big feature here at MetaConnect. At the keynote, having James Cameron there come speaking around that and just some of the demos that I'm seeing here going to more casual audiences that are already watching a lot of cinematic content on their TVs and seeing if you can expand out and make it a much more immersive experience. And so That to me seems that there's been this community of immersive storytellers and creators that there's going to be maybe a coming back and bringing in more of the theatrical tradition and other traditions into more of what's happening in XR. So anyway, I don't know if you have any thoughts or reflections on that.
[00:47:09.735] Kiira Benz: Well, I think what's been interesting coming from the world building side for the last few days and also kind of looking back in my life and also realizing that I've been a world builder since I'm a kid, is that Mere is saying the creators are still important. That yes, there's Gen AI, but they don't intend to replace creators. And I think the emphasis on that that I've been hearing has been really important. reassuring and I think that for other artists that are really worried about their job being replaced and for sure I think for certain technical arts like they have to learn AI like they have to learn these tools they're not going to go away And for those of us that also embrace things in the physical world and physical reality, like crafting and these other things, we should still have an appreciation of them. But I do think that we need to feed into what these virtual worlds can be and that the potential for social connection is huge. And so the human is still important. We know that the human experience better than AI. And there's something I've been meaning to write about, which I spoke about at Cannes on a panel about AI, which is that I still think that, yes, we have artificial intelligence, but the kind of AI that I'm really interested in is the audience intelligence. And I think that there's something that we know as humans and as collective humans together in a shared space, whether that space is physical or digital or virtual, is very powerful. And so I have enjoyed hearing Meta talk about the importance of the creator and that that really needs to come from human beings.
[00:48:42.549] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's a great point. And the only caveat I would add to that is that Meta hasn't announced any third-party creator integrations for some of their latest lines of smart glasses. So I think creators are in this limbo state as to not knowing exactly where they stand with the future of where Meta is going, because all these platforms that are being announced only have first-party apps to them so far. So it seems to be, yes, I hear what you're saying. But at the same time, there's this kind of like unsureness as to where Meta may be going here in the future if they are really kind of actively engaging with the broader XR creator community. So that's my only sort of caveat to that.
[00:49:18.447] Kiira Benz: I do think that that wasn't clear enough in the keynote today, and that some of the messaging that I've been getting is that there's an ecosystem, there's a family of apps, and that Horizon Worlds and the sense of the world and creators being a part of that is really important. So I do feel like there's a vision somewhere, but I don't know that we got. I feel like there was so much concentration on these new products of these glasses that we didn't quite get as much about the virtual immersive system and where do those creators fit in. But I feel like that's still a part of it. But I'm not sure. Let's see as things get announced.
[00:49:53.752] Kent Bye: The one little breadcrumb trail that I could hear was in the announcement of the MetaHorizon Studio as well as with the MetaHorizon Engine. So the new game engine, it sounds like it's replacing Unity to a certain extent, a runtime that allows them to perhaps run on much more resource-constrained devices like the headset. I mean, with the Snap Spectacles, they had to do Snap Studio where they're not running Unity apps. They're running their own kind of like very optimized software version to run some of these lenses and experiences and that on these glasses that are also going to be resource constrained they'll be like the phone as a compute puck but just actually processing on the device there's not that much opportunity to run a full unity experience and so i feel like we're kind of moving into a realm where Now that this new MetaHorizon engine that was announced, we don't, I don't know what the backend or engine or actually how it's rendering anything. But with the studio, there was this sort of offhanded comment where Mark said, oh, and this is how are you going to eventually going to be able to also create experiences for the glasses using MetaHorizon. these new tools so that was the only breadcrumb that i saw it's like somebody who was sitting next to me said oh that's how they're able to justify their investment in vr because it does seem like we're in this pivot where there's a lot of focus on ai and smart glasses but you know kind of the vr and the immersive content ecosystem generation is going to feed into everything with ar moving forward in the future and even into ai as well but we're in this kind of like limbo state where There's been a reduce of funding. The marketplace and the consumer market is really wonky, moving towards free-to-play. So people are creating narrative-driven type of content that you maybe see once but don't come back to again and again and isn't social. So there's kind of like a commercialization and preference for what meta is rewarding in terms of what they think the market will bear and also what the market is already bearing. So we're in this kind of weird limbo state, I think, where there's all these strands that are starting, but we don't know where it's going to be going in the future and what's going to actually be, profitable for creators to get involved with. So I don't know how you navigate that yourself or if it's more of getting funding just to create the next project and then distribution is a whole other kind of like open question, but I don't know how you're navigating this kind of limbo state.
[00:52:05.535] Kiira Benz: With hope. I think I've been navigating every limbo state that this industry has thrown at me. And if I look back to the moment that this industry touched me very deeply, it was this experience called The Enemy that I'd done at Tribeca, where I was a documentary filmmaker at the time, still making theater and trying to make these hybrid films. and looking for a transmedia approach to my work that I thought maybe I would take onto a big web experience. And I just hadn't found the tech yet. And I knew I needed something that was spatial and nonlinear. And when I did The Enemy and I walked between an Israeli and Palestinian soldier a decade ago, this story feels so relevant, right? And I had to listen to both of their experiences and I used my body physically to move through space. I was so blown away by that experience and what those creators had done. I just, I knew that this is the medium for me. And so I have fallen in love with it and said to myself, this is my path. This is the type of technology and medium I'm supposed to be in. But unfortunately, it's been presented with these huge ups and downs. I mean... I think if any of my colleagues thought I would go into XR storytelling or immersive storytelling with cutting edge technology, they maybe wouldn't have guessed that. And I wouldn't trade the experiences that I've had. I've had powerful experiences. I feel like I've lived a lot of life by going into these different worlds with people that are designing these beautiful virtual worlds and playing with tech in a way that has made my body and spirit better. just feel so many things as a human being. So I still love this world. And I really hope that the technology can start to find its footing. And I think it has to listen more to the storytellers. Like I think if meta can remind itself for the people that are in that alignment of understanding the importance of the creator, I think if they hear this podcast and If any of them write that down again and just say, it's not just about the tech. Let the story guide the tech. Let the story and the vision help be what selects the tech and makes the tech really sparkle. And that is how all these things will come together.
[00:54:27.759] Kent Bye: Beautiful. Yeah, it's a good reminder for sure. And finally, as you think about where this is all headed in the future and some of the ultimate potentials of XR, AI, immersive storytelling, and all these different theatrical and immersive entertainment and immersive storytelling traditions, what do you think all those things added together, what that ultimate potential might be and what it might be able to enable?
[00:54:49.795] Kiira Benz: I'm really excited for these shared realities. That's something that Kazem uses, that's something that synchronous reality is something that is a term that I was using with my team. I think that there's so much potential for us to come together in time and space as human beings. And what I loved about what we were able to do with Finding Pandora is bringing all these cultures and all these people that came from different cultural perspectives and spoke different languages. And yet we had designed the show in a way where everyone could participate together. And I will never, I mean, I would sit backstage for many of the productions and be there as like a third usher if that was necessary, if we had any kind of major tech problem. and i just loved watching the audiences come through and i would watch these people of all these vast cultural experiences come together and pass to each other a puzzle piece to complete a puzzle like someone would get the puzzle from the ground and someone else would climb a staircase and they would put the key in the pandora statue hands and i would just see these people collaborating even though they weren't speaking the same language they were speaking the language of story and play and humanity and I just feel like these forms of emerging technology and XR together can really bring people together so I'm excited to design more experiences for them I love liveness that's my happy space to be mixing live performance with XR I also think that there's a form of liveness that happens in recorded performance as well. And I think specifically with volumetric capture, it's really very special. So I'm excited to see what we can do and hopefully bring and elevate humanity to greater heights and help us all understand each other better.
[00:56:37.210] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:56:42.998] Kiira Benz: I think there was a collaborative spirit that I remember getting started in. And I think that collaboration versus competition is still my preference. And I have done my best to help many other creators in the space. And I hope that we can all just keep helping each other.
[00:57:01.010] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, Kira, thanks so much for joining me here for this impromptu career retrospective of all your journey into the space. I know I've got probably over a thousand unpublished interviews and a couple of them that we've done in conversations over the years. And my goal is to eventually get everything published, but I'm so glad that We had a chance to run into each other here at MetaConnect because as I think back on your career and what you've been able to do, I see how the type of work that you're doing has been on the bleeding edge for that moment in time when you were working on those projects from Love Seed to running to founding Pandora X and this latest work, Territory with Kinetic Light, and also Skits and Giggles, what was happening with the frontiers of what you can do with live performance on a Very constrained platform at the time of Horizon Worlds of, you know, hand crafting each of these worlds collaboratively built while you're actually in VR. So, yeah, just really curious to see where you take this all in the future. And it was a real pleasure to be able to have this opportunity to kind of reflect on where you've been at and where things might be going here in the future, especially as Meta comes back around to kind of emphasizing entertainment and storytelling more. And I'm hoping to see more kind of engagement with those third party creators. And I'm also very curious to see where you take your career here next and what are you going to be pushing at the frontiers of this intersection of theater and storytelling and XR. So, yeah, thanks again for joining me here on the podcast to help break it all down.
[00:58:21.698] Kiira Benz: Thank you for having me, Kent, and for creating this space that you have for all of us.
[00:58:26.411] Kent Bye: Thanks again for listening to this episode of the voices of your podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast and please do spread the word, tell your friends and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a, this is part of 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 voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
