#1364: Step into the Movies with “The Vortex Cinema” Blending Cinematic Storytelling, Gaming, & Escape Room Mechanics

I interviewed The Vortex Cinema director Max Sacker as well as actors Christian Stotz & Brian Chase remotely ahead of the SXSW XR Experience 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.

This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.

Music: Fatality

Rough Transcript

[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. 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. So continuing on my series of looking at different immersive stories from South by Southwest 2024, Today's episode is with a piece called The Vortex Cinema, which is a really ambitious fusion of cinematic storytelling with embodied gameplay and escape room mechanics. It's definitely one of the more experimental in terms of structure and form, but also in polish and fidelity. experience that is bringing together all these different affordances within virtual reality and just quite an epic indie effort to put all this together. And the course of this conversation, I chat with the director, Max Sackler, but also a couple of the actors, Christian and Brian, who are featured within the context of this piece as well. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Max, Christian and Brian happened on Friday, March 8th, 2024. So with that, let's go ahead and Dive right in.

[00:01:15.132] Max Sacker: My name is Mike Sacker. I'm the creative director at Another World VR and also the co-CEO of Another World VR next to Julia Isserlis. We're currently a team of nine VR developers that have been in the space since 2016. Our previous games were Cobalt and Pagan Peak, both of which were kind of horror, escape roomy, kind of mysterious interactive, well Cobalt was an interactive movie and Pagan Peak was more of a game and now we're doing the Vortex Cinema, premiering that at South by Southwest here. Really excited to get into that, we just set up the booth and the festival is just about to kick off so we're feeling good about the next coming days. And Vortex is the culmination of a long dream that I've had which is basically to step into the movie screen and enter the world of cinema as the main protagonist basically physically crossing a magic barrier and becoming a character in a fictitious cinema universe. So that's kind of the general idea. We started that about four years ago. We're based in Berlin in Germany. And yeah, before I dive into that, next to me right now on my left is Christian Stotz. Christian is an actor and he plays a, well, I don't want to spoil too much, but he plays initially an antagonist, but somebody who will grow on us over time as a main character called Corbinian. And to my right is Brian Chase. Brian Chase plays Captain Hackett, who is the captain of the Fifth Street police precinct in a black and white, gum-shoe-y, film noir universe. So they are with me today to give a little bit of perspective on what it felt like to play a virtual character in this world. And I guess I can answer questions about direction and production and some of the creative behind it.

[00:03:09.105] Christian Stotz: Hi, I'm Christian Stotz. Thank you for having us. It's a great pleasure. I'm a former actor. Today I am working in the sector of political communication. But for good friends like Max, I'm often slipping back into the acting area. Years ago, I took part in Pagan Peak, and I was the voice of the villain in this game. And that was a special experience. And I have to say, I love to watch the people on Twitch playing the game and getting terrified by my voice. That was a big compliment, I have to say. But to take part in the Vortex cinema, playing Cobenian, was a totally different experience. And it was amazing. I never, never, ever had experience as an actor like this. It was totally different from what I did on the film set, what I did on stage, what I did in the speaker cabin. That was special. I mean, you play a part and then you see how Max and his team are creating a world around the character and you can see the development. blow my mind away. So I'm very, very happy to tell you more about that in the next hour.

[00:04:29.880] Brian Chase: Good evening, my name is Brian Chase. And like Christian, I also have a political background. I've worked for the telecommunications industry and legislative public affairs in California for the better part of a decade. but for good friends like Max, returning to the arts. And this is my first role as well in a VR setting. So I am a member of the cast. I play Captain Hackett. And I am also working in public affairs programming in the area of television production, working right now on writing a show on California current events and California history. So great to be here this evening.

[00:05:16.227] Kent Bye: Great. And Max, maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into working with VR.

[00:05:22.371] Max Sacker: Sure. So I come from a filmmaking background initially, but in 2016, I had an Oculus Rift on my head and I started to see, as many VR creators did, the potential of immersive storytelling. I founded a company with Julia Isserles called Another World VR, which specialized entirely on VR immersive storytelling. And we marry games and movies. We initially started out as filmmakers trying to understand the Unreal Engine and getting a new vocabulary when it comes to game design and interactive. But now, Our company is more so fully a team of game developers that happens to love cinema, but it's changed for sure. We've become an independent game studio based in Berlin, and I spend almost every day of my life in the Unreal Engine with an amazing team of 3D artists, programmers, and game designers. And yeah, Vortex is the culmination of that idea of making movies interactive and making gaming a little bit more like cinema, like an experience of having watched a story that's compelling and characters and I suppose narrative arcs that leave a satisfying kind of like visual response, making people feel like they've actually seen a show that is reminiscent of film, but very much using all of the tools from that we've learned over the last years in game design and focusing on the interactive component of that.

[00:06:55.018] Kent Bye: Right. And so the Vortex Cinema is premiering there at South by Southwest, XR Experience selection there and in competition. And so maybe you could just give a bit more context for how this project came about.

[00:07:06.708] Max Sacker: Sure, I'll just start real quick on that. Basically, Yulia and I both share that dream of entering the movie world and she is the producer of the game, Vortex Cinema, and basically she's very good at Making the impossible possible. So it's very difficult, expensive, time consuming, and also challenging to get funding and support behind such a long winded project. I mean, we are nearly four years in development on this and we do it every day. It's not very common that you have that luxury, being able to focus 100% of your time on VR games production, especially as VR is still I wouldn't say niche product at this point anymore, very much not. But it's still something that not everyone has at home in their house. And people take a while to onboard and to come to terms with the hardware. So we know all of this. And we take that risk upon ourselves, fully aware that it is still in its genesis. And she really provided a situation by, well, her very, I would say, skillful handling of the German federal funding system, whether we have a federal fund in Germany for actually for games. It's a wonderful thing that we don't have in the United States. And and helping basically me and the team focus on being able to do such a large creative endeavor while having our backs, you know, in terms of financial day-to-day. So, she was a big part of the genesis of this project, and the other thing is, like, we just love this whole idea of being able to enter a film. She's had that dream since her childhood, I have as well, and I think the game very much is an homage to film. from a gaming point of view. So that's kind of where we came from and then we just went deeper and deeper into literally the vortex of insanity that is this project. And what came out is a short demo that we're showing here at South by Southwest because it's a It's an event where a lot of people are going through in, let's say, 30 minute time slots. And so we've given a nice sort of first taste of what Vortex can be like, which is that you enter a film noir world, you play a hard-boiled gumshoe investigating the death of a scientist. something to do with a mysterious raven, and you start to meet characters from that 1930s, 1940s film noir world, whether they be gangsters or crooked cops, and you start to unravel a mystery that ultimately, without spoiling too much, takes you through different genres and time periods of cinema over the last hundred years, on a bit of a rollercoaster ride as you try to solve this mystery, going through dimensions. and different portals to discover different chapters of what we all know and love about movies.

[00:10:16.870] Kent Bye: Nice. Yeah. I've, you know, if it's a 30 minute slot, I've probably gone through like the 35 or 40 minute mark. And there's still yet stuff that I am going to try to finish and play after this interview and finish it up. But that's probably just as well because we can still talk about some of the stuff that I've seen so far. And it is a mixing and mashing of different genres from more of the cinematic tradition for more of a first person shooter from like, there's even some like boxing and some interactive action and. also just some like escape room elements that are all kind of being blended together and potentially even more genres and experiences beyond what I've been able to experience up to this point. And so since there is such a focus on that cinematic film noir with these different actors, and we have a couple of the actors here, wondering if you could set a bit of the context for the process for capturing these performances and, and then I'd love to hear from each of the actors about their experiences there. So was this just like voice acting? Did you do motion capture? What was the process of actually capturing these performances?

[00:11:18.394] Max Sacker: Sure. So what's really important to me as a director is to have an environment where actors can trust me with new technology. They're lending not only their faces, but their body movements, their voices, yeah, their personalities to this role. And the way we did that was both Christian and Brian got strapped into an XSENSE motion capture suit. They were given a script. In some cases, they also gave their input into the scene early on before we even did anything. And then they would wear a rig on their head connected to an iPhone that would be using the LiDAR sensor within that iPhone to capture their facial gestures live. And all of that got streamed into various programs, initially iClone, and now we've moved on to MetaHuman. In the end, it ends up in the Unreal Engine as a complete virtual performance. In the case of Christian and Brian, as they are very special characters in real life and also in this game, it was important to me that they felt able to transfer all of themselves into the performance. So we did a photogrammetry scan of their heads. using a scan dome that we built in our basement. And that's just a very simple DSLR setup. It's about 35 cameras that are wired together. They fire off at the same time, and we're able to take photos from different sides of all angles, create a 3D mesh through photogrammetry, and then our incredibly fearless and talented 3D artists would start re-topologizing that, rigging it, preparing it for animation, and then we would have a head that could, through the different blend shapes that it can portray, sort of mirror the facial expressions of the actor. And then the body motions were done in the next sense. Motion capture was all put together as one virtual performance. Before I go on too much about the tech of that, I'd like to pass it on to these two to talk a little bit about how that felt, because they were thrown into the cold water when they met me for the first time. I said, hey, put this suit on, you know, and trust me, it's going to be great. And yeah, I mean, let's start with Christian, because he had a demanding performance right from the get go as Corbinian. Do you want to talk about how that felt?

[00:13:38.017] Christian Stotz: Yeah, with pleasure. So I have to say, as an actor, you're used to have like some sort of costumes or masks or something like this is, I wouldn't say problematic to act in, you know, but it's a challenge. You know, so every actor, every actress knows about what I'm talking about, you know, if it's a costume or it's the environment or like I said, it's a mask. And this is the same like in this VR, you have like this helmet on, you know, and have the iPhone directly in front of your face. And you are focusing not getting distracted by yourself while acting. So it's a challenge. But when you see the result, it's stunning. It's absolutely stunning. So you can see yourself, you watch like a VR character that looks like you is showing your acting. It's like looking in the mirror. It's something fantastic and something I'm really thankful that I experienced that. Me and Max, we are like close friends since 15 years now. And it's a big advantage of our friendship that we can lose ourselves in hours and hours of like talking and creating funny stories and characters and so on. And now we made one of these stories real, you know, and this is a very special character for me to play because it's very personal. And it's also because there is so much so much aspects of things we created over these 15 years and many creative sessions that we put in this character. And Max decided to also develop this character more, to not just give him one moment where he can shine and then he's out of the game. So I'm very excited about what is happening to Cobenian in the future. I don't want to talk too much about who is this character and what is this character doing, so the players should experience that by themselves. I have to say that this game, the Vortex Cinema, is like a game that put us out a little bit of this rush that we feel during our daily life and also it puts a brake on this lack of attention that we are suffering during like this media consumption we're doing all over every day, every day in our daily media consumption. It's like a game that has its beauty in the details so take your time and when you walk through really enjoy the details this is like it's when i go through the first scenes the first part of the game it's like the more slow i discover all the things like the more this game shines so this is my hint to all the people playing it take your time and really relax and enjoy it's worth it

[00:16:46.240] Brian Chase: All right, well, this was all new to me. And what I think was unique here, and unlike Christian to some extent, was that I was instructed to act a lot like myself and bring a lot of my personal experiences into this character. A very political background and a lot of public affairs work, and someone who understands municipalities and the way government bureaucracies work. and just to bring those sensibilities to it, but also with a lot of the same approach to the appreciation for storytelling that Max and I grew up with. So we grew up making films. And so this was a return to that original appreciation for this sort of artistry. But it was very foreign to me and initially not terribly comfortable. And that's an understatement. You're putting on a suit like you're going for a run. But knowing what I'm supposed to be like, you know, in a kind of a starched dress uniform, you're having to use a lot of your imagination to visualize how this comes across and being able to act in an environment where You're really focusing more on the movement and the space. It's not, like Christian said, what you're wearing. It's not the costumes. It's the orientation that you have in relation to what's going on in this world. That was something completely new to me. And then, of course, having a camera right in front of your face the whole time. You can barely see over it. I mean you're like looking at yourself. That's capturing all of your emotions So, you know all of your mouth movements and your facial expressions are captured and can be mapped But I think you have to have a real appreciation for it because I didn't think it was unnerving at all it was just it was new but I was very excited to see how it would turn out and and very excited to see how all of this data would come together and recreate what I was doing in that environment. So that part was very exciting to me. Now, in terms of the gameplay, it's the mechanics that I'm really excited by. Being able to see in intricate detail the projector and the firearms and the way that these elements interact with one another, that to me is so impressive. on top of the architecture and the recreation of these spaces that I think are so exciting to be able to explore. So, yeah, I agree. It's something you really want to take your time with, and I'm just blown away with how far the technology has come.

[00:19:24.005] Kent Bye: Yeah, just a follow-on question in terms of the capturing of the performances. Was this a situation where you could only record one actor at a time? Because usually when you're acting, you're acting in an ensemble with other people. And I know that for the actors, it can be a little bit more difficult if you can have to act out with not having any other people to feedback the other lines. So just maybe talk about if you're able to record multiple actors at the same time or if they had to do it one at a time.

[00:19:50.018] Max Sacker: So the ideal situation is that instead of having an iPhone basically taped in front of their eyes, an actor could really be in a VR headset and look at the virtual environment that they're acting in and interact with other performers in real time. That's something that we want to do in the future. The reality was initially we had one Xsens suit. And so in duo scenes where several performers were talking to each other, we would have to record at one time, then flip around, put the suit on the other performer and have them respond. But then we got a second suit and Xsense also supported us with licenses. So they saw the merit of the project and they gave us the software licenses to continue finishing what we have for South by Southwest and then towards the final game. And one of their licenses allows you to have multiple performers acting at the same time. It proved to be a little challenging at the beginning because of the way these sensors need to be set up and calibrated, but we figured it out. And that really made a massive difference. So more towards the end of the production, we had a setup where, and it really makes a difference because if one performer can, in a conversation piece, pat the other performer on the shoulder, or if these touch interactions that happen in everyday conversations or dialogue can be synced perfectly in real time, it just looks so much more realistic. If the actor can have an eyeline and actually act off the other person's expressions, that makes a massive difference. You know, so we developed the finesse towards the end of the production, and you'll see that, I think, when you continue to play it, you'll see certain performances where there are two people playing at the same time. That's possible to do with accents. That's not a massive technical hurdle. What is still challenging on a technical level is marrying that with the environment props. So X-Sense is an inertial-based capture system, meaning that these sensors can drift a little bit, they need to be recalibrated, they need to be corrected by 3D artists. Not a terrible hindrance, not a big deal, but it does require you to think about all of those things before you shoot the scene. And in general, it isn't just the XM suit, it's everything. It's the VR, it's the way it comes into the engine. The truth is, you have to have a very myopic and specific overview, pixel by pixel, of what we're going to do, where we're going, what interactions take place, how long they should be, before you actually put anyone in a motion capture suit. You know, one concern I had was that some of these scenes might run on a little long because, you know, when you're playing a video game, you don't always want to be stuck in a cutscene. You want to move on with the interactive. And I actually found when the motion capture is of a high enough quality, like it is with Accents, or when the facial capture is of a high enough quality, like it is with MetaHuman, you can do quite long scenes. I'm talking about like up to a minute or longer of dialogue, and people are still captivated and engaged with that performance, even though they're currently not able to interact because they're watching a cinematic. Because it's real, because it looks authentic. And this is something that I'm very excited about going forward, like just adding another layer of polish to that to see how far can we go with a linear narrative before we bore somebody, you know, and how can we mix that with exciting interactions like investigative, detective work, shooting. And so I think one thing that we succeeded in with Vortex is balancing shooter elements with investigative, detective work and cinematics that you don't want to skip, that you do want to see and play out. And that's just a formula that I think we really nailed and I'm really happy about that.

[00:23:42.625] Brian Chase: Mm-hmm. I'll just add from a cast members perspective. Yes, you're acting with an X on the wall, right? I mean you're looking at different colors of different X's knowing who is who in what direction and Timing that well, and so that's where I was saying earlier. You really have to have some imagination when you're playing this out having some feeling of what the end product is going to look like and

[00:24:09.861] Max Sacker: The exes being gaffer tape. Everything was gaffer tape.

[00:24:14.883] Christian Stotz: Yeah, but you always have to keep in mind that this is not that unusual when we talk about acting. For example, when actors play in front of a green screen, you have to imagine that they have to really feel that they are in this world right now that the green screen at the end and the post-production creates. You know, when they stand in front of the ocean or they're running away from anything, it's like it's not there. They are in front of a green screen. So I think this is something that requires a lot of talent. And also when you look at audio plays where just the voice of an actor is used and the people speaking and the dialogue. Sometimes it's like the actor is coming alone into the studio and the director just reads the rest of the dialogue. And then you have to, as an actor or actress, you have to react on the director that just reads the lines without any emotion. You have to create the emotion. At the end everything is like put together and you have an emotional dialogue just in audio for example. But this is also always this like 50 or even more percent of imagination that you have to use as an actor to create this world. And this is what I talked about before. When you see it at the end, when you see the result and you see Corbinian in the scene, it's like you remember, right. Yeah, that was the line. That was the line. And then you see the product and it's surprising. It's really absolutely surprising. And I had two scenes as Corbinian. And the second scene was way easier for me because I saw the result of the first scene. So I had a little bit more of expectation how it should look like at the end and so on, like it gets easier. So when you start acting in a VR game, the first time is like really jumping into the cold water and the second time is much easier, much easier.

[00:26:28.903] Kent Bye: Yeah, I have a few follow on questions around the experience itself for you, Max. I'm wondering if you could maybe elaborate on that very first scene, because you're like in a movie theater, you're seeing like what's essentially like a cut scene, but it's in the context of watching a movie. And so you kind of have this scene that's playing out. And so it's a way of kind of using CGI and metahumans to have the cinematic, but the cinematic is not immersive around you, but you're watching it on the screen. And so maybe you could just elaborate on that, that very first scene that you're walking into.

[00:26:58.188] Max Sacker: Sure, so we spawned the player immediately into the front of a movie screen in an old movie theater. It's not a fictitious movie theater, it's a hybrid between a real existing movie theater in Berlin, an old silent film theater that's been around since the 1920s, that's hardly been opened again since the fall of the Berlin Wall, so it's a very special, dusty, magical place. combined with the exterior of a classic sort of Main Street American cinema that we might have seen, you know, in the 1970s, 80s. The environment itself is actually two locations that have been put together with photogrammetry and then redesigned by us to make it a unique And I wanted to ensure that the first thing that you experience is that room, this magical movie theater where this whole series of events kick off. And on the screen in front of you, you're watching a black and white, the beginning of a black and white murder mystery where a scientist is killed by a mysterious off-screen entity. And then it rolls the intro credits of that film within a film, and the film within the film is called The Case of the Red-Eyed Raven. And then we have, you know, our own credits running after that. And it's kind of like a soft onboarding lead in of like, OK, I'm in front of this movie screen inside this dusty old magic movie theater. If I want to, I can watch this black and white film, which is about four minutes long, play out in front of me. But as you watch it, it starts to fall apart. Like the audio goes out of sync. There's scratches on the movie. Something's wrong with it. And when you turn around, there's an old Eastern European cleaning lady just kind of scrubbing the floor of the cinema. And if you walk up to her and you can start a conversation with her by pushing the grip button, she'll tell you, stupid old man, go upstairs and fix the projector. It's broken. So she gives you your first quest, your first objective. And then it's up to you at this point. You can continue to watch the movie or you can walk around the movie theater and explore the foyer and the dusty kind of back areas and there's a bar. I don't know if you saw these but there are lots of silly little interactions like you can turn on a hot dog machine and stupid stuff like that. But the goal is to go upstairs to the projection room. It's all about player agency. You are up to your own devices as to how quickly or how slowly you want to explore this space. You can watch the movie that's playing up on the screen or you can completely ignore it and just mess around and talk to the granny and throw objects around or whatever you want to do. But everything is story. If you pay attention to what's happening up on the screen you will find out in that movie clues that will help you later on. It's actually the crime scene of the scientist being murdered. There is the crime scene that you later visit as a detective inside the movie. So you actually enter that exact location later. And yeah, I suppose it's just a way of giving you the space to be curious and like take it at your own speed. But once you get up into the projection room, the projector breaks. And it's now up to you to fix it. And now I really don't want to spoil what happens afterwards, but you have to rummage through a storage cabinet and find something to help fix the projector. And that kicks off a magical set of events that ultimately transports you into another dimension. From which point on, you're a detective in the 1940s. Crime caper.

[00:30:22.690] Kent Bye: Yeah, and just from the sections I've had a chance to play through so far, which is probably the first 30 or 45 minutes of the experience, you have the cinematics, you have open world exploration type of thing where there is a linear path, but there is a lot of side areas that you can walk around and explore that are not necessarily on the main path. And so there is this environmental exploration and environmental storytelling with lots of little clues and letters and stuff that you can pick up and read. there's like these different gameplay interactions that you have, but then you also have escape room, puzzle dynamics, and then the cinematics. And so you really have exploring all the different qualities of presence with like your embodied presence, and environmental presence, and active presence, and mental presence, and the social presence with the other actors, but then also the emotional presence with the story that you're telling. And so because you are blending in so many of these different genres, Maybe you could elaborate a little bit for how you start to iterate between the script and the interactive and the puzzle making. And so what's your process for blending and blurring all these different qualities of presence together throughout the development of this project?

[00:31:29.113] Max Sacker: Okay, so initially there was a linear script that Yuli and I wrote where we wanted it to go. And as these things always turn out, you iterate that with programmers, with 3D artists, with game designers that are all sort of feeding it back on what works and what doesn't work, and you start to understand how you have to balance, for instance, a voiceover with something fun, because you want to make sure that the story has beats and a certain rhythm that keeps, you know, a hardcore Steam gamer interested, as well as somebody interested that just wants to slowly watch a narrative unfold. So, you know, one thing we have in there is shooting mechanics. We have a lot of things that you can do with your hands. We have a physics-based movement system like, you know, some of the popular titles where, you know, the trend has certainly been over the last few years to have physics-based interactions, you know, to be able to manipulate objects by just pushing them. You know, a great example in terms of weapon mechanics is, you know, Ghosts of Tabor or The Walking Dead Saints and Sinners. these are like popular game titles on steam and meta platforms that do just that though they're about shooting they're about gunplay they're about in the case of walking dead there are linear narrative elements so that is difficult to balance out between the kind of I suppose more passive linear storytelling that you see at festivals for an audience that isn't necessarily a hardcore gaming audience. And so that was one of the first challenges, like how do we balance this out? How can this be fun for someone that just wants to shoot? and mess around and break the game, basically, versus somebody who wants to take this as a serious story, you know, with high ambitions in terms of visual quality, storytelling, characters. That was the balance that took a while to find, you know, how much of this has to be that versus how much of that has to be the other. I think what we're showing at South by Southwest really shows that that is possible. You can have both and, you know, you can have your cake and eat it too. Both angles work. But we also said, with Vortex, we want to make this an indie breakthrough. We want to create a title that people, a household name. We want to have something that kids as well as adults want to play. And when I say kids, I mean 18 plus, because we have some pretty dicey stuff in there. I'm talking about young people and people that might not have so much experience with VR can have things in it that they find fascinating for various reasons. So that was the reasoning behind how we want to balance this out. Yeah, and I guess, your question towards the process, it's trial and error. It's, uh, but you know, one last thing, maybe it was once we found the vocabulary and really understood what was working towards the end of the production, things were just coming together. Like the scripts would be written very rapidly, go out to actors, come back and they would just work right off the bat. But it took three or four years to get there in terms of figuring out that language and balancing that out.

[00:34:41.302] Kent Bye: Yeah, in terms of the actors, Brian and Christian, I'm wondering if you could share some of your impressions of having played through some of the different demos and maybe seeing your own performances, but also your overall impressions of playing through the Vortex Cinema.

[00:34:57.119] Brian Chase: Well, For me, I don't have a lot of experience with playing VR in the first place. This is my introduction, so it's intensely personal. As I said to Max, even after playing, I find myself in the real world making some of the hand movements as if I still had controllers. little embarrassing, but when I'm scrolling back to move away from you, you know, and it's exciting to be a part of something that new as far as seeing myself. Yeah, it's certainly it's eerie. It's like looking in the mirror, you know, but from Multiple angles, you know, I think that that's you know, of course a little jarring, but it's so impressive Like I'm just blown away by it Personally though like what I'm really driven towards is that spatial element. I love old architecture I have a real appreciation for and I've loved working on projects where we can help with scanning objects and spaces It's like a preservation act in and of itself a lot like what people do in communities where they want to protect You know homes and buildings that are important For one reason or another, you know, this is something I really appreciate when all of those details are so caringly Restored and presented and you're able to interact with them So I don't think that they're stupid or they're silly. Personally, that's one of my favorite aspects is that you can stray from the story on your own, in your own time and play with those elements. You know, go over to the bar, you know, see what you can fool around with in the theater. You know, things that aren't like they are today. I mean, so it's not just going into a, you know, a different time in terms of you know, the story element. It's going into a different time or medium in this case. It's really going into, you know, spaces that they don't make them like that anymore. And how else you can experience that, aside from just looking at photos, to be able to actually move around within it, I think is just really cool. So. I'm also blown away by lighting and shadows that for some reason just really sticks out at me. I think it's that detail because it's something you don't think about even in real life, but you're in this environment and you're going, Oh my goodness. Yeah. The light is coming in from over there and yeah, the shadow would be over there and how that dynamic moves based on where you are and where that light is. You know, I think that's just really tremendous and it's exciting to see how that plays out when you're in that world.

[00:37:20.993] Christian Stotz: Yeah, I have to admit that also my VR experiences are quite limited. So most of the time when I'm playing VR is when I'm with Max or my 15-year-old nephew. But let me try to explain another aspect of that. So when I am playing Vortex, I have to say for sure I'm a player who took part of this game, so you have to keep in mind that this is an important aspect. Also I know the producers, and I can't say that Julian and Max, they are artists. And what they did is creating a piece of art. And the things that blow us away are always things where there is a huge amount of hard blood. in it and i can ensure you that in the vortex cinema this is the case so the team they have in another world they're going the whole highway with them and it's a huge amount of work and you can really see that when you play the game you see that that's what i mentioned before it's like when you look at all the details you know oh my god that took a lot of time a lot of effort and a lot of talent So that's why I'm telling everybody who want to try Vortex, take your time. When you think about your favorite movie, for example, you see it and you see the screenplay, the acting, the music, everything is fulfilled of people who say, like, yeah, that's my project. That's what I want to be part of. And I want to push it. I give my best. And so to be part of that, where is so much hard blood involved, is something where I can say, yeah, that makes me very proud. And it's also to be here with Max and Brian to present this game the first time to the world here in Austin at South by Southwest Festival. This is amazing. It's an amazing feeling. And I'm looking so much forward to the next day to see the people when they take a first look at the game and to see their eyes when they take off their headsets when they're coming back to our world. and asking us like, oh my god, what I did just experienced, where have I been? This is something I think like for the whole team, it will be amazing. And also for the people in Berlin, for the Another World team, when we go back and tell them what the people said, what the people felt about it, I think this will be a great feeling for them too.

[00:40:06.990] Max Sacker: On that point, I just want to also express my gratitude to that team at Another World VR, the 3D artists, the programmers, the sound design, the tech art, the unsung heroes in between, the interns. I'm not joking. It was such a large labor of love also by student interns that supported us, gave us their time. Everybody involved in Vortex really pushed the envelope in terms. I mean, we were Yeah, it was an intense, long labor of love. And I just want to say to Another World VR and everyone involved, I love you very much. Thank you very much for everything you've done.

[00:40:44.581] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's certainly of a scope and scale of a project that it's been a long time since I've seen a project that's this big and this vast and this epic, this cinematic. It's closer to an experience that would be launching a more full release rather than something that would be seen in the context of 20 minutes. I feel like you've got a few hours worth of gameplay and experiences that you're going through. I'm about 45% the way through. And you said I was about 25% the way done. So I think I've got a few more, uh, half hours or an hour, hour and a half or two more hours to go through still. So I think it'll be difficult for people at South by to get through the entire experience. That's my prediction, at least from my own playing through it, but it is a really big experience that you're creating. When you walk into this cinema world, you did a trick where you're kind of zooming with a camera, but then the camera kind of zooms and clips into the character. And at first I was like, whoa, what's going on? And I kind of stepped out of the way, but then eventually I realized, oh, okay. So this is a cinematic trick where you're blending the affordances of cinema, but yet. we're kind of embodying this character, this rookie. And so you're walking into his perspective and then he kind of steps off to the side. And so because a lot of the more interactive, immersive components of this experience, you're actually embodying one of the characters. Maybe you could just set a bit more context for who are we playing? And it seems like he's a rookie, so he has to learn about this world. And so he's being taught about this world by other people. So maybe just describe who this main character is that we're playing.

[00:42:15.490] Max Sacker: Sure, in this noir chapter you're playing Rex Snyder, a world-weary noir detective who we consciously casted an incredibly special performer, actor, called Moritz Fuhrman, who has all of the elements of Rex Snyder, basically, you know, he's not I'm sorry about this, Moritz. He's not your conventional, good looking, Max Payne sort of chisel jawed protagonist. He's somebody who's taken a hit in the world and has gained a lot of experience. And we meet him on his first day at the Fifth Street Police Precinct, where he's basically tossed in the towel on his private eye practice. It hasn't been working out. He's been roughed up and kicked around, you know, and maybe it's not paying the rent either. So he's kind of decided to take on. There's a joke in there because there's never day. It's always night in this. It's always raining. It's always dark. And he says, I guess I had to take on a day job. Funny because I haven't seen day in as far back as I can remember. And he's kind of giving up by becoming just a typical member of the force. And it's kind of that, OK, well, we're all giving up on the freelancing and joining a corrupt police organization and that's the mindset that he's in on day one but he befriends an old cop that's on his way out called inspector bolt who kind of shows him the ropes of how to shoot a gun of how to do an interrogation of how to maneuver in this crooked world where good is bad and up is down and That's the tutorial component. So Bolt kind of guides you through the main mechanics, how to shoot and reload your firearms, how to talk to characters, how to interact with the space. And then let's just say it's in keeping with the classic cliche that you might expect from a cop crime drama. And then it's up to you to take it from there. And when you say embodying the character, we go in and out of his internal monologue, where you see him grumbling and commenting wryly on what's going on. And then we move the camera into his head and then you possess him and resume control of his motions. So you are then in his body and his shoes. And that, I think the movements that we do and the devices that we tell cinematically there, that was very risky because Well, if you read the playbook on do's and don'ts in VR, you shouldn't move a camera because it creates motion sickness. You shouldn't break the fourth wall, if you want to call it that, or jump in and out of characters because it's disembodying and jarring. There are so many things that you're not supposed to do when you design a VR game that we consciously did because we thought, you know what? I think there's a way that we can. You were mentioning clipping into the character's head. It's risky also in the sense that if the player in their play area isn't standing in the exact area where we'd like to hope him or her to be standing, then they might have a funky experience going in and out of his body. It sounds like that's what happened to you at one point, but then it sounds like when you tried it again, it kind of worked out. So these are new cinematic moves that we're bringing in from the world of movies into VR and hoping that people like them. We also developed like, you know, the classic film noir, you would have a vignette or like when the picture fades into like a circle onto some detail, like these old kind of movie effects that are never used anymore, crossfades. We've got stuff like that as well, not here in the South by Southwest version, but like when you enter a cinematic, you see projector grunge, you see scratches, you see a sort of aesthetic set of vintage camera, well let's just call them visual effects for lack of a better term, that reminds you I'm entering a cinematic, I'm going out of a cinematic. You haven't seen that in this version but if you imagine like when you play a PlayStation game it's loading up a cinematic you see sometimes like a loading screen and you see like a little turning circle or something like okay we're now going into a cinematic and the final version that we will publish you'll see that as the picture will flimmer a little bit or maybe there'll be like a leader countdown three two one okay now we're in a cinematic and we have that on the back burner right now just to make sure that what we're testing out here at South by and getting an audience response on. If it's not clear enough, then we have built these tools to just put them on top in the final version. And, you know, it's a mouse click away to make that a little bit clearer, but it is, it's a risk entering it from a passive camera into an active character back and forth. And all of those things that you've seen, it's new. I don't think that's been done in a VR game before.

[00:46:55.024] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I think that's part of the reason why I typically, when I'm in experiences, I try not to like clip through things because that sort of diminishes my own sense of being embodied in a world. And so when it was forcing me into this clipping, I stepped out of the way the first time. And then the other times I was like, wait, maybe if I just stand here and I was like, oh, this is interesting. You're deliberately having me embody the character. So yeah, you do switch in between the first person embodiment and then a third person, more omniscient, invisible ghost witnessing where you can see the person that you're embodying. When I first went through it, it wasn't clear to me until later when I went through it again, that that was like what was happening. But yeah, like you said, some of these rules are there just from no one's done them before and no one's broken them. And so now you're breaking them. And I think as a medium and the grammar, maybe this catches on and this is just how we start to do things. So it's still in that early development phase in that sense.

[00:47:47.265] Max Sacker: As it turns out, you're the first person to play Vortex outside of the team. It's about to start tomorrow and you received an early build and it's very interesting to hear that feedback from you because that's what we're looking for here at South by Southwest, just to see what worked and what didn't work. So just before we bring out, you know, our final version, we wanted to have these few days here to just observe, correct and adjust.

[00:48:13.088] Kent Bye: Yeah, you'll be, you'll have a chance to do a lot of user testing there at South by Southwest with a broad range of different expertise of people who are brand new to VR and people who are seasoned veterans who have seen hundreds or thousands experiences. So there'll be a good cross section. So yeah, I guess as we start to wrap up, I'm curious what each of you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality and immersive storytelling might be and what it might be able to enable.

[00:48:36.781] Brian Chase: Brian. All right, I'll kick that off. But there is obviously so much potential. But something that I think about a lot is, and I'll just continue on that thread with regard to the historical and architectural preservation, as if that were, let's say, the goal to recruit people into, let's say, that sort of preservation work, like a conservancy that works in a city. The potential, I think, to build empathy or interest in a topic is pretty strong. to be able to recruit people to the cause of, let's say, preserving buildings, building up communities. We were talking earlier about energy issues, you know, in communities in third-world countries where there's not the resources to the tools that are needed for day-to-day life. Well, it's one thing to write about that on a piece of paper and say, these challenges exist and you can be a part of helping this effort or furthering this technology to move this community forward, or you can put them there. And you can show them what are the challenges. And speaking to the mechanics, my goodness, and when I say mechanics, because I'm not sure if I'm using the right terminology, when I say mechanics, I mean the mechanics of the items in the game, right? The mechanics of the way things work in real life and taking those elements and putting them into a VR environment. That brings a whole lot of potential when you're working on a campaign to build interest or empathy behind a cause because life is complex, right? And the things that you're usually working on or building interest around or advocating on behalf, those things are complex and they require that level of detail. So I think the potential is astronomical aside from, you know, I mean, this is so different from playing games. I mean, this is kind of the other, the other end of the spectrum. Instead of playing games, it's advocating for things that build up community and improve people's lives. So I think it's very exciting on that front too.

[00:50:41.738] Christian Stotz: Potential in VR, I think like it's... I don't know if our fantasy is enough to see like what VR can do in the next 20-25 years. So I wouldn't go so far that I would make a prognosis or something about that. Because I think like in 10 years we stand on a point where we think like, oh my god, none of us thought 10 years ago that this is possible. I think like the biggest progresses will be made which we are in the sector of education like Brian just mentioned or also in entertainment and to stick a little bit to our subject today I think we are right now is making a dream come true to really dive deep into a world to really let your daily life behind and not sit in front of a screen with a PlayStation or in front of a computer and playing games. No, you become a part of it. Like we just say you are Rex Snyder in this time during you playing and you enjoying this experience. It's like you become an actor. You don't have to be an actor, you become an actor because you become Rick Snyder and Rick Snyder acts like you want Rick Snyder to act. And this is phenomenal and this is something where I said as I was a teenager, That was my dream. Like really too. These are little details, you know, that you can flip like the revolver, you know, that the drum is closing and so on. Like this is really one of the details I'm talking about because I'm so in love with the details of this game. And you can do so much. You can be so individual. And I think like this is an aspect in the world of entertainment that VR is absolutely pushing.

[00:52:31.022] Max Sacker: I don't have that much to add to that at the moment because these things have been discussed. The sense of presence, putting yourself in the shoes of another, the entertainment, the gaming. I think VR is coming of age now. I think we're past the point of It's a fledgling medium. Oh, I don't know if this is really going to last. It's here to stay. It's been here to stay for a long time. And if you pay attention to the gaming world in particular, you can see consensus around what works and what doesn't work. Meta has impressive sales numbers. People are buying these headsets. It's just a young generation that's doing it and they natively flow into these headsets. They just adopt it in a completely different way than people that are even in their 20s. Like there's a new generation of kids and soon to be young adults and then adults coming that will grow up with these device have grown up with these devices and use them like they use an iPhone or It's as natural to them as as writing on a piece of paper is for us and that's what I'm most excited about you know as we Grow older and pass the boon on to a new generation. What will they come up with? What will they create that we couldn't possibly have seen coming now is one of the most exciting fields to be in right now and So yeah, I'm just looking very much forward to the next few years and seeing also what the hardware does and seeing what people do with it. It's just incredible. And every day has been a blessing and just tremendous joy to be part of this process.

[00:54:10.526] Kent Bye: Nice. And is there anything else that's left and said that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?

[00:54:15.529] Max Sacker: Just that we're launching a Discord channel for Vortex and it's completely empty and I'm way behind schedule, but there will be a place where you can follow this project and I would send you the link to that Discord channel. And forgive us because we're literally at the moment in the middle of, you know, setting up the booth, but there will be updates coming there about release, about how you can get access to this game. And yeah, thank you for listening. It's always a pleasure. We love Voices of VR and yeah, always nice seeing you again, Kent. Thank you very much.

[00:54:47.071] Brian Chase: I feel, you know, especially being at an event like South by Southwest, I just feel incredibly honored to be a part of something that is emerging so quickly. And you hear from the exhibitors every passing year is just a whole new experience because of what's happening with this technology. And it's so exciting to see what everyone with what such talented people are doing with it. And so, again, incredibly honored to just be a part of it and hope to come again in the future.

[00:55:16.387] Christian Stotz: I can just add and ask the people who are listening to this podcast right now, try it. Try the Vortex Cinema. It's an incredible experience and I am so overwhelmed since two days with being in Austin. being spoiled with the most amazing food I ever had. This is incredible. And to be part of this team presenting Vortex here at South by Southwest. So it's a lot of going on these days. So I can just say right now, please give it a try and get yourself into this world and make this experience. It's absolutely worth it.

[00:55:57.157] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, Brian, Christian, and Max, thanks so much for joining me here on the Voices of the Year podcast to break down a little bit about the process and journey in making the Vortex cinema. I think it's certainly one of the most epic experiences that I've seen on the festival circuit in a long time, and just really beautiful, cinematic, and mixing and mashing of so many different genres that It's one of the more ambitious projects that I've seen come across the festival circuit in a while as well. So yeah, curious to see how the rest of the audience will react to it. And yeah, just to see how you continue to finish it up and tighten it up and eventually get released out into the world so that more people can play through it. So thanks again for joining me here on the podcast to help break it all down.

[00:56:35.896] Max Sacker: Thank you. And Kent, let us know if you get killed at the end or if you make it through.

[00:56:42.462] Christian Stotz: Cause there is that. If you can pass Kurbinian, well, respect.

[00:56:51.103] Kent Bye: So thanks again for listening to this interview. This is usually where I would share some additional takeaways, but I've started to do a little bit more real-time takeaways at the end of my conversations with folks to give some of my impressions. And I think as time goes on, I'm going to figure out how to use XR technologies within the context of the VoicesOfVR.com website itself to do these type of spatial visualizations. So I'm putting a lot of my energy on thinking about that a lot more right now. But if you do want a little bit more in-depth conversations around some of these different ideas around immersive storytelling, I highly recommend a talk that I gave on YouTube. You can search for StoryCon Keynote, Kent Bye. I did a whole primer on presence, immersive storytelling, and experiential design. So, that's all that I have for today, and I just want to thank you all for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a listener-supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you could become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.

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