Gondwana VR simulates 100 years of climate change in the Daintree Rainforest within a 24-hour durational simulation that’s running each day throughout the Sundance New Frontier 2022 selection. Lead artists Ben Joseph Andrews and Emma Roberts symbolically translated scientific projections into a degrading ecosystem in VR that’s made up on 40-50,000 forest assets across a virtual space of over 30 acres, but they also created a generative sound design based upon over 40 hours of source audio that represents how the soundscape of insects and birds are projected to change over 100 years from 1990 to 2090.
All of this is being simulated in real time as users are able to save up to ~12% of the assets in the forest through a mechanic of sending firefly-like light particles into individual trees. The end result is both a slow and meditative experience, but also a durational piece that encourages you to come back and check up on it throughout the course of the day. There’s a livestream on their website that you can listen to the ambient sounds slowly change over the course of the day. I’d actually recommend being embodied within the full VR experience first ($50 Sundance Explorer Pass tickets to the entire New Frontier selection should be available until the end of the festival on January 30th), especially because the rendered livestream is a lot different than what it feels like to be fully immersed into the experience and to directly experience the many cycles within cycles within cycles that are happening. The 24-hour experience resets each day at around 10a PST / 6p GMT, and so I’d recommend seeing it at the beginning, and then checking it out throughout the course of the day. And then come back for the finale at the end, and then contrast that again to the new day beginning after 10a PST.
I had a chance to speak with lead artists Andrews and Roberts as well as key collaborator Lachlan Sleight after having a chance to spend 1.5-3 hours within the experience before the festival kicked off. We talked about the journey of creating a piece like this, how they took inspiration from durational artists like John Cage, and some of the challenges of trying to represent these long scales of time symbolically and through the course of a 24-hour period of time. I had some really powerful moments of awe and wonder within Gondwana, and there’s many challenges and opportunities for the durational form of immersive storytelling that’s not be bound up by the traditional constraints of time and space that physical installations in a festival or museum context may suffer from. The pandemic has forced a piece like this to go completely virtual, which has resulted pushing the limits and boundaries for what’s possible in telling the stories of relational dynamics of a complex ecosystem over time. Definitely try to dip into the experience before their run at Sundance ends on January 30th to be able to experience it for yourself.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. So I'm going to start to dive into some of the individual experiences of the Sundance New Frontier 22 selection. And the first one I wanted to talk about is Gondwana VR. This is a 24-hour simulation. So part of the reason why I wanted to do it first is because it's running for 24 hours from now until January 30. And so if you do have an opportunity to go to Sundance New Frontier, it's like $50 to get access, then I highly recommend checking this out. Just because it's such an interesting experience that unfolds over the course of 24 hours. They're symbolically representing 100 years of climate change within the context of the Daintree Rainforest within Australia. They've created an entire ecosystem that has not only the forest, but also the sound design from these recordings that were recorded back in the 90s. are also degrading the sound as it happens and unfolds over time. So it's quite an evocative experience to be able to dip into it. It unfolds over the course of 24 hours, and so I had a chance to spend anywhere from 90 minutes to three hours over the course of the last third. There's also a live stream that's going as well. So after you experience it, I would highly recommend going into the VR experience at first. experiencing some of it, and listening to it, and maybe tuning into the live stream afterwards. So now that you get a sense of what to listen for, because it's something that unfolds over such a long period of time, it's an opportunity to kind of train your perception to be able to detect some of the different changes and shifts that are happening within this as an environment. It's also training us to be aware of how things move so slowly. This is a rainforest that's been around for 100 million years. They're trying to, over the course of 24 hours, take you through a slice of the next 100 years with all the changes that are predicted with climate change. They're running all this in a simulation. It's quite a technological feat that we dive into in a lot more detail within the context of this conversation. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Wastes of VR podcast. So this interview with Ben, Emma and Lachlan happened on Wednesday, January 19th, 2022. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:18.239] Ben Joseph Andrews: My name is Ben Joseph Andrews. I am a director on Gondwana and that's mostly how I've kind of operated in the immersive realm so far.
[00:02:27.657] Emma Roberts: Yeah, I'm Emma Roberts. Ben and I are quite frequent collaborators, myself as producer. Our background is in LBE, essentially an installation based VR work and Gondwana is our first online native experience.
[00:02:42.513] Lachlan Sleight: And I'm Auckland. I've been working in VR for the better part of seven, eight years. You know, I used to have a VR startup based in Melbourne called Liminal. And so for the last three or four years, I've been working just across a whole bunch of different kinds of projects, making art pieces, a couple with Emma and Ben. And yeah, Gondwana is definitely the biggest thing I've worked on. So this is kind of the next step of the journey.
[00:03:04.019] Kent Bye: Great. Maybe you could each give a bit more context as to your backgrounds and your journey into VR.
[00:03:09.645] Ben Joseph Andrews: Yeah. So my background was filmmaking. So I was a traditional filmmaker for a short while and started a PhD actually that shifted my focus a little bit because my background was kind of in research and film theory and cinema studies. And it was a practice-led PhD that was quite open-ended in terms of exploring new languages of cinematic storytelling. A lot of it was quite an experimental focus, I guess, of trying to achieve audio-visual immersive experiences through a variety of different kind of ways and approaches. And then I got banned from filmmaking from my film school temporarily. It's not as bad as it sounds, but that period, which has been to last a couple of weeks ended up being like a number of months. And in that time, I was writing a lot and just wanted to really just keep creating. And the opportunity to work in VR emerged in that time. And I was adapting some of the work that I was doing in film to a VR context. And that was an installation. So it began as a live performance. And that was all I knew VR to be, was this kind of like more of a performance based medium where the headset is both kind of this audio visual experience, but it's also a blindfold that takes place within physical spaces. And that gives rise to many, many interventions artistically in terms of changing the space around participants or multi-sensory interventions. That's kind of how I began. And then I created that in a really short period of time. And then Emma and I wrote a grant application for a music festival that's in Melbourne to do a live sound experience. So kind of almost like taking that really, really, really early methodology and expanding it further through kind of live sound and all of the wider scope that being in a festival environment would allow. And we got the grant and had to make the work. And maybe you tell the story.
[00:05:22.073] Emma Roberts: I mean, I like my background is also film and production specifically, so production management. And I had never tried VR before. I'd just written some grants and then asked me for some help. And then we got it and we had to make it. And so my first time trying VR was actually the day of putting on our first VR installation together. I think consequently, like Ben said, coming into it without a lot of preconceptions of what the medium could or should be. which was really liberating, I think, from a filmmaking perspective. Often as a filmmaker, your things are very planned. Things are very separate from the audience as well. And I think particularly in a live context, creating experiences that involved the headset, but also production design and live performance. was really exhilarating and addictive and we could see the power that it was having, I guess, on audiences. And that was really exciting. So we kind of made a couple of large scale LBEs here in Australia and then started making Gondwana as an LBE and then the pandemic happened. So now we've made a giant online live event instead.
[00:06:34.097] Lachlan Sleight: Yeah. So I, I suppose in like sort of 2014, 2013, around when the DK2 was first becoming a big popular thing and, you know, the DK1 was quite well established. I was working as a barista and walking down the street, there was like a public DK1 installation that I happened to sort of stumble across and, um, Yeah, I tried that and was super blown away by how ill it made me feel. And by extension, like how powerful that experience was as a digital thing that had happened to me. And you know, the experience itself was kind of arbitrary. But yeah, just the fact that it made me feel a physical sensation in my body really blew me away. And I spent a few weeks like obsessively researching VR. And at the time, I was just teaching myself to code. So I kind of like pivoted my entire creative world over to VR. you know I was putting up my eyes to like the cardboard preview on the screen in Unity and like crossing them and that was my best VI headset until I you know finally got my hands on um like one of the very first like public cardboard kits you could get and eventually saved enough money for a DK2 and just made a heap of junk just like fun little creative abstract experiences. And shortly after then, I just got like a random email from a guy called Damien who lived in Melbourne. And he and his friend had this idea for a company where we could like make these abstract VR experiences to modulate people's emotional and cognitive states, like sort of condensing down colors and sounds to make like calming or energizing experiences. And at the time I was literally working, making coffees. So, yeah, we all formed a company and we did that for yeah, like a good couple of years. And that went really well. And the company is still going after sort of a long, amicable, gentle separation, because I wanted to continue pursuing my own creative projects. I left that and was, yeah, just doing a bit of consulting, doing a bit of teaching in VR and AR, and sort of making some abstract experiences. I had a little bit of success online with one called Sire, which was like this abstract particle simulation physics thing and that sort of led into me doing more creative projects in the arts and so for the last four years I've been working mostly in artistic projects in VR around Melbourne and especially those focusing on the environment which has been great because that's sort of my main cause that I'm keen to sort of use virtual reality and technology to further, if that makes sense. So yeah that's kind of been the journey so far and yeah Gondwana's been been a long, long time in the making. And like Emma said, it's changed like really fundamentally in a number of ways. So it's been really interesting. You know, it's one project, but it's been multiple projects and it's undergone like a series of crazy, really deep changes. So it's, yeah, it's been, it's been a thing.
[00:09:10.750] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, I'm excited to dig into Godwanna, but before I do, I almost feel obligated to follow up with you, Ben, to ask you, what does one do to get banned from filmmaking?
[00:09:20.794] Ben Joseph Andrews: Yeah, I know. It's a good question. I do get whenever I say banned, it does spark the follow-up question. And the answer is kind of like both boring, but like meaningful at the same time, because it was still being like prohibited from the whole filmmaking process. And essentially I was the first PhD candidate in the school and without making them sound too terrible. Even though this was meant to be the second year of the candidature was meant to be practice-based. So the first year was just pure research. They didn't actually set up all of the legal and insurance aspects to allow me access to gear, to post-production resources. And because of that, even though like I was due to begin, like everything was planned, production schedules, I was in pre-production, the ban kind of occurred through that means and it lasted a really, really long time. Technically I didn't actually get unbanned. I just abandoned film for VR. And that's kind of actually, so I guess I'm maybe still banned. I'm not sure.
[00:10:25.985] Kent Bye: It sounds like some sort of bureaucratic glitch of not following regulations closely enough rather than anything you did in particular. So, all right, well, that, that helps clarify it. And I was, my curiosity was getting the better of me there and I wasn't going to be able to let that go until. Got that story, but maybe, maybe it's a good segue into Godwanna because this is a, a durational take as a piece. You know, when you look at the runtime, it's 1,440 minutes, which is 24 hours of nonstop simulation that you have that's going through about a hundred years or so of time from like 1990 to 2090. And so maybe just give a little bit more context as to this project and how it came about and what you were trying to do with using VR as a medium to explore this long length of time.
[00:11:16.715] Emma Roberts: Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, Gondwana is essentially a explorable virtual environment modeled on the Daintree Rainforest in far north Queensland and the top north corner of Australia, like the very point of the top of Australia. And that is the oldest tropical rainforest in the world. We were really interested in creating, I think, off the back of some of our multisensory location based works. We found that a lot of the audience response to our work, which is often very focused around awe and wonder was really quite transformative. Like people would come in and tap us on the shoulder years later and say, you know, that experience is still something that I think about. And I really like came out of it in a changed state, which I think we started to think really quickly once we'd done that last experience stylus in 2017, how can we use that audience response and push it towards something that's very important to us, which is climate change, particularly being in Australia, which is a country not super like on a government level, extremely unwilling to do anything to combat climate change. And so we became interested in using awe and wonder in virtual reality to create an experience where people were able to I guess come face to face with the data in a way that was lived and felt rather than these abstract facts and figures that a lot of us in cities in particular, that's our interface rather than people that are in rural areas or countries that are quite vulnerable. So that's where the background of the experience came from, just this broad brief of how can we create something that will allow audiences to tap into that. So Gondwana, like I said, it's this explorable environment, like collectively as a team, we're big nature lovers and love to go and be immersed and to explore natural spaces. So we wanted to create something where you could have that experience of free roaming and being curious in the natural world, but also one that told a story over time. The Daintree Rainforest is 180 million years old approximately. And at that ancientness and that sense of time and cycles that you get when you are there, which we spent six months on location off grid in the Daintree to research this experience. It's super powerful. And so we took that idea of time and started to look at what would this look like as a durational experience where we were able to over a long period of time for VR. And initially it was a day's exhibition when it was an installation piece. Now it's 24 straight hours because we're not constrained by physical space. over that long period of time, how we could use that environment to tell a story and to allow people to see time at the speed of trace. So every 14 minutes in the environment, the landscape jumps forward in time by one year, and that brings to life climate data. As you said, from 1990 to 2090, the only thing that can stop that seemingly inevitable decline is user time and experience. So the more people that spend time in Gondwana and the more collective time an audience spends in any 24 hour period, the less likely the rainforest is to degrade. So it's simultaneously a simulation and a social experiment in a way. Yeah, I think that's a long summary of a large project.
[00:14:42.786] Kent Bye: Yeah, a durational take of 24 hours was something that I haven't seen before in VR. And so I wanted to do as much as I could. The beginning of the day was difficult because I think it started at like 3 a.m. And it was just a bunch of stuff, just even during the press preview that was running that I ended up doing the last two thirds, probably spending anywhere from an hour and a half to three hours. It's hard for me to, I kind of lost track of time. But what was striking to me was to even see the change there at the end. Which there is a mechanic where you can allow user participation to stop the degradation of the forest. And I'm kind of glad that no one did. Cause I feel like part of the power of the piece is to see what if nothing is done, this is what happens. I think if nothing would have changed and I think it would have been less impactful for me as a user. So I guess that's in terms of one critique I would have is that if people lived to the full extreme of going around and by their participation and doing different things to be able to resuscitate different plants. that on an aggregate level, as if I would experience that, it would have felt like there was no change because this is a very interesting piece in the sense that, you know, normally I would do a 15 or 20 minute, maybe a half hour piece. And then you'd be able to see the change, but this, the change is so almost imperceptible that did require me to come back, you know, an hour later to kind of see how things may have changed. And that it's like in film there's a time lapse where you take something that your eyes can't perceive the changes and then it speeds it up so you can see the changes so this is in some ways kind of embracing that time lapse but on a scale of symbolic time of 100 years over 24 hours and so every 14.4 minutes you're jumping forward a year But still, even when it would jump forward, I would have a difficulty seeing what those changes were. It would only be after a few years or after jumping in, coming back later, I'd be able to see that. So I think that's interesting, but I think the challenge there is to play with that time perception and to know what that sweet spot is to allow people to see the change, but to not have them be in there, not perceive any of the thing that's changed. I don't know if you know what I mean, but I'd love to hear some of those trade-offs, because that was certainly an interesting decision to spread it out of 100 years over 24 hours. But I guess I wonder how many people are going to dedicate themselves to dropping in and out like that, and if they'll be able to see that. For me, I did it, and I'm glad I did it, and I think it was powerful. It's unlike any other experience I've had, but there's also that challenge of meeting the audiences where they're at and trying to give them something that's digestible. But even if you would do that, something that's digestible would then kind of take away the power of the types of timescales that you're trying to really communicate.
[00:17:19.805] Ben Joseph Andrews: Yeah, I mean, yeah, there's so much to unpack there because in a lot of ways, Gondwana has been a negotiation of a lot of trade-offs, like you say, in terms of how obvious and evident we want the degradation to be versus how much we want to also reference the sheer age and persistence of this rainforest that's existed for such a unfathomable amount of time that the temporal canvas that we need to play with, like it felt correct for it to be symbolically, like you say, like quite long in order to feel the fact that time is moving and time is moving relatively quickly, even though it's 14 minutes and even though it's 24 hours, like that feels like such a long time for a user. But in the context of, you know, this forest that is so, so old, it's also such a tiny, tiny, tiny kind of slice. And so there was just like, yeah, there's a lot of trade-offs to kind of unpack in terms of like the aspect of change that we were trying to represent. I'll just pick up first on what you were saying in terms of, yeah, the power of the fact that it does degrade versus if there were so many users in the experience that it kind of, there is also an interactive mechanic within VR where you can actually save a single asset at a time. And that allows this kind of like individual action, but it's not really possible to save on your own every single tree and plant.
[00:18:53.137] Emma Roberts: It would take an extremely concerted effort and quite a large audience in Gondwana to keep things at zero. There's a bout for context. There's about 40, 50,000 individual assets in the experience, about 6,000 of those give or take are savable and it's a huge environment as well. So like, I think we're quite interested as well as the first time at Sundance that this has run with an audience. We're quite interested to see how it actually plays out. Do audiences come in and want to save everything and keep it at zero?
[00:19:28.556] Ben Joseph Andrews: And that was one of the real emotional challenges of Gondwana from the very beginning was, you know, because it's based on climate data and climate projections, there is within all the data, a kind of a move towards loss and decline. And as a creator, as an artist, that is a really difficult emotional navigation to go through, particularly when then projects this linear loss that's fixed and unmovable and cannot be like, no matter how much audiences try or wish or desire, the forest must be lost. And I feel like for a long time, that's what the project was actually. And that's what we, you know, we had the data. There's kind of various models. None of them are fantastic. You know, like they're all varying degrees of some kind of catastrophic loss for this rainforest that it is so old because it has remained so stable for so long and part of that's just the fluke of its particular spot and the particular movements of continents over large periods of time but the change that's happening is actually really quite quick and Yeah, as time kind of went by through the project, it felt uncomfortable that there couldn't be a way for that narrative not to take place, for that narrative of loss to be absolutely inevitable and absolutely fixed. And we kind of decided that we wanted to give some power back to audiences to actually be able to affect change in this virtual space, for it not to just yeah, result in kind of catastrophic collapse. And like I said, you know, through sheer collectivity and organized, yeah, like kind of use, then that can create a resilience factor that will actually push down the algorithms movement towards loss. And it's only human users and human audiences that can actually push against this kind of like force that the system is constantly trying to push towards more and more degradation that gets represented through the experience through various ways. And yeah, it felt really, really powerful to free the work from this kind of like, yeah, this linear movement towards like just various degrees of decline.
[00:22:06.440] Kent Bye: Yeah. And Lachlan, I'm wondering if you could maybe jump in and talk a bit about how you were involved with the production of this, because I understand that there was quite a number of assets. I don't know if you were involved with helping to create a wide, diverse ecosystem of different plants and different biomes that are represented here within this piece.
[00:22:23.284] Lachlan Sleight: Yeah. So, um, for the most part, the assets were all drawn by Michelle Brown, who's a brush artist based up in Brisbane. I drew a few of them, but for the most part, the plants themselves are drawn by Michelle. although they're all drawn in a build of Tilt Brush that we made from the open source repository. And so we have a whole custom stack that brings all those into Gondwana in a way that allows us to represent the degradation and to allow them to be more responsive, you know, to the environment itself than assets would normally be wind and growing up and growing back down again. You know, all the different effects that we have in there. Yeah, you're right. There are lots of different biomes in Gondwana. It's a really big, it's a really, really big virtual space. And yeah, arranging all of that content in a way that was believable and engaging to walk around without feeling too like constructed, like it was a big sort of rainforest playground was a huge part of the process. And yeah, I suppose just in general, a lot of the construction of the piece wasn't just laying out assets on a virtual terrain, but layering content through time. And obviously being a 24-hour piece, it was important to us that we had lots of different things happening all the time. And so that if you did spend that time in the rainforest, it wouldn't just be seeing the same things on a 14-minute loop, but the forest itself changes not just visually, but the things that happen through time change over time. So it becomes sort of a deep experience chronologically as well as spatially, if that makes sense.
[00:23:54.410] Kent Bye: Yeah. And for me, you know, I did quite a lot of exploring around and trying to figure out a way to map in my own mind the space. And, you know, it's a river that runs north, south, and then the Eastern shore to kind of go and see where the space is and how it's oriented. But the thing for me that was really striking was the sound design. and how immersive the sound design was, because I felt like, you know, you mentioned, Emma and Ben, that you had spent around six months in this forest. And I'm wondering if you could talk about the process of the sound design. And because I was coming in about 16 hours into the 24 hours, I don't know how much of the degradation also involves the sound design of what the forest sounds like when you have this vibrant ecosystem versus as you go on. Maybe get to talk a bit about that process of creating the sound design because it was so rich of giving me this sense of immersion into a place that was really all around me and immersive.
[00:24:52.797] Emma Roberts: Yeah, this question makes me happy. I think a lot of the time we talk about Gondwana, people really focus on the visuals, which are also very great. But sonically, there's a lot interesting going on in the experience. So the base level of the soundscape is these incredible time capture recordings we have from 1990 by a man called Andrew Skiosh, who spent a couple of months in the Dane Tree recording high quality ambience of different rainforest spaces. He has this huge archive of every bird you could possibly imagine and every time of day in all these different places. And so our sound designers from the convoy, Erin K. Taylor and Pisandia took a bunch of those source recordings and sculpted them over time so that, like you suggested, we start with quite pristine audio and then over time, as the rainforest degrades, that sound also degrades and becomes stretched and reverberated as well. So you have this sonic journey that you're going on that kind of very subtly, but in a way that is incredibly rich, really brings to life that journey through time from 1990 to 2090, where we go from a really lush, rich soundscape at the start to one that is very changed and quite haunting in a beautiful way at the 24 hour mark. Do you want to talk a little bit more about the other sonic elements, Ben?
[00:26:25.815] Ben Joseph Andrews: I mean, yeah, like so there are other more musical aspects that punctuate the way that time passes in Gondwana. So like we talked about earlier, that every 14 minutes, the rainforest leaps forward in time. Every six minutes, we go through a single day, which is represented just through the sun's journey, rising and falling, and then the moon coming up. And the day-night cycle is three minutes day, three minutes night. And that kind of created A bit of a sonic challenge because obviously we had all these wonderful field recordings, like Emma said, from many different times in the day, but trying to create the sonic markers and conditions for dawn, it's really difficult to do in such a compressed window, like to try to get this sense that the forest is waking up. It's such a gradual layered occurrence in nature. And in Gondwana, because the dawn sequence is actually really quite compressed, it's really quite short. Our sound designers, Matt and Erin, did this absolutely fantastic job in giving musical motifs to certain cycles and there's many, many, many cycles within Gondwana. But the dawn and the dusk is a really key one because they happen really quite frequently. Every three minutes a new dawn, every three minutes a new dusk. But it was really important for us because so much of Gondwana is about change and the rainforest itself is such a ridiculously, outrageously diverse place, we wanted the sound design to reference these cycles in a way that doesn't create pure this sense of repetition, that it's happening the same every single time and that you can like kind of almost experientially understand that cycle and its loop point. And I think technically, Lachlan, I think, yeah, you'd be able to speak really deeply to how the sound aspect really kind of technically works because it is really interesting.
[00:28:32.318] Lachlan Sleight: Yeah, like you say, cycles within cycles within cycles. I think probably the most important thing that happens is that that 14-minute loop marks the central musical tone for all other musical elements in the piece. So as that 14-minute event happens and you sort of get that change signifying the year is passing, that tone that plays, all other tones are randomized but curated intervals, harmonic intervals of that tone. And so the Gondwana becomes a 24-hour musical piece that Matt and Erin and me, I suppose, have crafted such that we can play it back. And I might like to spoil that part.
[00:29:12.285] Emma Roberts: Yeah, spoil it.
[00:29:14.173] Lachlan Sleight: So that finale that you saw, Kent, that was the 24-hour musical piece playing back over a few minutes. And so it sort of all concresces and collapses back in on itself to sort of show the full 100-year cycle passing again in a real time lapse. And every single, even the user direction sound effects, everything is coming off of that to sort of create this sense of harmonic continuity. And that's all on top of the quite complicated ambient sound effect system, which is doing its best to show the degradation through becoming more stretched and haunting and reverberated over time, but not in a way that becomes unpleasant to listen to because that's our sonic base ground.
[00:29:57.336] Emma Roberts: Yeah. I will say we broke unity on the last day of production because we had too much audio in it. There's like 37 hours of audio in Gondwana because it's, oh, it's 40 because it's generative. And there's all these like potential things that can get pulled at any given time. We found out after importing a couple more hours in casually on the last day of production that we'd hit the limit. which we didn't know existed. So it's a fun thing to have.
[00:30:24.832] Ben Joseph Andrews: And like Lachlan mentioned, you know, like, because it's all harmonically linked and creates this, you know, it is a very slow form composition, but once you kind of tune into that or spend time within it, you can kind of start to, intuit this kind of change and you feel held within this larger system. But consequently, because every sound is harmonically linked, every sound has to have 12 variations to be harmonically relevant, depending on which tonal center we have moved into. And because dawn and dusk happen so regularly, there are many, many, many, many variations of those of events per harmonic interval?
[00:31:11.534] Lachlan Sleight: We started talking in dimensionality so we have the dimensionality of pitch and the dimensionality of variation and the dimensionality of the chord. I think the dawns have four dimensions and the field recordings have four or five dimensions and that's per sound so every sound has like layers upon layers upon layers upon layers that mean that even if you were in Gondwana for three or four hours straight you probably wouldn't hear the same audio sample playing twice. which was kind of a big goal for the sound of the project.
[00:31:38.723] Kent Bye: That's what I think kept me drawn in because visually there's a lot of repetition in terms of what I'm seeing. But I mean, I should also say that every 14 minutes as it fast forwards through the year, you kind of get this hyper fast forward moment that when I first experienced, I was like, what is happening? It filled me so much with awe and I would try to often make my way down to the beach to I'd set my stopwatch to know when the next 14 minutes cycle was and try to go to the beach and watch it and kind of enjoy it. So I had my own rhythm, but, and then I should also mention that, you know, you have a mechanic where you can like look at your watch on your wrist and it will give you different information. Sometimes information around how long you've been in this piece or information around any sort of degradation that's happening in the environment. And so, yeah, during the 24 hour mark, there was a little clue that took me in to find the Easter egg that is the culmination, which not to spoil anything at all, but just it was worth the wait. For me, it was 3 a.m. that I was watching this. Then that point spend a number of times because I really wanted to get a sense of this. And I did not notice the musical elements that you're talking about. I mean, I did find that it was engaging. It was shifting enough to be interesting. but I didn't notice the pitch changes over that time. It reminds me of like the John Cage piece of music where like an organ note is played for like a dozen or like months and years. Yeah. And then it slowly changes. So it's the, you know, the playing of a composition over many, years and even centuries or something that potentially how long it's going to be able to play this piece. But kind of reminds me of that where, again, you're talking about these timescales that it's difficult for our human perception to perceive those shifts. And so you're again, kind of playing with time in that way, symbolic time. But also I think probably the most striking is the bleaching of the plants that you see over time. you can hop in and out. And as you hop in and out, there's like a counter that says, okay, this is where you're at from 1990 to 2090. But there's also all these scores in terms of describing the health of the canopy, the health of the animals, the health, sort of like these different quantitative metrics to be able to evaluate the degradation of the ecosystem. which is I think probably harder to visually represent the full complexity of those numbers. Ideally, you would be able to maybe see it or start to think about augmented reality of overlays on top of the virtual environment to be able to show that because I found those numbers to be somewhat abstracted from what my direct experience of it was. I just trusted that those numbers were representative of what was happening, but I couldn't have an embodied experience of that. the most striking part was the bleaching of the plants, which was the architecture of the plants were still there. It's just, they were the kind of grayed out. And I would imagine if it was actually dying, that those would degrade and they would go away and then you wouldn't see them anymore. But I should also just mention that there's a very interesting generative aspect where it's almost like, you know, when you go onto Google Maps and it's loading in the map, it felt like there's so much geometry that's dynamically being constructed as you're walking around. which gave it a really interesting feel because it was like, I've never seen anything quite like that. And it was just interesting to see how, as I was moving around, the world was being constructed around me in a way that wasn't fully formed, but I would imagine some sort of like occlusion culling or optimization reason for that, or maybe you could talk about both the bleaching of the plants to be able to symbolically illustrate this degradation, but also how those objects were being loaded in because it was such a, surreal experience within itself that gave it like a dreamlike quality. Like the world was dynamically being constructed as I was walking around, which when I would watch a YouTube live stream, I didn't see that component of it. It just felt like it was fully rendered and almost baked in terms of like super high resolution. But the experience of actually walking around was magical in that sense of like the world is changing around me as I'm walking around. But yeah, I'd love to hear about both the symbolic representation of this data that you're extrapolating from these projections from science, but then also this mechanic of the self-generating world as you're walking around.
[00:35:52.989] Emma Roberts: Totally. I'll take bleaching in Lachlan if you want to take the self-generating world. But so the bleaching, you're totally right, I think. Those watch statistics that you see, birds at 65%, canopy at 40%, they are actually happening in the experience. So you do lose animals according to that data. The canopy becomes thinner, the understory becomes thinner. But like you said, that's really hard to see if you've only just dropped in and you don't know that the birds used to be what 100% looked like. And so this idea of visually representing those changes in the rainforest as the bleaching came from the neighbor of the Daintree, actually the Great Barrier Reef, which is more famous next door neighbor. So they're right next to each other. When you stand on that beach, you're actually looking out at the reef. So obviously the bleaching of the coral reef is something that's globally known as the poster child of global warming almost. But this thing that we've all learnt how to spot and to grieve over as well. And one of the interesting things that when we're up there is that the Daintree is essentially going through the same thing, the terrestrial equivalent of bleaching through its species loss is incredibly rampant and is speculated to continue to be quite catastrophic. It's really hard to see because essentially what happens, like you said, in real life, a tree will die, it falls over, it decays into the ground and it's replaced by something else because it's a quite a lush environment, but it won't be replaced by an ancient species. It'll be replaced by a relatively new or adapted species. Obviously I'm talking quite generally here, but So you go into the rainforest and you just say, well, it looks like a rainforest and that's beautiful, it's dense, it's lush rainforest. But what you don't see as a as a regular pundit is what used to be there, which these incredibly Jurassic, ancient and incredibly rare plants that have a lineage back to the Gondwanan supercontinent. So we chose to bring the idea of bleaching, which statistically what that represents is the percentage of species that are critically endangered or extinct, and to bring that to life throughout the experience. So you have this really clear marker and ability to see that change over time in a way that we all understand. So that's where that came from. Lachlan, do you want to talk about generating the environment and tilt challenges?
[00:38:11.086] Lachlan Sleight: For sure. So yeah, I mean, Tilt Brush, we chose really early to use Tilt Brush as our main sort of asset creation pipeline. And there are a bunch of reasons for that, but probably the primary one way, way back in 2019 was that Tilt Brush gives us like a data pipeline that you don't get from traditional 3D asset creation because it's drawn by a human. And because Tilt Brush saves the actual sequence of drawing and the way that the actual asset was drawn as part of its file, we're able to use that data in our of the plants. And so even from our very early prototypes, we had that dream-like quality of assets that were slowly materializing and dematerializing as you approached and moved away from them. And so when we moved away from the original installation form of Gondwana and towards the sort of more free roam, downloadable online version, we kept that sort of materialization and dematerialization system from the data in Tilt Brush, but we're able to augment it thanks to Tilt Brush's open sourcing. But you're right, it's effectively the world's most complicated LOD system in that we can't render the whole, there's 50,000 assets, and because they are drawn in Tilt Brush, they're not really well-optimized 3D meshes. They're messy, human-made plants. And so there's, I don't know, something like 25 million polys in the rainforest, which we certainly can't render in stereo, and certainly can't render with quite a complicated shader pipeline that's running on all of that. So yeah we do draw that in and out as you approach and move away from different areas and like you say in the live stream it's not quite so obvious partially because the live stream camera has to teleport around and so we can't use quite the same system of slow materialization and dematerialization because it would have the camera jump and there'd be nothing visible But also because we are rendering it stereo, we do have the opportunity to sort of render out a further distance. And so the same system is being used to an extent, but the close range of things that are fully drawn is further away for the live stream camera. Yeah.
[00:40:08.053] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'm glad I had a chance to actually be embodied in the space because the whole sound design and the whole experience was quite different. I was watching some of the stream and I couldn't get a sense, but after getting in there, I got a much better sense of the piece and also just the different cycles throughout the day and, you know, being completely immersed in a place where you're kind of really rapidly cycling through the sun and the moon was really quite trippy. I'm wondering if you have any reflections upon creating this as a simulation, you know, projecting out into the future, and what your takeaways are creating a piece like this, and what, for me, after being in it, I feel like there's a part of this sense of time that I feel like you're trying to go for in a 24-hour durational take that evolves over 100 years. you know, the amount of time that I committed to it popping in and out, it was a quite unique experience. But I think there's just something about telling the story of something that's so large. And it's really a ecosystem story, which I think is something that's also unique to the medium of VR to be able to tell the story that, like I said, it doesn't translate that well to 2D. Like I had to be in the environment that my brain is kind of processing the relational dynamics of this ecosystem in a way that is difficult to take a 2D camera and capture that same vibe. And so to be immersed into that and to feel those relational dynamics, and then also to just the sound design as it's changing and all these other sort of ways that you're unfolding this story over time. So yeah, I'd just be curious to hear some takeaways of attempting to tell a story like this, but also what you're left with in terms of these embodied experiences you were able to create through the simulation.
[00:41:46.580] Ben Joseph Andrews: Yeah. I mean, just quickly to speak about the live stream. It is really, really different like on an experiential level versus being completely enveloped in a VR environment. And also really completely different to what we're initially attending. It was like a full multi-sensory rainforest installation. But the livestream also, you know, it isn't purely just for people who don't have access to the tech and definitely that wider accessibility was a really, really big driving force behind it. But it's also for once you've had that VR experience or once you've spent a significant amount of time through the VR or the 2D, like we kind of recognize that because it is such a long form, such a large temporal canvas that some people would just prefer not to have to get back in the headset or to spend even more time. And the 2D, the live stream could just be another kind of persisting reference point through which to have it on while you're cooking or just put it on. And it is a very different medium, I guess, through which the change is occurring. But once you've built that reference point, it's a little you have got that to judge the live stream from. So that was the intention with trying to almost use... The live stream, it does broaden accessibility, which is really important, but it also helps to fill those gaps of being able to check in on it. a little bit easier than like loading up VR or being able to do it while, you know, you've been in VR, you've checked out, gone to one, you're like, I wonder what's happening now. And you're on the bus going to an office you probably actually can't work from at the moment. And, you know, you can just check it on your device or check it on the go and just kind of like have the option to kind of remain connected. Yeah. In terms of learnings and takeaways, do you have anything to start with?
[00:43:41.002] Emma Roberts: I don't think we ever would have thought we'd get to this point with the experience when we started it. I think we set out in creating it as this piece about four years ago now, and I've been really blown away by the complexity, sometimes in a frustrated way, but also like, I think the complexity of the possibilities and the persistence of this is a durational piece that lives in the cloud and is generative and procedural is really fascinating. And that, like, I love getting into the headset and not knowing what I'm going to see, just knowing that the parameters that we've set have created something. And when audiences come in as well, that's going to be an extra layer. The audience is going to be creating something as well, both in how they're being able to run across other people in the rainforest, as well as the impact on the trajectory of the piece. So I think one of the big takeaways that I've had is just that I find it incredibly fascinating. The procedural possibilities of building an environment and work like this are really just super rewarding artistically. And I also think like I really love having a VR piece that is contemplative and meditative and self-directed in a way. I think a lot of the time VR is thought of as this medium for doing or for task oriented things or really like linear stories. And I think a lot of the people that we've had through in our testing period and Shari from Sundance as well have really responded to this long, nonlinear, gentle piece that's really up to you what you do with it. And I think that's really cool.
[00:45:25.114] Ben Joseph Andrews: Yeah. I mean, you know, so much of Gondwana is a outrageously small team. Like we're a team of five on the production and is that right too?
[00:45:36.470] Emma Roberts: Five on the building and then six on the production.
[00:45:38.691] Ben Joseph Andrews: six, sorry. We're a team of six. We just added another six. Yeah, exactly. And I'm just incredibly proud of the complexity and the richness of, like you say, an ecosystem that's changing over such a long, long period of time. And, you know, there's definitely been a lot of technical hurdles that we've had to navigate throughout the whole process of creation that were really challenging and especially being such a small team, working through some of those challenges. And working through some of those challenges, like what I was saying before about just the optimization of Tiltbrush and actually it becoming open source last year came at a really critical point for us and Gondwana would not be what it is now without that happening and without that greater access and flexibility that that kind of permitted. And one of the takeaways is to create this level of richness and change is really, there's many, many layers to it. And I think in an ideal world, we would have added a substantial amount more layers to how all those systems work and the various forms of change over time, how they are revealed. But yeah, I guess the technical complexity of the work certainly created a variety of challenges. But It's been really rewarding as well to, like Emma said, to work on something that has this life of its own. And we've got all these kind of real-time control panels that are kind of like what you were saying, Kent, with the watch. It's like this way more deep dive into the watch. And you have this sense when you watch the control panel and, you know, Gondwana is always changing regardless of who's in it, but you get this sense that it's living and it has got this pulse and it has its own rhythms and its own cycles within cycles. And it's constantly changing in novel and emergent ways and reaching that point where Emma mentioned before, putting on the headset and not knowing where we as creators were or like in the forest you know actually being like where am I and trying to find some of those markers like the little rivers that run across or some of the like key rocks or some of those nested ecosystems But reaching that point where when we put the headset on, we didn't quite know like where and what and how it was going to happen. And there are all of these beautiful moments that can happen that we deliberately tried to create in a way that we weren't curating it too much or really at all where different cycles just meet one another. And when they meet one another, because they're all harmonically linked on a sonic level, it creates these really rich and beautiful moments that even for us who have been working in it for so many years and spent countless hours in that virtual forest, even now those events are still rare and they kind of create this sense of beauty that it still gives me a sense of awe at the level of interlocking complexity, but also harmony of this system.
[00:49:07.441] Lachlan Sleight: There are things in Gondwana that we haven't seen, that we know are in there, we just haven't seen them.
[00:49:11.685] Emma Roberts: I've never seen the forest dragon. I know it's there, but I've never seen it.
[00:49:17.578] Kent Bye: I wanted to ask a few quick technical questions and then we can start to wrap up because there is this vastness of the place that I think I was just trying to walk from one end to the other and like, see how long it took me. It took me like six minutes just to even walk within VR. And so how many square meters of a space are we talking about in terms of this world you've created?
[00:49:37.595] Lachlan Sleight: I'm not sure what units of area are metric in imperial, but it's about 12 and a half hectares or 30 acres. So it's 350 meters long by 350 meters deep, more or less given that the boundaries aren't even and there's some areas that are blocked off and stuff.
[00:49:52.063] Kent Bye: Okay. Yeah. Cause there is this sense of feeling lost and you know, you mentioned how many assets it's just a massive, absolutely massive space. Another question I wanted to ask is you download a unity build. And so you have the guts that are in each person's site, but yet there's information that users are doing that's presumably being reported back. And then you're getting this 24 hour of where you're at in the cycle. That's also being fed back so that everybody's synced and having essentially the same. architecture of the same experience. And so is there a lot of data that's being passed in between, or is it pretty minimal in terms of like, here's a random number generator seed of where you're at or like.
[00:50:30.633] Lachlan Sleight: No, no, no. The forest lives primarily in the cloud. You know, one of the things that at least for me sort of slowly emerged over the course of the project is more and more and more of Gondwana migrated onto the internet and so the Unity app is effectively a repository for assets and the record of what is placed where. With a slow internet connection you can't use Gondwana because there's a lot of information being streamed back and forth and we've got three separate servers running doing different things and they're all interconnected. Yeah. And I suppose the reason for that was just so that, I mean, like Ben said, Gondwana has its own life, even if no one is running the Unity app. We have a control panel website, which is our sort of front end for watching things happen and making sure it's all going okay. And it's like 60 sliders or 50 sliders, all kind of like moving in real time and all the data readouts and knowing what's happening sonically, just so that we can get a sense for ourselves when sculpting it, what that superposition of events looks like.
[00:51:31.346] Kent Bye: Wow. Yeah. I feel like there's like a augmented reality app in the making where it's like the hyper advanced watch that gives you like data almost like created a whole platonic representation of all these mass structures that are representing these unfolding processes that are then being rendered out spatially within the Unity app. But to cut through the matrix and show us the code of what things are being generated by what, you know, I think it's obviously that would take away from the immersion of actually feeling you're in the experience, but I feel like there's a whole other layer of data analysis of a piece like this that you could start to push the limits because you're basically mathematically representing an ecosystem in some fashion. So rather than having those numbers abstracted out on a panel when you're out of the experience, if you're in the experience, then You know, the question is like, how do you translate these numbers in a way that just like in the matrix, you start to read the matrix in some ways, but doing a symbolic translation in some ways of being able to represent symbolically some of these things, either spatially or other ways, because I feel like there's this question of how to represent time and how to represent these changing dynamics of a degrading ecosystem, that once you have an embodied experience, like the bleaching gives me some intuitions, but there's a whole other layers of these intuitions that I feel like could be explored. You know, most of it's sonically in other ways, but I'm just thinking in terms of like data visualization and other things like that, that as creators that it would help you. And so those tools, are there ways to kind of take it to the next level that then helps, you know, eventually feed back into science so that as a scientist walks into a forest, they start to see the same type of visualizations that allows them to get a beat on something that is beyond their perception of these processes that are unfolding that they can't see, but is being observed or measured or simulated in some fashion that can be aggregated. It's almost like a time-lapse for ecosystems. that you've created, but that be able to somehow experience that time-lapse in a way that allows you to really get to the heart of those metrics or whatever that allows you to understand, Oh, this is what's happening with this part of the ecosystem.
[00:53:38.598] Lachlan Sleight: I was going to say, I feel like it's really funny because people know Gondwana as a digital experience, and this isn't like a criticism of people in reality, but in reality, we just take what we see in as experience. And because we know that Gondwana is digital, we know that there's data happening, we know that things have been sculpted and created by humans. It's like we want to, as technical people especially, we want to have a knowledge of what's happening and how it's working. And to an extent, we wanted to go as far as we can away from that. And we put those metrics in the front. of the experience because we sort of realized somewhat late in the experience, like, oh, no one's going to know what's happening. They'll just think that this is just like, it's just an animation loop, but there is all this data that's happening. And so we wanted to hint that there was code happening in the background, but the end goal was to have an experience that felt like a, just an organic, independent reality that you're just visiting.
[00:54:30.865] Emma Roberts: Yeah. I think like one of the takeaways from this as well is that through like knowing that ecosystem, the data becomes fascinating. Like I can sit and watch the front end all I want. I can still watch my watch all I want. And that's really cool to be just essentially looking at abstract facts and figures again, but to have them have a life where you're projecting yourself into this forest. You're going, Oh, the birds are at 30% now. Like, what's that going to look like? What's that going to sound like? It's like going to feel like. which is amazing to be able to bring that data to life, even when you're just seeing it as data and make it feel like something important rather than just like numbers on a page.
[00:55:10.387] Lachlan Sleight: Bring it back in the way that you want real data visualization in the real world. You want to know what's happening. You know, just an experience.
[00:55:18.821] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think one of the key insights in terms of data visualization in VR is the degree to which that you can play with the data and interact with it. And so also thinking about rendering out a five minute animation or a 14 minute loop that allows you to kind of see, or maybe multiple rather than a 14 minute, maybe it's 15 minutes, but it's like essentially three years worth of data that is unfolding that you can tune into these things that is a multimodal aspect of when you see something and you hear it, then you're able to make the connection. And so having those data visualization aspects that allow you to see what happens with this changing in the birds and be able to like dial it up. So, yeah, I'm just, I'm thinking about those ways of making it so that it's taking what is that long time lapse, but the challenge I have with it as a piece is that my perception isn't evolved enough to be able to perceive all the depth of the changes that are happening, despite coming back and really trying to like tune my perception. And so I feel like, you know, in some ways there's a need for that type of augmented way of showing it in real time in some fashion. And, you know, this feels like a larger mission of where things are going to go eventually. Like this is like a first iteration that's fully formed and it's amazing. But yet we're talking about getting people to wrap their mind around climate change and that there's experiences like this that I feel like that can start to really give people as they walk away those deep embodied experiences. In some ways, kind of like Don't Look Up as a film narratively was able to share an experience that doesn't quite work out in terms of the heroes saving the day. And so that narratively really stuck with me in a way. And I feel like there's elements of this piece that are starting to hint towards that, but yet as a medium of trying to figure out how to do that, it's a very complicated problem that I've seen people try to do over the years. There's been Don Fung Dennis did a piece on going up to the Arctic and showing the melting glaciers and stuff like that. But still that's difficult to give on the vast scales that we're talking about, you know, and of course, inconvenient truth is another ways of showing these graphs and the data. But I feel like the advantage of VR is to give people these embodied experiences that are allowing them to really tune into those changes. So anyway, that's just some thoughts in terms of like where this could go in the future is that continued mapping of that data. into the virtual experience and starting to find ways of having that multimodal, you can go in and tune your perceptions to hear that. But as an audience member, I feel like the watch sometimes didn't show me the full breadth of information that I'd want to know about. Totally. Yeah. Well, as we start to wrap up here, I'm curious what you each think is the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable.
[00:58:06.122] Emma Roberts: I'm so excited to hear Lachlan's answer on this. Ah, phew. I mean, I think like ultimately the thing that excites me about VR and its potential is just a different way of looking at the world. Like we can sculpt and bend reality and perceptions in so many different ways in VR. And I think that's where its power lies really is that you can build an experience that gives you a different way of ultimately looking at real reality. That's my short answer.
[00:58:41.054] Ben Joseph Andrews: Yeah. I mean, circling back to our very beginning, to me, I was powered to create motion sickness and just really visceral sensory phenomena. It is the power of VR and how it maps to the human system and how it hacks into illusions of our body and ourselves and what makes us feel present. And what VR reveals is that actually some of those mechanics and some of those illusions are actually quite fragile. Because of that, VR can produce new and different and alternative sensations and sensory phenomena. And that is one of its great strengths. But while that is its potential, what it can kind of unlock is a better, deeper, richer understanding of like who we are and what we are as humans, as sensing humans capable of, and to enrich how lived and bodily understanding of our environment that we live in and the world that we occupy in and the best headset isn't going to remove the physical world that we are living in, which is in such a precarious position. And I think that what VR can do is to deepen that sense of connection and that sense of richness, and that can help us better connect as people with ourselves, with each other and with nature.
[01:00:13.724] Lachlan Sleight: I mean yeah yeah totally I think I agree it's like you know the ultimate potential is a deepening you say it's a expansion of our reality in the same way that the written word is an expansion of our reality as a technology allows us to go deeper into what it is to be on earth as consciousnesses and as VR gets more mature and becomes more integrated into our lives it's you know through mixed reality headsets and augmented reality headsets as that becomes more fundamentally part of our lived experiences, unless you put the headset on, you have an experience, you take it off and you think about it, you know, that expansion becomes more and more powerful and more and more part of what it is to be human in the modern world. And, you know, like you say, in the modern world, you know, it's not all good. Yeah, I mean, I really hope that the ultimate potential of virtual reality is to help us connect with the world in a way that helps us make it better and not allows us to sort of recede from it and go into sort of parallel experiences that aren't connected to the issues that we have to solve, you know, that are tied to our basic existence as physical humans that need to eat and not experience natural disasters and various other issues. Yeah, so I suppose the ultimate potential is a deepening. I think you said it perfectly about a deepening. Hmm.
[01:01:31.768] Kent Bye: Great. Is there anything else that's left instead of you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[01:01:36.568] Ben Joseph Andrews: Yeah, I guess like enjoy Gondwana, you know, we intentionally created something that has no, I mean, it has got end points eventually, but to sit and listen and to contemplate what changes are occurring in our environment that happening on such a slow level. And that's kind of what Gondwana does show as well. Like, even though it's a long period and even though there are these heightened moments of time changing, perceiving and being connected to and understanding gradual, gradual, gradual, subtle changes in landscape is super, it is really tricky and
[01:02:19.389] Emma Roberts: especially changes that you are never going to see all of because ultimately we won't. But like, and that's half the issue here is that you can't in real life grasp those fully and we're never going to, but we need to learn to extrapolate that and to see beyond just this little slice that's in our past and present. Yeah. So, I mean, we're really looking forward to seeing people in the rainforest and seeing how they interact with it and hearing.
[01:02:45.130] Ben Joseph Andrews: Yeah. And like you said, actually, Kent, you referenced before the John Cage piece and, you know, those durational works like the Oliver Eliason, Melting Ice, Glacier at the Tate, I think, those experiences are a huge inspiration behind Gondwana's durational format. And one thing that's untested from us as we speak to you today is how audiences actually spend time in Gondwana. And we've done lots of testing, but we've never released it on scale. This is the premiere and the images of people flooding into that organ to hear the chord change. to experience one hugely monotonous tone, go into one hugely monotonous tone and to gather together to like experience that temporal moment is something that we're about to, I guess, start to get a glimpse of with Gondwana and how that unfolds, which is just, yeah, hugely exciting.
[01:03:48.540] Emma Roberts: I will say if you do want to see the finale, I'd recommend getting in about 10 minutes before if you want to see it fully 10 minutes before that's my advice.
[01:03:59.206] Kent Bye: Michael, anything else left unsaid?
[01:04:00.807] Lachlan Sleight: Oh, I mean, to the wider community, thanks for making so much cool stuff. It's been, it's been an amazing little space to be in, especially during its growth. Just like, a whole bunch of really awesome people making really cool technology in a way that isn't so technology-y, if you know what I mean. Just like people making experiences for experience's sake and not for digital content's sake. It's been awesome.
[01:04:24.538] Emma Roberts: Very generous people. I love you. Thank you.
[01:04:30.058] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. Well, Ben and Emma and Lachlan, I wanted to, first of all, thank you for coming on the podcast. And I guess a final thought for me is that this experience was a piece that I wanted to really immerse myself into and really get a sense of what you were creating here, because it's not often that people say I've created a 24 hour VR experience. So I feel like now that I've seen the trajectory of where it ends up, that if I go back and either listen to the YouTube or the live streams that are out there, or to immerse myself into the piece again, from a first person perspective, to be able to then know where it ends up at the end, and then be able to use that as a contrast to come back again, because it's a much larger contrast, which are you going to be starting in at 3 a.m. Each morning, uh, Pacific.
[01:05:16.973] Emma Roberts: Sorry. The 3m was, we had a couple of things that needed to happen that day, including the press preview. So it was an unfriendly time zone for Pacific, but, but across Sundance, it will start at 11 a.m. Mountain time every day.
[01:05:29.642] Kent Bye: Okay. That's a little bit more reasonable to see. Yes. And then, you know, the next day would be kind of the ending and then you kind of flip over each day. Right. You're just going to, so, okay. Yeah. So I think it'll give people a chance to tune in and there's like a countdown clock there in the piece that be able to kind of help orient folks where they're at. So, yeah, I look forward to kind of coming back in and kind of tuning in again and listening, but yeah, it's a piece that I think, you know, as I look at the selection this year, it's certainly one of the most. Technologically advanced with all the different stuff that you're trying to do. It's a quite ambitious piece in that sense. And. Also the experience of it, of, like I said, the sound design of making it really feel like I'm in this forest with all the sound design and the musicality of it all. Yeah. Just really blown away by everything that you were able to do to even put this together and make it happen and, and start to break unity at the same time, because it's kind of pushing it beyond the limits of what the technology can even do. So yeah, so many different ways in which that it's a. really quite impressive piece overall. And yeah, just really enjoyed my time in Godwanna. So thanks again, Emma, Ben and Lachlan for coming on and unpacking it all today.
[01:06:39.184] Emma Roberts: Thank you. Thanks so much. And thanks for spending so much time in the rainforest.
[01:06:45.778] Kent Bye: So that was the lead artist, Ben Joseph Andrews and Emma Roberts, as well as a key collaborator, Lachlan Sleight, on the Gondwana VR, which is playing now until the end of the Sundance Film Festival on January 30th. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, well, this is a piece is something that was quite a meditative experience, one that you have a lot of agency of exploring around. It is all about trying to depict the degradation of an ecosystem over the course of 100 years. Symbolically, over 24 hours, which is every 14.4 minutes, they would jump forward a year. You get some of the day-night cycles in between there. But more or less, there's this evolution that's happening within the context of this simulation, where you have these plants that are slowly bleached out. They go from the normal architecture and then they just turn gray. And then also the sound design, which is pretty amazing that it's not only capturing different aspects of the ecosystem. And as you go around throughout the forest and throughout the day night cycles that are happening, it's shifting and changing. And there's a whole musical element there that I didn't catch the first time I went through it, which is that there's a slow musical piece that's unfolding. You can see the whole musical piece unfold around the ending, which I think they're beginning and stopping at around 10 a.m. Pacific Time or 11 a.m. Mountain Time. So if you go in there, I recommend to start at around 10 a.m. or so or after 10 a.m. Pacific and then check out where it is at the beginning and then maybe check in throughout the course of day and then maybe the following day. Check in as it starts to wrap up and try to catch the ending of the finale. It's quite spectacular. And yeah, just to see the elements of the force as it was changing and to what degree can you notice some of the subtle nuances of what they're trying to do in this piece. And, you know, this is a piece that you could probably take aspects of it and boil it down to like a just a 20 minute experience or whatnot. But there's something else that I think is this durational take this idea that it is running over that 24 hours and you have to As an audience member commit to going in there and really trying to pay attention to different things because in a lot of ways These changes are happening beyond our perception that even within the context of this one day that's like a microcosm for how much these changes are happening that are a almost happening so slowly that it's hard to see or perceive. We are very good as humans of perceiving change, but if something is changing so slowly, we don't necessarily notice it. And so that's why the time lapse as a conceit within film is so powerful for you to see those changes that are happening. But within the context of VR, you're still kind of taking it in in real time. It's hard to do the full aspect of that time lapse, especially when it comes to the sound design elements, which was Pretty powerful what they've been able to put together in this like they said over like 40 hours with the audio material They're a part of this as an experience. And so there's quite a lot of really interesting generative ways of Running this simulation in the background that is then feeding in information into your local build that is dictating how things are unfolding. So I I think it sounded like they were trying to avoid the inevitability of just everything taking away the agency of the user if they feel like they can't really do anything. But theoretically, if you have enough people that are participating in an experience like this, you can start to symbolically save different aspects of the forest. It sounds like even if you did that, there's only 6,000 out of the 50,000 assets or so, so you'd only be able to save around 12% or so. It can definitely tell by the end of how quiet and eerie it gets, and when you go into the next day, you can definitely sense the changes. It's a piece that I've brought up and listened to the live stream throughout the course of the day, afterwards as well. Yeah, it's very interesting to tune into it afterwards. It does have this musical quality. And there is this sense of awe and wonder when it goes to the day-night cycles and it kind of cycles through all the different multiple iterations of the day and night and just the lighting effects that are happening dynamically. And also just how all the assets are loading in dynamically has quite an etheric effect as well that is pretty powerful. So yeah, I definitely recommend trying to check this out. And I think this conceit of trying to spread out an experience over the course of 24 hours and see what kind of qualities of presence you can cultivate within people and to draw up all these different relational dynamics. And I think, you know, if there's anything where this could go in the future is to think about other ways of visualizing stuff that you have a watch, but are there other ways to be able to do like a augmented reality overlay on top of this virtual experience to be able to help elucidate some of these different aspects a little bit more. There's a certain quality of not having any of that. You're just in the embodied experience of the world. But there is so much about the back-end that the creators are looking at that it would be interesting to start to play with other ways of symbolically translating that data. either through spatial representations or even just augmented reality overlays or maybe time lapse. You know, not everybody is going to have the patience to be able to go in there and see all the different stuff and commit to an experience like that. So thinking about are there other ways to be able to convey this in something that is digestible for people? There's lots of stuff that are happening in the context of this that even to recognize the eight different biomes, I'm not sure if I could necessarily identify and recognize those even after going through the experience as long as I did. I certainly didn't explore every little nook and cranny of what's in there. So yeah, just thinking about other either directions of where to go or at least, you know Thinking about editing stuff into things afterwards or augmented reality layers. These are all kind of speculative ideas You know, there's nothing that needs to change with it It's perfectly fine as it is, but those are things that it's a challenge I think to kind of continue to allow different ways of telling the story of slow change and the dynamics of the ecosystems that are shifting and because you get that information outside of the context when you leave the context of being in the forest, and those numbers are helpful, and so are there ways to kind of integrate it more tightly. And even as creators, they were using that as a design inspiration to help keep track of how the ecosystem was changing, and are there tablet interfaces or other ways to bring in some of that data within the embodied experience of the experience itself are some of the different questions that I think about after going through it. Yeah, it's kind of a meditative experience on, you know, really thinking about different cycles within cycles within cycles of time. So yeah, really quite interesting. And I'm very curious to see what other folks are to do with this kind of form of, you know, these long form durational takes and As an audience member, yeah, like I said, it takes commitment to be able to really go in there and try to see what you can see and take whatever you can take out of. I think that's kind of the idea, is that there's going to be lots of people that do that, and maybe through the process of unpacking different things, then you can start to have a whole other layer of making sense of this experience. So that's all I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the voices of VR podcast And if you enjoyed the podcast and please do spread the word tell your friends and consider becoming a member of the patreon This is a lesson support podcast and I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening
