I interviewed Dreaming of Lebanon co-directors Martin Waehlish & Cynthia Sawma remotely after 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
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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 continue on my series of looking at different immersive stories from South by Southwest 2024, Today's episode is with a piece called Dreaming of Lebanon, which is produced by the United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs. So I've previously did an interview with the UNDPPA back on episode 1052. That was when I talked to Danish about the translation of some of these UN reports around peacebuilding. And so this has been an effort within the United Nations to do these different types of immersive documentaries around the world to update different decision makers and leaders around what's happening, especially in these places where it's not easy to always go there to see what's happening on the ground. And so this piece is focusing on Lebanon. So I'm just going to read a little bit of the excerpt to give a little bit more context. So Lebanon has been facing one of the most severe economic downfalls in the world since 2019. Inflation has skyrocketed. Electricity is scarce. Life is a constant struggle for many. But despite the hardships, there is hope for a better future. Meet and engage with Rafik, Josephine, and Batool, three young Lebanese who stayed in the country despite the hardships. And so this features some volumetric interviews with these three protagonists, and you get a bit of a guided tour to what's happening around different places around Lebanon. And you have the ability to make choices and decisions as to which narrative branches that you want to go down. And then also at the end, it shows some quill animations that are representing some of the dreams of these protagonists. So it's really getting into some of these speculative world-building techniques that are imagining these potential futures and what are giving these Lebanese folks hope of some of their dreams of how things could be changed in the future. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of The Wastes of VR Podcast. So this interview with Martin and Cynthia happened on Thursday, March 14th, 2024. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:08.817] Cynthia Sawma: My name is Cynthia Sawma. I'm a Lebanese film director and writer. My work varies between fiction shorts and short documentaries. And this VR piece is my first VR experience. And it was lovely. This whole adventure was crazy cool.
[00:02:32.675] Martin Waehlish: And my name is Martin Veles. I lead the innovation team in the United Nations Department of Politic and Peacebuilding Affairs. And in this team, we look at unusual methods to address diplomacy and peacebuilding. And for the last years, we have been producing a range of VR productions. And we were lucky to find Cynthia to pull off this new VR experience called Dreaming of Lebanon.
[00:02:54.219] Kent Bye: Great. Maybe each of you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into working with VR.
[00:03:01.021] Martin Waehlish: So basically, I turned to VR as a means to really bring conflict zones to decision makers. And for me, this started, as I think for many in the XR field, through gaming. And I got my first hands on a VR headset in New York through a colleague, Danish Astrid Allaway, who introduced me to this new medium. And I was quickly hooked and fascinated. And then we started producing VR experience in the United Nations and since then kind of addicted to this medium. And I'm excited about the new affordances that emerge with every new technological leap that we see.
[00:03:38.702] Cynthia Sawma: I'm based in Beirut. I've always been based there. I started as a casting director in the film industry, mainly feature films. Then I shifted to directing commercials, documentaries, music videos. and all my work is character-driven stories. I love to tell the stories of characters that have very complex stories. My first VR experience was thanks to Martin for the trust that it was a huge opportunity for me. Who knows, from here, where this would lead us.
[00:04:22.947] Martin Waehlish: And we have captured Cynthia's first VR experience, actually, with another documentary. We were scouting for a documentary maker in Lebanon, and we knew that there are not many people, at least in Lebanon at the time, that were still there, you know, familiar with the medium. And I remember how Cynthia responded when we showed her another VR experience we produced, which was on Columbia, if I'm not mistaken, and it was in a cafe. And our line producer, Tarek Keblawi, filmed the whole thing. So we have that on record, Cynthia. Do you remember that? I know that you were partly confused when you had that experience.
[00:04:58.262] Cynthia Sawma: I mean, it was totally new for me because, you know, in Lebanon, there's zero opportunity to produce a VR piece. So you barely find an opportunity to get produced for a feature or a short. So this was really crazy.
[00:05:17.048] Kent Bye: Yeah, so I actually had a chance to see the UN Departments of Political and Peace-Building Affairs' previous production called The State of Global Peace by Danish and also from Superbright, EGOW. I had a chance to talk to them after their premiere virtually at Sundance 2022. And so this seems like in the same line of productions of this broader initiative at a website called Futuring Peace. And so Martin, maybe you could give a bit more context for some of the types of experimentations that this innovation group that you're part of has been doing, continuing from what I last checked in with the state of global peace back in 2022.
[00:05:53.270] Martin Waehlish: Yeah, we started actually, I think soon to be five years ago with a VR production on Iraq, which was capturing the now and then in the country, both ISIS. to give Security Council members a feeling for what it's like to be underground. And then we did another VR production right afterwards on Sudan to capture the startup of the Special Political Mission in the country. Then we did the piece that you just mentioned, State of Global Peace, one on climate security during the pandemic. Colombia and now Lebanon. And this is basically a response of the UN Secretariat to the new affordances that we see when it comes to new technologies. And there's really a movement in the United Nations. We started with two dedicated UN innovation teams, the World Food Programme and UNICEF did that some years ago. And since then, there's been a flourishing of dedicated teams that try to bring in new methods, means, and ideas to advance our work. I think we've now grown to over 76 dedicated UN entities. There's going to be the first ever metaverse day later this year, organized by our colleagues in the International Telecommunication Union, ITU, that will bring to the forefront the many productions that have happened on the VRXR side in the UN system. And for us in the Department of Politics and Peacebuilding Affairs, it's a way to communicate complex issues to decision makers. So it's basically an aid to help them better understand what the situation is like, because they don't really have the time nor the space to travel. The Security Council travels sometimes, but it would be very rushed and curated. They wouldn't have a casual stroll through Beirut. And then secondly, for us, there's also an opportunity to have a tool at hand to engage in peacebuilding activities. So the current Peace Dream of Lebanon is shown by our colleagues in the Office of the Special Coordinator for Lebanon, Ansgol, around the country in schools, universities, other places to get that conversation going for how is life like to relate to one another. And then from there, start a conversation about how a brighter future could look like. So those two dimensions have really materialized as an advantage using XR over the last years.
[00:08:05.372] Kent Bye: One of the things that I noticed in watching some of the other VR pieces that are online on the featuringpeace.org website in Yemen and Colombia and Sudan and Iraq you have what seems to be an approach to take more of a disembodied approach, meaning that there's like voiceovers and you're focusing on the different shots and there's like a narrative that's in each of these, but it's a lot different than Odyssey and this latest piece of Dreaming of Lebanon, which is much more of an in-depth character study for three different perspectives, giving us a cross-section of all the different issues that are happening in Lebanon. And so, Martin, I'd love if you could maybe talk a bit about the overall higher level direction for the previous approaches that you've taken in doing these types of films, and then what were some of the considerations to take a different approach with the character study, but also give a little bit more playing with both the embodiment as well as the themes of imagination and dreaming of a possible future. So yeah, maybe if you could kick it off for what was leading up to some of the choices that you were setting the broader context and then pass it over to Cynthia to have her perspective of coming into this project and the types of approaches that she wanted to do.
[00:09:20.960] Martin Waehlish: Yeah, thanks, Ken. And it's great that you noticed those nuances, because indeed, every time we do a VR piece, we try to improve, advance, try out new things, you know, see what sticks. Because it's hard. It's hard to produce XR experiences that move people, that leave a trace. that help change perspectives. And I think none of us in the VR community has really figured this out. I've been just through a deep study of behavioral science studies related to virtual reality, and I feel that all of them are inconclusive because they compare different things. So just to say that probably the next piece, if there's ever a next piece again from our department, you will see it again a different direction probably. And you're absolutely right that most of our pieces in the past were more like an accompanying briefing material. So you have a lot of voice over in the Pathway Columbia production, which came at the five-year mark of the peace agreement, where we wanted to give decision makers a sense for the development of the peace process over the last five years. And that needed some curation. You have individuals there in Pathway Columbia that tell you their story, but you're more this kind of distant observer at the side that gets presented with those different lives. While in Dream of Lebanon, you are basically part of this journey, we wanted to emulate the feeling for what it's like to have a coffee chat with three young Lebanese. So Dream of Lebanon starts on this rooftop. you know, three folks having coffee, inviting you to chat with them. And that already feels a bit fake that you are invited virtually, but we wanted to create kind of an entry to the experience instead of just pushing you on the stage. So you get invited into that experience and then you can start asking them questions. So the beauty of Dream of Lebanon is that it's a self-guided interview. And the idea here was to give the users more agency. The pieces we've done before, apart from State of Global Peace, We're more passive, immersive footage. You're there as an observer. It goes from first minute to minute number six, eight, nine, 10. And in Dreaming of Lebanon, you have that agency to pick the questions. Everybody has a different journey because you can ask different questions every time you run the experience. And through that, we were hoping that people connect more with the characters through that agency. That's one aspect. I think the second aspect that we were experimenting with, and you tell us as the audience whether this worked or not, was the way of how we played with three different types of presentations in the experience. So you have the 360 footage where the characters bring you to their homes, their families, their workplaces. That's one type of footage. And then you have one where they are right in front of you. We filmed this in a green space, so it's blacked out. You can focus on them. And our VR guru, I would say, Adrian Meyer, who really did a fantastic job in conceptualizing this and kind of finding new technology and advancing them for this kind of filming, made it happen that you see those characters in the highest detail possible. We filmed this in the studio with this theater camera, and there's parallax, so they look at you while you move, and it gives you this kind of intimate feeling to have a direct conversation with each of those protagonists. And then there's a third element, a third kind of type of presentation in Dreaming of Lebanon, which are the dreams. And that is done through an illustration where we wanted to show the true power of VR, like true VR as some call it, like an illustration which is done in Quill, where we also found, Adrian found, a fantastic artist who I think did a great job in bringing those dreams to life in a not too complex and not too simplistic way. And this was born actually out of an idea the special coordinator for Lebanon had when she saw the Columbia piece. We gave her a briefing of the possibilities of virtual reality and the head of the UN in Lebanon, which is called the special coordinator in that case, watched the Columbia piece and said, look, I want to tell the world that some people stayed and they still have dreams and hopes. We need to tell a story around that. That was actually her idea. And then we thought, OK, that's great, because the beauty of the future is that everybody has their own future. Nobody can predict the future. And we can shape actively the future. So we put in this kind of foresight-related approach into the experience of the dreams, where we have a chance to project and see how a better Lebanon could look like. And that we bring to life with those illustrations. And in its package, again, it created Dreaming of Lebanon as an experience that is interactive, Those are all characters that we scouted, casted. None of them has been paid. You know, these are all volunteers. And we were so lucky to find Zarfi, Josephine and Batul to join that journey and to tell their story.
[00:13:57.079] Kent Bye: That's a really great overview of everything. And yeah, I'd love to hear from your perspective, Cynthia, as you're coming in on this project and where you began with what type of information you were provided, both from the previous projects, but also how they want to try some of these new things.
[00:14:13.939] Cynthia Sawma: Yeah, the fact that this experience is interactive, it allows the audience to explore this narrative environment and also to make choices that affect the storyline and interact with characters and control the narrative. So when they use the question, you have two different questions, they control the narrative in a way. So this is something really great about the piece. And the most important thing that through South by Southwest, we noticed that everyone felt like they are in an intimate conversation, in therapy session with these protagonists. So this is something really essential.
[00:15:01.267] Martin Waehlish: I just wanted to add one more perspective that Cynthia, you were talking about when you produced a piece in Lebanon about the magic. You want to talk about this a bit? Because I felt that this adds an additional dimension that we haven't spoken about yet. The magical part of Dreaming of Lebanon.
[00:15:15.433] Cynthia Sawma: Yes, of course. I mean, one of the key major stuff that we agreed on, or we talked about, that we didn't want people who are watching this experience to have a pity look on these people. No, we wanted to make them feel connected because their stories are universal. And I'm the one who also decided to stay in Lebanon regardless of all the opportunities that were around me to leave. But also I wanted to share this because there is something magical about this little country regardless of the conflicts, political conflicts and everything around us. But these dreams were very essential because they hold something super magical. I mean, you will never get to see Lebanon the way this animation was portraying. I know it myself, at least not in my lifetime. But yeah, we wanted to create this, to transport this magic stuff, this fire inside each protagonist to everyone who's watching, regardless if he's coming from a Lebanese diaspora or who's never been to Lebanon. There are some people who told me, I didn't know where Lebanon was on the map, or other people were telling us, ah, this changed my perspective. I didn't know that Lebanon has such great people and filled with humanity, and I connected with them. I now know more about it. So this is amazing.
[00:16:52.032] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I had a chance to play through it at home here and so I wasn't constrained by any of the normal constraints that you might have in an exhibition at South by Southwest where this is a little bit more of an interactive experience where you could go on and on and on. I think I probably spent a little over an hour or so watching this experience and I dove into some of the other previous experiences that you've produced but I'm wondering how much total footage is included in here because there's three protagonists and I went through each story at least two times and noticed that there's probably some additional stuff that I wasn't able to explore because there's a branching narrative approach as you're going through these questions and new questions appear as you go down different branches and then sometimes the questions repeat and so I'm wondering how much total footage, if you were to watch it back to back, would this experience be?
[00:17:48.005] Martin Waehlish: Yeah. So the experience in total at the moment, if you go in one round, so to say, if you play this like an arcade game, is 21 minutes with each experience around like six to seven minutes plus intro, outro. So total 21 minutes, but you can also watch just one interview or two. But now you're asking about behind the scenes, how much footage was there in total. And I have to reveal that we didn't have enough time to collect more than footage from two days in a studio. And that has various reasons. One is you can't really exhaust the characters too much and was exhausting because they are not professional interview givers, so to say interviewees, as you have politicians or like you are running a podcast. So you're familiar with doing second take, et cetera, if needed. And then also a lot of things happened during the production in the studio that we didn't predict, because it is a very emotional topic for those who joined us, you know, Josephine, Batul and Rafi. And they can tell themselves, you know, how they felt in that experience. But we noticed that It is going to the core. It's going to the core and we didn't want to ask them, come tomorrow again, tell us the whole thing. We want to know more. So you need to be kind and careful with the people you interview. And we did it as an interview. Again, both curated in a certain extent where we told them types of questions we asked them and we asked them to prepare a dream. But it was not scripted. And even in the editing, we were very careful in not missing out on parts that were dominating in the conversation we had with them in the studio. So that to say that there is not like triple or four times the amount to watch it endlessly for two days. But as you did, if you watch it, you know, second or third time, you will take different pathways. There are also options in the experience just to watch the scenery. I feel the power of VR is not what is said, but what you see. Some call this super reality, which I think comes close to probably what it is. Because whenever I watch VR, I don't listen to what is said, but I more kind of sharpen my senses and see and hear more. I'm not talking about what is said, but like nature or wind or the music. So also there are, in that regard, some scenes where you can just prolong, where then a little sign pops up. You can move on to the next part of the experience, but you can also just enjoy the nature. And we were lucky to end up at some unusual spots at an unusual time. Just a little bit behind the scenes here, we ended up in the Cedar Reserves in Lebanon, which is further up the mountains. And we were a bit late because we just had a week to produce the whole thing in the country. A bit more than a week. And the park rangers came and wanted to kick us out. And we were filming, and we didn't want the park rangers to be shouting at us on camera or be in the picture and all of that. So again, the crew was amazing. Tarek, Adrian, Mazin, all of us somewhere keeping the park rangers away while the others found another spot to capture that magical moment in the forest. And that magical moment in the forest goes on as a long loop. So you could watch that for more than a minute or so. Hope that answers your question, Ken.
[00:20:55.096] Kent Bye: Yeah, just a quick follow up because it was a 20 minute runtime if you run through it once and watch through each of the three different speakers. And then when I watched it again, there was like repeat footage. So I guess if you were to put it on a timeline and put all of the footage that was edited, how long would it be if you were to watch all the different scenes?
[00:21:13.289] Martin Waehlish: Very good. I think you end up with around 32 minutes because there are some scenes where you could endlessly stay in the experience, but obviously we didn't endlessly film that.
[00:21:23.216] Kent Bye: Yeah. Okay.
[00:21:24.937] Cynthia Sawma: I want to add something. We spent a lot of months casting and finding people because, as Martin said, nothing was scripted. The subjects and the questions we were asking were very delicate, so you can never say to the person, come back tomorrow and say the same thing. You would lose authenticity. authenticity was something sacred for this project. We had trouble finding people who have something to say, but also who decided to stay and they are based there and don't have the luxury to be based in two countries. I just wanted to add this.
[00:22:05.882] Kent Bye: And I'd love to hear from each of you some of the broader context that is leading this production to be produced within the context of the United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, reflecting on some of the themes that you wanted to cover in the piece, but also Martin, maybe you could start with setting some of the broader context for what the United Nations is doing in Lebanon and what you were trying to achieve with the production like this.
[00:22:31.388] Martin Waehlish: So the UN in Lebanon has a supportive mandate to basically help state authorities in a range of issues to cope with humanitarian issues that were posed by the influx of Palestinian refugees a long time ago, and obviously now the Syrian refugee crisis. So that's a humanitarian and development issue. And then there are more precise security challenges that are posed by the situation in the South. And on top of that, you have spillover effect from what's happening in the region at large. So this kind of supportive role, which has been going on for decades in the country, frames the activities of the United Nations. And one aspect of that is to support peace building. And there are various activities in the countries that look at how do we get youth engaged in the future of the country? How do we strengthen democracy and make people participate actively in the shaping of the future of the country? So there are various activities carried out by various UN actors, including the United Nations Development Program or UNICEF, the Children's Fund Program of the United Nations. And there is an office that coordinates those efforts, and that's the Office of the Special Coordinator. So you see it already in the name, Coordination of Lebanon. And that's the office that also produced this piece. And us in the Innovation Cell, we supported the office in producing that experience. And as I said earlier, it was meant as a way to show decision makers in New York City, so outside the country, for what life is like. And then likewise, it is used as a peace building intervention or trigger or starting point, whatever kind of term you use.
[00:24:09.002] Cynthia Sawma: And also I want to add the main theme, because we have three different characters. So this tackles the themes of peace and security, mental health, environmental, like how to build like eco-friendly country, community. So all this we built with this character. if I want to say, the story. They also were part of the storytelling. They were part of the script, if I want to say. Nothing was scripted, but the questions also.
[00:24:45.290] Martin Waehlish: Yeah, maybe important here on this point to note what we didn't include. in terms of themes. So we didn't talk about the Syrian refugee crisis. We didn't talk about the situation of Palestinian refugees in the country. We didn't talk about the security situation at the blue line south of Litani, which obviously gets a lot of attention because of the situation in Gaza. or the maritime issue that has been on the radar of the UN for a long time. So those are things we didn't cover. But when you look at the scene that Batul is talking about, where she talks about how hard it is to get paperwork done as a young entrepreneur, And then she sits with the mokhtar, so like a notary, what you would say in English, and the electricity turns off. Those circumstances, why it makes it so difficult for state authorities to operate in the country, that was the main focus. And then humanitarian issues to a certain extent as well, and the normality of what do the normal people face as Lebanese? What do Lebanese face as a challenge in the country? That was front and center of that experience.
[00:25:46.778] Cynthia Sawma: Yeah, daily challenges.
[00:25:49.410] Kent Bye: Yeah, I feel like watching some of the other pieces after I watched Dreaming of Lebanon, I found myself wanting to see who was speaking and not hear a disembodied voice and to really dive in a lot more into the stories of the characters to give what's happening in Lebanon through the lens of these individual characters that we get to know. And we have the opportunity to choose what questions that we're asking, and then we get rewarded. Like you said, Martin, there's three different modes that you're telling the story with. sitting next to them one-on-one with the interview, and then you go into a scene that's elaborating the point that they're making, but also allowing you to take a little bit of a guided tour through these different aspects of Lebanon as a city and how these individual characters and their lives are woven throughout the course of the city. And then you get at the end, each of them have their dreams that gets into more of a imaginal space, world-building, future dreaming as to what might be possible if they live into their full potential of their hopes and their dreams for what could happen in their country. And so I guess as you're starting to weave together each of these stories, I'd love to hear maybe Cynthia, as someone from Lebanon, what were some of the themes that you were trying to really explore and stuff that also naturally started to emerge as you go through these three different conversations to give different cross sections as to what's happening in the context of Lebanon?
[00:27:18.038] Cynthia Sawma: I mean, I am a dreamer myself, and I guess that you should hold on to your dreams if you're based in the country. Because you put that survival mode and you just focus on whatever you want to do and hold on to it because it's your only way to survive. And from there, the idea of this documentary or the questions came out. there are plenty, plenty, plenty of subjects to tackle in the country. And that's funny, but at the same time sad, but it's good because you have at least a story to tell and it's good for us filmmakers. Other themes were, of course, political corruption, the absence of the government, the religion, but of course we didn't have time and we needed to concentrate on specific stuff. But yeah, there are many, many, many themes. If I get the chance to make another Dreaming of Lebanon part two, we have plenty of subjects to talk about.
[00:28:28.857] Martin Waehlish: I like that. I like Dreaming of Lebanon part two. I like that already. One thing that we heard from people watching in New York and other places is, why did you pick young Lebanese? Why didn't you pick folks from the older generation? And this was a deliberate choice because we didn't want to be turning this into a too nostalgic piece where we just rave about, oh, 20 years ago, or like, you know, the Paris of the Orient, the Switzerland of the Orient. So that's what we picked. Actually, I mean, Batu, Josephine, and Ravi are not teenagers. They are mid-career. But I think the truth about virtual reality as reality is that you only get a slice of life, right? You never get the full picture. I think there is a false promise of virtual reality that you get this totality of what's happening around us, but that's a false promise. So that's why you get a slice of some of the confessions, right? Lebanon has officially 18 confessions. Unofficially, there are more confessions. So you get some balance from the confession, some balance with the gender, two women, one man, different regions, because Rafiq comes from Tripoli, which is in the north. Batool has southern roots and Josephine, Beirut. So you get some cross section, but where's the far east of the country? We didn't have somebody from the Bekaa closer to the Syrian border. You know, always get that slice. I mean, more than three characters is hard to manage and experience. You know, I'm a big fan of single character stories and having three was already They're not rich, they're not poor. People ask us, why didn't you show folks that were illiterate? And we're like, well, that's hard, because we wanted to have characters that speak English good enough to be filmed on camera. We have experimented with voiceover in the Yemen piece, Musallam. And that is tough in VR, when you hear a voice that doesn't match the character because you dubbed it, or you have a voiceover and they have two voices talking, it doesn't really work. There's an English that limits our pool of candidates. And the truth is, you know, there is, like, I mean, Cynthia, correct me if I'm wrong, but the knowledge in the country is pretty high. You know, you have a high density of universities. So I think in that regard, yes, those three kind of represent one sliver of society, but it's a big size of society. And especially because they're the ones who stayed on. Because as Cynthia said, she had other opportunities to leave. And all three characters talk about, we have a good education. We could leave, but we stayed on. So why did that group stay on? And that's a very important group, because those are the ones that work as entrepreneurs, as changemakers. And those are the ones who can actually steer the trajectory of the country into a different direction. And that's why this is an important cross-section of the country. And then we didn't want to do an ethnic geographic piece. And that was a really hard thing to do because the country is so beautiful just by looking at the nature and the surrounding, but we didn't want to do an ethnic geographic piece And likewise, we didn't want to do what some in the VR industry call slum porn, right? Where you just show the misery and the destruction. There are some elements where you see the ATM, which was broken, and there are some other kind of scenes that I don't want to tell your audience too much about it. But yeah, we wanted to keep that balance, which Cynthia called it magical. And that was the main aim. And last point is, The whole experience ends with one of the characters saying, let's keep talking about Lebanon. That's the main message that we engineered into the story. Let's keep talking about Lebanon as a place that might be on people's mind or not, but that is definitely getting less international attention because of the many competing conflict theaters, you know, Ukraine, Sudan, Gaza, et cetera.
[00:32:07.886] Cynthia Sawma: Yeah. And also, I wanted to add, we wanted to focus on youth. on people who are living the present and not picking an older generation who lived the civil war or their traumas from the past. We heard a lot of these stories, but we wanted to concentrate on three people in their 30s or late 20s trying to do something. And yeah, so
[00:32:40.353] Kent Bye: Great. And so I'm wondering if each of you could talk about what you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality might be and what it might be able to enable.
[00:32:51.359] Cynthia Sawma: I mean, from my side, this I think would be beneficial for the film industry as it will likely continue to evolve with technology. And I guess it will be like leading to more immersive experiences. and make the audience connect more and build connection with the characters. Documentaries or fiction, I guess this would be a huge beneficial for the film industry.
[00:33:22.921] Martin Waehlish: Yeah, on my end, I mean, there has been this heavy talk about empathy and perspective taking for the last decade, plus since VR has become more available and we've seen more production that cut through a range of genres, entertainment, you know, social impact, industrial issues and so forth. But I think the true power, and I would love to explore this more in the future, is how can we simulate different futures? Because the true power of virtual reality is not just taking a snap of what's happening around us, but really future work, simulating how different trajectories can work out, and then foresee certain consequences of choices that are made all with the aim to pause, all with the aim to take better decisions, all with the aim to be more responsible with regard to the choices we make. So that's one aspect. And the second thing that I think we see more and more of is on the market, and we tried with hand gestures, right, to create more interactivity, the full embodiment, so that you're not just a passive observer, but you have some type of engaged, gamified experience where the lines between what you are in and what you are feeling really blur. And that's really exciting because for that, the technology needs to become lighter. It still feels so heavy to have something on your head and you have this battery pack right at your brain, which freaks me out all the time. So once the devices get lighter and better, this intuitive technology is going to be so powerful and new gamified approaches. They really excite me and we try to test this out in Dreamweaver with the hand gestures and the interview pathways. I'm just excited to see how generative AI will help us generate worlds at a heartbeat. and construct new realities with a fraction of the price that it currently costs. So those are aspects that really excite me and I'm curious to see how this will develop in the near future, hopefully.
[00:35:22.173] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, I know there's been a number of these types of pieces produced over the years, and I feel like taking the approach of doing a character study, but also allowing the production to go throughout the course of the city, to see the city through their eyes, and to learn more about them as you go through each of these different contextual domains, learning more about this person, but also in the end, ending on their dreams of what they are hoping for and aspiring for in the future, I think is a really powerful way to tie it all together, to look at the reality of the present, but also the hopes and the dreams of the future. So I thought it did a great job of combining those two different elements and excited to see where this conceit goes in the future as you continue to do this futuring of peace work that you're doing there at the UN Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs. So Martin and Cynthia, thanks so much for joining me here today to help break down the peace dreaming of Lebanon.
[00:36:13.227] Martin Waehlish: Thanks for having us Kim.
[00:36:15.018] Cynthia Sawma: And thank you so much for this lovely interview.
[00:36:18.899] 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, can't buy. 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.
