I interviewed Maarten Isaak de Heer about We Are Dead Animals on Saturday, November 15, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
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[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So, continuing my series of looking at different experiences from IFA DocLab 2025, today's episode is with a piece called We Are Dead Animals by Martin Isaac de Err. So this is kind of an interesting piece because Martine is collecting these dead animals in the way that he's finding the dead animals and he's scanning them. Once he's scanning them, then he's playing with them in these virtual spaces and putting them in his vision of this kind of eternal space. view of his paradise and so these animals are able to live in this paradise and roam around you can catch them and then as you collect these animals you can basically rip their limbs off and reconstruct them and create new animals so it's kind of a game where you're collecting these animals but also reconstructing them to create entirely new animals so Yeah. And you also have this kind of unique locomotion mechanic where you're kind of swimming around and floating around in order to go through. And that's kind of a survival game as well, where you have to find food to eat. And the more food that you find to eat, the longer you can survive. But it's basically a piece that is this collection of probably around 40 or 50 different animals. And each animal has a story. And as you collect it, you can kind of learn more about it. And you can also go from this more open world exploration part into that kind of playroom where you're able to deconstruct and reconstruct these different hybrid animals. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Martine happened on Saturday, November 15th, 2025 at IFA Doc Lab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. So with that, let's go ahead and... Dive right in.
[00:01:59.226] Maarten Isaak de Heer: I'm Totetieren Maarten and I'm an animator by trade and I'm here at the festival with a VR game I made with dead animals I found in my surroundings and I 3D scanned them, I rigged them and I made a game out of it.
[00:02:16.002] Kent Bye: Great and maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space.
[00:02:20.856] Maarten Isaak de Heer: Well, I started as an animator. I studied art and went into animation, just drawn animation. And then I discovered I was always looking for other kinds of media. I animated busy pictures and moving paintings and dabbed a little bit in lenticular print. And then I discovered Fulldome. And via Fulldome, so I never did the same thing twice, and after Fulldome I discovered VR animation. And then I went back to Fulldome with this knowledge, and then when I started to find the dead animals around me and... gathered all these animals I found. First I made the full dome, made a paradise for them and then I decided to do this more because I'm collecting these animals and they are my puppets. Now I can let them speak, I can let them do anything I want. So they're there for me, I don't have a next project coming up but they're there in the box and if I need them I will get them again. Yeah. And I'm always using new technologies that come to me, like recently also voice cloning in the game. Unexpectedly, we needed a voiceover, so I used the voice of my deceased grandfather, who was a theologian. And so we had good recordings, radio recordings of him, so I could make a very good voice clone. And he's the voice guiding you through the experience, which I thought was also very fitting, like a kind of reanimating my grandfather and human being.
[00:04:08.217] Kent Bye: Yeah. Nice. And so if you go back to the moment where you decided that you wanted to use these dead animals as an artistic inspiration, maybe you could take me back to that moment of like, when did you start to gather the scans or have this idea that you wanted to use this as your source material?
[00:04:26.505] Maarten Isaak de Heer: It was a ping-pong with technology. I found out about photogrammetry, which allowed me to 3D scan them. And I found a way to animate them in VR, so it's really like playing for me. Sandbox playing and playing with the puppets. And for me it made total sense, like reanimating real life that I found around me. I found a little spider, scanned it, or the smallest animal I found, or one of the smallest was a head louse on the head of my son and it was like, oh, you've got lice, great. So I had to use a microscope for that and that was just a lot of fun to collect all these different animals and to hunt for them. There's also a wild boar in the game and so I had contact with a hunter and they all have little stories and that's what you see in the game also you learn in the game also the stories of the animals that you find.
[00:05:23.993] Kent Bye: Yeah, and so maybe you could take me back to the dome experience that you did with these dead animals a couple of years ago at DocLab. I remember there was like a half dome where you kind of laid down and watched. But I just remember it being like kind of immersed into a world of these animals that were kind of floating around. But maybe you could just describe a little bit of this first take of dead animals in the context of a dome experience that you had created.
[00:05:47.229] Maarten Isaak de Heer: I wanted to do something for Dome again because I love the medium and I had these animals and I wanted to put them back in my imagination of paradise. So the landscape they are roaming that is all constructed also of dead materials I found, also scans of dead branches, dead leaves, dirt. and that was the whole idea for the dome projection that you witness how they get born in paradise like they crawl and they fly everywhere and then they get detached and new species are formed and it's all in one motion and you just look at it it's not interactive and you see how they transform into, well, the most irrecognizable kinds of entities. And then they plunge into the river that is flowing in the paradise to be born again. It's like an eight form, an endless piece. That was the idea of the first dead animals project, yeah.
[00:06:47.474] Kent Bye: And so while you're jumping around between different mediums, I'm wondering if you can maybe give a bit more context to whether like virtual reality came onto your awareness first or the Dome and if it was from Dome into more immersive forms of VR and just trying to get a sense of your journey into working with these large scale mediums, but also immersive and interactive and participatory mediums.
[00:07:09.168] Maarten Isaak de Heer: Yeah, well through VR animation. I had a workshop here from the animation festival and there I learned to animate in VR. That was for me a world that opened because it's very intuitive and I really liked it and I could use it. I knew I could use it for 3D spaces like the dome. Before that I was only hand-drawn, I was only animating hand-drawn.
[00:07:32.930] Kent Bye: Just a quick clarification. Do you mean that you're actually in VR and you're using your own embodiment? Maybe just describe a little bit about how you're doing that. What software or what ways you're able to do that?
[00:07:43.526] Maarten Isaak de Heer: and the software is called quill it has its limitations but it also has a really nice community where you can learn a lot and i found a way to bring my dead animal meshes into quill and animate it there and it's well as i said it's so intuitive that it feels like playing like i used to play like a boy i'm just building hands-on building uh worlds i'd grab models and put them together and there's a mountain and there's a tree and then and then you get a bird and you let the bird fly and it's a recording on the fly so it's also very fast a very very fast way of animating yeah and then are you able to then export it into fbx or how do you export it and get it into like a vr experience I exported at, for dome you can export accurate rectangular at 8K, so you get a 4K dome projection, which is okay. And it's exporting directly out of Quill?
[00:08:42.442] Kent Bye: Yeah. Okay, wow, okay.
[00:08:43.703] Maarten Isaak de Heer: Yeah, the PNG sequences. And for the game, it was another thing because we had to crunch everything. We had to get the models and animations out of Quill, crunch it in Blender for VR because we wanted to use standalone VR with hand tracking. So everything had to be very light without losing the special aesthetics of this. It looks like a 3D collage a little bit.
[00:09:11.676] Kent Bye: Yeah, there's some very unique... locomotion mechanics and also interactions that you have in the more, I guess, game and the game version of this kind of idea of reanimating and puppeteering these dead animals. The earlier experiences were a little bit more cinematic where you're watching it, but at what point did you decide that you wanted to create more of an interactive experience?
[00:09:33.720] Maarten Isaak de Heer: Yeah, well, three years ago at IDFA, I met my developer here and we had the first talk and then we decided like, hey, let's try it. And then we had a period of finding money for it. And then we, boom, we started. And I wanted to do it because, yeah, I don't know. For me to have the experience, I work mostly for me, but also for people to have kind of like the same experience that I have reviving these animals, it feels very weird. And in the end, I think this is the closest I can get for people to really roam in my imagination of paradise. The installation you see here, you start in a nest, the safety of a nest, and you swim up and you're in paradise. And what was I going to say? No.
[00:10:30.373] Kent Bye: So in the world, you're in this kind of like alternative universe where you're also going around and you have to lean down and pick up the animals and then it kind of revives them. And so you kind of... Are you saying it's... I mean, there are weird aspects of sort of like playing with dead animals in physical reality. But then in VR, there's not as many like life-threatening situations where it could... You're not... having your mortality threatened by doing that in VR. But in physical reality, there's probably more precautions you have to take. Or it's just not something that most people do because there's other unintended side effects that could happen. So I don't know if you wanted to elaborate on that.
[00:11:10.387] Maarten Isaak de Heer: In Germany there's this tradition of building animals for hunters. They take animal parts and they build new animals out of it. It's called a Wolpartinger. I think other cultures have this as well. In my VR game it's not gory, it's plasticky, it's safe in that sense. But still, it's connected to the real world because all those animals that you're handling, they really existed and they are revived and now they live on in virtual reality. And it was fun to make it a game because you have a certain lifespan. In the game, it's 15 minutes. And then you have to eat, of course, because you will die anyway. But if you eat, you will live longer. And then we wanted to have three very basic aspects in the game, and that is exploring, just exploring, collecting, and then creating, so you can create new animals. Yeah, very low-key basic gaming elements.
[00:12:19.710] Kent Bye: Yeah, so you had a series of different hand gestures that would trigger different things. So if you put your hands together, you would go into your playroom where you're storing these animals, where you could have an inventory of seven different animals. You could open your hands up like a book, which would bring up the atlas of all the different animals that you'd collected, and you could read about all of them. And then also, as you're moving around, you're kind of like swimming through air, as it were. So you're kind of like using your hands to move around. So you're kind of flapping your wings and flying like a bird, but also swimming in water, but the water is air. But it gave me this memory of like I'm moving through like a liquid type of environment because that's the closest experience I have from how I was moving around this virtual space. And so, yeah.
[00:13:06.981] Maarten Isaak de Heer: This is actually the way I used to fly in my dreams, these swimming movements. Yeah.
[00:13:17.300] Kent Bye: Okay, so it's directly inspired from a dreamscape that we're embedded into here as well. and so with the there's a collection of different statistics and stats and just also a little bit more history and stories so as you are collecting each of these animals you also get a little information around what this animal even is and just even a picture and other information so maybe just add a little bit more of how you're using the virtual reality to then kind of annotate Um, with other information and context, uh, in a story for each of these animals. I don't get it. Oh, uh, just, uh, just the way that you're, just talk a bit about like what you wanted to share. Uh, so I guess the question is around, um, can you talk a bit about the different types of things that you wanted to share around each animal that you're interacting with?
[00:14:13.627] Maarten Isaak de Heer: Oh, it depended on the animal, because some animals had larger stories to it. There was a wild boar I got from the hunter, and for some reason his legs were cut off, and I don't know why. Some say that it's a delicacy, but it could also be that this particular hunter needed these feet for his wolverting, for his creature. I don't know. Every animal has its small story. Sometimes I have a license to kill mosquitoes, for example. But if you want to scan a mosquito, you shouldn't smash it, of course. So I killed it very gently and then scanned it. So I would be able to use it as an animal in my paradise. So it's all very different, very small animals, very big ones. Another aspect I think I want to point out in the game, I come from a vicar's family, so it's very leaned onto paradise and the religious background I have. And that's also why I'm playing with... If you move from the Paradise to your workshop, you have to pray. And I like people using these gestures to move around in the game. It's a play because it's not very heavy. You're allowed to have fun in it and laugh about it. Because for me it's a way to cope with life and death. the idea that we're all of the same parts. We are all dead animals. Just give it some time. And to be okay with that. And in a game, we're very used to play games and die. And in this game, it's... it gets a bit more serious but also very comforting for me like yeah to have you have to cope with life and death that's it
[00:17:05.293] Kent Bye: Yeah, and just curious to hear any thoughts on life and death, because in some ways life doesn't happen without death, and in a way that you're kind of meditating on these dead animals and you're bringing them back in life, there's a way that when that goes backwards, it's different than if, you know, because we're living and you die, but there's not many other situations where we are interacting with things that are dead and then bringing them back to life. And so for me it was this kind of interesting, like, it did make me think about it because it's like, oh, I don't usually play with like dead animals. And so, but you know, there's, there's a way that all things in VR were also kind of like in this liminal state of not being alive or dead. So like, why, what does it matter in some sense? But I guess the, because the main material is these dead animals and some of them are somewhat changed. Like there's a frog that is not complete or like you can see the artifacts of it being, uh, dead. Um, and then, but it was brought back to life, but yeah, just curious to hear any, you know, other kind of deeper themes of life and death that you wanted to explore and give people an opportunity to maybe have an encounter with the non-living in a way that, uh, would be beyond what they would normally, uh, find themselves doing. Like this is something that I wouldn't necessarily, uh, go out of my way to, uh, to interact with animals that are dead, but in this experience I thought it worked in a way that... I wouldn't normally do that in physical reality, but in this context I think it was okay.
[00:18:38.511] Maarten Isaak de Heer: It started with... I was photographing dead animals for a while and then I got this idea of reviving them, because I felt empathy for rats and pigeons that are just lying on the street and everyone is avoiding them. if you want to scan a dead cat you have to go to a vet and the vet will most probably deny your request because it's weird and same goes for waste management it's very hard to get to dead animals officially but you can scrape them off the of the road or you can use all roadkill or you can just use insects because we are allowed to kill them for some reason And this discrepancy of empathy is... I'm intrigued by that. It's not fair. Some animals are loved, and we are very careful with them, and others are just... We just stamp on, I do it too. And this knowledge that you're... I could also be crushed any moment. But then I have the knowledge for me, like, okay, but then I'm also part of all these dead animals, be it an elephant or a head louse. I'm part of it. I'm not making it for the audience to say like, oh, you have to feel this. No, it's really for me, actually. I'm playing and it works for me.
[00:20:20.680] Kent Bye: you mentioned earlier that you had like a license to kill mosquitoes or something that like I'm coming from the United States people would just swat or kill mosquitoes but like what is this license and what just maybe elaborate on that because I've never heard of such a thing
[00:20:37.419] Maarten Isaak de Heer: It's not a real license. I mean, it's just a figure of speech. We seem to have a license to kill certain animals, mosquitoes, spiders. But where is your license? I've never seen it. I mean, why are we allowed to do that? Yeah, because they're everywhere. I don't know. It's a fact. And I can understand why we do it, but still...
[00:21:02.700] Kent Bye: It's strange. So it's like a part of the piece is also exploring how there's a hierarchy of things that are okay to kill and not.
[00:21:11.883] Maarten Isaak de Heer: Yeah, a hierarchy of empathy in people. And people can get really emotional. If I kill a small puppy, people will be very offended. But not with another animal. You see, it's... It's not very deep.
[00:21:36.787] Kent Bye: It's easy to understand. Right, right, right, right, yeah. And especially with insects, I think people, yeah, they can be seen as a nuisance. I guess they're all living, but there's ways that some animals are... I think when people talk around, like for people who are vegans or vegetarians that are for more... reasons of the kind of the food industrial complex like this the way that animals are treating the way that we the way that we eat so yeah that I think it's another way that that comes up where I hear people talk around like how we are treating some of these you know from industrial animals for the food industry are different than our pets and there's a line in terms of what's a pet versus what is being treated as food in a way that dictates the level of empathy that's given to them in their life So, yeah, I don't know if you had any other thoughts on that.
[00:22:33.602] Maarten Isaak de Heer: Yeah, well, now I was thinking about the moment in the game where you can create new animals out of it. That's the part where you're playing God in a way. And the funny thing is, I like it to be funny, as soon as you made it, for example, a fish with wings and then you send it back to paradise and there you can see how it moves. And there it never moves in a good way. They're all freaks. And that's a joke. I like that. Because in a way it happens all around us in nature. Things are combined and new things appear. But if you try it yourself in my game, it just looks funny and weird.
[00:23:27.671] Kent Bye: So, yeah, this is a theme that you had mentioned that there's a German culture around this kind of creation of new animals. And that's something that you'd also explored in your dome piece. Had you had any encounters with this tradition or how did you come across this idea of kind of, you know, mashing up these different animals into new animals?
[00:23:48.061] Maarten Isaak de Heer: Oh, that's the... Is it called soft gaming? I don't know. No, casual gaming. There's an old game called... It had the same principle of just building new animals out of animals. And I know it's a thing people just love to do. It's a nice thing. And it can go on endlessly. You can make all kinds of combinations. And that's what I was looking for because I wanted to make a game. A game with collecting very basic gaming aspects. So very easy to understand. So you have maybe more space for a deeper meaning. You are allowed to think of yourself. Because it's very different how people... react to the game. I mean, some are very... I think it's somewhat scary or maybe gross a little bit sometimes, but...
[00:25:05.803] Kent Bye: And here at DocLab, there's a big installation that has like, it's like a huge nest. And so maybe you could talk a bit about like the process of collaborating with Popcraft or if you were involved with directly creating this installation part of the experience.
[00:25:21.229] Maarten Isaak de Heer: That was fantastic because first to be selected was very good to have the premiere here. I was very happy and then we discussed how do we want to present it and I hadn't given it much thought. And I was afraid, like they were saying, yeah, get some taxidermy animals. And I was afraid it would be just decoration. And now how it turned out, because I thought of I want to build a nest, like a real nest where you are experiencing the game. So from this safe space. And now it turned out to really make the work more sense. It became now a portal, a virtual portal to my imagination of paradise. So you can just visit and it's over there and it's perfect now. But in the... And the process of making it was fantastic. I asked around gardeners and I was very lucky to find some very cool guys who built this in like one day. And it smells also. That's also a very good thing I wanted for the installation.
[00:26:54.349] Kent Bye: Did they add smells or you just mean that the organic matter naturally had smells?
[00:26:58.321] Maarten Isaak de Heer: Yeah, it smells like a forest in there. Yeah. Yeah, so that all fits. But I would like this game also to be downloadable on MetaQuest. So it will reach more and different audience. To just break out of the art bubble a little bit. You see? And then it will just be people downloading it and playing it in their homes in any kind of setting.
[00:27:39.953] Kent Bye: Yeah, it does give me this kind of sense of like childlike spirit of exploration and play and being able to kind of interact with these animals in a new way. And so I'm just... Oh, wait, the... Oh, and you had said that this space that you're creating is kind of like a portal into your imagination of paradise. And so I'm just curious to hear a little bit more around like, what does that mean for you? What is paradise for you?
[00:28:10.989] Maarten Isaak de Heer: It's all life and death, the circle of life. It's so easy, but to be surrounded by all these dead materials and dead animals, because in a way they are still part of life. I mean, they are decaying and from them new life will appear. So to me they're the new hope. A corpse is a new hope for new life.
[00:28:44.690] Kent Bye: Nice. And so, uh, where do you, what do you want to take this next? What's what kind of, um, either, it sounds like you want to create like a, a way to just distribute this in a broader scale, but I'm just curious if there's other artistic, uh, intentions that you're going to continue to explore this theme or other ways that now that you've created this kind of fully embodied hand-tracked, uh, type of experience that you're interacting with this, like where you want to, uh, take this type of art form in the future for this, these themes that you want to explore. Yeah.
[00:29:13.736] Maarten Isaak de Heer: Well, I have now this collection of a lot of dead animals, which I can use for anything I want. I don't have a plan for the future yet, and I'm not actively looking for it because I know something will come up. I'm taking a little break. Also because this year, coincidentally, I did a dead animal thing on Instagram. It's called Influenza. It was a dead cormorant who was giving tips and tricks on how to become human. So she was changing parts and putting human parts on her beak and the nose on her beak and then ears, human ears. So she was transforming into a human and then on Instagram this thing happened that a lot of people responded and the comments decided what the next episode would be. Funny things happened. Someone wanted her baby. Someone wanted to marry her. She had this style like, oh, influenza, oh, my dearies, I love you. Everything with hearts and the internet style, being sweet all the time. And people just went with it, like really, and loved her back. And that was so funny. So maybe I'll do some next interactive thing with followers on Instagram because it's nice to have an audience. I mean as an animator you work a lot on the production and then you send it to the festivals and you see your audience at the festivals maybe and that's it. And it's not comparable with the numbers of people who see it on social media and the reactions you get instantly. And I'm also looking for making the animals talk and going more into text. I really like to use text and now the technology, voice cloning, allows me to do it. So that's the way I'm thinking, but I'm not pushing it right now.
[00:31:38.907] Kent Bye: You said that you met your developer here at DocLab like three years ago. Was that when you were showing and screening your previous piece here? And maybe just talk a bit about what the developer saw that wanted to kind of take what you were doing to the next level of interactive and immersive participation.
[00:31:54.326] Maarten Isaak de Heer: No, it was via my producer. He knew him. It was my idea. I want to make a VR out of it. We have to find a developer. He knew of him. He's been working on Lacuna as well and on the Lesbian Simulator and lots of other stuff. So I got lucky there to be able to work with him. Frank Bosma.
[00:32:20.580] Kent Bye: Nice. And finally, as we start to think around where this is at and where it's all going, I'm just curious to hear what you think the ultimate potential of this type of immersive art and immersive storytelling might be and what it might be able to enable.
[00:32:35.216] Maarten Isaak de Heer: The end of VR, you mean, or?
[00:32:37.765] Kent Bye: Or just where you think it might be going in a way that could be its most exalted potential for VR, immersive art, immersive entertainment. As we are at here now, another way to say it is what type of experiences do you want to have with this type of technology, these experiences? It's kind of like aspirational, where it could all go, but things that you want to personally experience.
[00:33:02.233] Maarten Isaak de Heer: Yeah, well, I'm more of a maker than a consumer. I like making in VR more than I play games in it. What it could use more is more multiplayer platforms. I also have the feeling that VR will disappear a little and will be taken over by AR and we will have more gaming experiences in real life, layered in real life. I think it's going that way. I would like that. I mean, that you just have a very lightweight glasses and let's play ping pong here. Yeah, okay. We'll just flap our wings here and I don't know, to play play games on the street. That it's more integrated in real life because of AR. That's what I think is going to happen. I don't think VR will have a very large lifespan.
[00:34:07.799] Kent Bye: What do you think? I think that any time a new medium comes up, it never fully goes away. Because we still use radio and television. I think there's going to be situations where people want to escape their existing context. And I think for things that can only happen in physical reality, then that will happen. But I think there is an idea that AR is going to somehow always be more compelling than what VR is. But my podcast is like Voices of VR, so I've been always more interested in the VR just because I feel like there's going to be an infinite canvas of VR that isn't the same with AR in a way. AR is more constrained with physical reality, whereas VR isn't. But there are also going to be... emergent social dynamics with other people that are going to be probably more compelling or interesting that especially if it's in relationship to something that's site specific. So yeah, I think, I think they're both going to exist. I don't necessarily think one's going to supplant the other, um, because we all, we still go watch movies and we still watch TV. And so we do want to kind of escape into the other realms. And so I feel like VR is more of that, you know, tradition of wanting to go into another realms that go beyond our existing one. So
[00:35:20.874] Maarten Isaak de Heer: And it will be voice-generated environments directly generated in front of you. What the future will bring, I don't know.
[00:35:36.261] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say or share to the broader immersive community?
[00:35:44.086] Maarten Isaak de Heer: Yeah, I loved working with Popcraft. They're a very professional team and that's just great because building something so organic in a clean setting and they were so helpful and everything turned out so well. So I like the analog part of my installation a lot. I might do more installations of that kind and no digital things, maybe. But as I said, I'm on a break now for a while.
[00:36:21.300] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, very much appreciated hearing a little bit more around your thinking around this project and the themes of life and death and hierarchy of empathy and these deeper discussions, but also just kind of providing me with a sense of this exploration and play and novel embodiment where I think this experience of kind of moving my body through the space, that was a part of the challenge of how do I move my body just to go to where I want to go and uh, what inputs that is asking. So, uh, yeah, but I very much enjoyed the piece and thanks again for joining me here on the podcast to help break it all down. Thank you. That's all that we have for today. And I just wanted to thank you for listening to the voices of VR podcast. 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 listen, support a podcast. So I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring this coverage. You can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
