I interviewed Last We Left Off director Connor Illsley remotely during SXSW XR Experience 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. 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.voicesofvr. So continuing on my series of looking at different immersive stories that are being featured at South by Southwest 2024, today's episode is with a piece called Last We Left Off, which is a 360 video comedy of a Dozen Dragons birthday party with family and friends. It uses jump cuts between the imaginal worlds of D&D with the physical tabletop context, and they're experimenting a lot with blending these different levels of reality and be able to tell the story, but also showing a high-resolution 8K version on a couple of Apple Vision Pros there at South by Southwest. The distribution for immersive 360 video is something that still hasn't really been fully fleshed out, but yet they still think it's interesting to explore as a medium for how to tell these different types of stories. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the OasisVR Podcast. So this interview with Connor happened on Sunday, March 10th, 2024. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:16.333] Connor Illsley: My name is Connor Elsley. I'm a director, producer and editor in the world of VR. I'm here at South by Southwest right now for the world premiere of our VR film, Last We Left Off.
[00:01:29.346] Kent Bye: Maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into this space.
[00:01:33.809] Connor Illsley: Yeah, so I've been working in 360 since 2015. I had a really strong background in post-production and just kind of a generalist in filmmaking. And I was working for a lot of agencies and I was working for an agency called Secret Location who were kind of on the front edge of a lot of VR experiences. And they said, you know, do you want to learn how to stitch together 360 footage? And I said, do you guys have a headset? Like, let me, let me check that out. And yeah, as soon as I put it on, I went, oh, this is an untapped medium that I can figure out how to bring the cinematic level of detail and care that, you know, we try to work into traditional narrative and commercial work into this. You know, there's something really special here. And I really just got into the right place at the right time. And in the last 10 years, I've worked on probably upwards of 50 different VR experiences. I've gone all over the world, shot on five continents. And yeah, I really got to have a lot of amazing adventures all from this odd, bizarre, cool, cool medium.
[00:02:32.433] Kent Bye: Great. Maybe you can elaborate on some of the other previous VR projects that you had a chance to work on.
[00:02:36.948] Connor Illsley: Absolutely. I worked on a large ad campaign for the final season of Game of Thrones. We went around the world and hid six real thrones in six different countries. And we designed a custom 360 camera solution so we could record a full 24 hour cycle. And fans would have to watch this footage and figure out where in the world the throne was. And that was exciting. We had to go to Sweden, the UK, Brazil, Spain, New York, Northern Canada. The last we left off is our follow-up to our first VR film, Jailbrook, that we made in 2017, which was really our first foray into narrative VR and understanding how to guide the audience, how to take everything we love of linear film and then live theater and make something really intriguing. And it was a much smaller scale, but we learned a ton of lessons just about where the real rewarding pieces for the audience are in VR and where you can strip away a lot of the complicated parts of filmmaking and really let the acting shine through and build tension and really make people feel like they're, you know, being caught in this moment.
[00:03:49.703] Kent Bye: Yeah, one quick follow up of something you mentioned earlier around the Game of Thrones experience. Because I know at South by Southwest there was like a activation, a site specific VR activation where you were in VR and you went up a whole like elevator up to the side of the big wall. And that was probably in like 2014. Is that the same experience that you worked on or is that separate?
[00:04:11.316] Connor Illsley: No, ours was a ad campaign straight to YouTube 360. And it was the idea of engaging fans to try to figure out where the throne was in the real world. And so we filmed stuff in the Arctic Circle in Sweden. And we record audio, and we got the northern lights. And it was fascinating to watch the comments pour in, because someone would be like, OK, at 35 minutes, I hear a train in the distance. So that means it's not Greenland, because they don't have overland rail. And people were really getting into the weeds with trying to find where these thrones were. The first person to get to the throne would win a prize. So yeah, it was a cool and interesting job.
[00:04:51.297] Kent Bye: Yeah. And so with last we left off is a 360 video that's showing there at South by Southwest 2024. I had a chance to take an early look at a build that you're showing there. So maybe you could just give a bit more context for how this project came about.
[00:05:04.756] Connor Illsley: So last we left off, we've been working on it for about six years now, developing it. And it really came from the beginning idea was, I was listening to a lot of podcasts about people playing Dunder the Dragons and just got really invested in how people were using that game to work through other things that were happening in their lives. And I'd never played before, but I'd really taken in a lot of content around it. And I was fascinated by, you know, just how involved a lot of adults were getting into the idea of imagination and play and, you know, these complex pieces of improv that are all wrapped in these complex pieces of story. And the base of the idea was, how can we take this idea of we're in the center of a table of people playing and start jumping in and out of this shared imagined world that they're all in. And that was kind of the nucleus of, as a concept, this really is a great bridge of something that's going to work well specifically in 360 and in VR and be rewarding in the headset and we can build a really intriguing story around. So, you know, we have some great arts funding in Canada and we were able to get a small development grant and myself and the rest of the creative team, we spent the next two years hired Dungeon Master and we started playing Dungeons and Dragons just understanding the ins and outs of the game and getting an appreciation for, you know, just what the small moments and the wins are and just how odd and bizarre these adventures can get. And that really gave us a great basis to then start figuring out exactly how we wanted to shape the story, and how we wanted to build the characters, and what kind of problems we wanted to have them face in the game and in real life, and how we wanted to blur the lines between those two.
[00:06:56.135] Kent Bye: Yeah, just the very nature of Dungeons & Dragons is based upon improv in a way that you're really reacting to the situation and the context and the characters that you're embodying. And so in a lot of ways, I think Dungeons & Dragons speaks to this type of future of live action role play that we're likely going to see in the context of immersive and interactive stories where you're able to really embody a character and then play out some of these scenes. And so this obviously is nowhere near having the direct experience of D&D because you're watching other people have this D&D experience, but it's also very much either a scripted or improv narrative. Maybe you could talk about the process of developing the story if you did have this kind of more emergent improv dimension to shooting it, or if it was something that you wanted to really script out and really dive into some of the specific characters or stories.
[00:07:46.598] Connor Illsley: Yeah, so we were very tightly scripted for the process because Well, there's definitely a huge amount of Dungeons and Dragons as the backdrop of our story. It's really rooted in our characters and what they're dealing with on an interpersonal level. And I think the fantasy world of any role-playing game allows, I think, a lot of people to work through and express things that they might not be able to talk about as directly in, quote-unquote, their real-world lives. And I think We really wanted the story to have this nice mix of real themes and problems and emotional arcs that these people are then having to work through while under threat of imaginary circumstances. There's also something about playing Dungeons and Dragons that the stakes start to feel quite high as you get attached to your character and you get deeper down the rabbit hole. So yeah, in our scripting, we really wanted to find the level of not getting too lost in the mechanics of tabletop RPG role-playing games and how exactly that works, and more use that as an easy way to get the audience into this greater story that was much more about the interpersonal relationships around the table.
[00:09:03.916] Kent Bye: Yeah, and because this is such a character driven story and there's six or seven different characters that are featured throughout, maybe you could give a brief overview of what you see as maybe some of the primary and secondary characters in this piece.
[00:09:16.005] Connor Illsley: Well, primary characters are definitely our lead, Koro, and his brother, Jesser, and their parents, Lemon and Roger, and their group of friends who they've gathered for Jesser's birthday. We also thought it was funny that these young adults would have this Dungeons and Dragons birthday party. It was just kind of a funny concept to us. rope and their parents playing. So yeah, it's really about Koro's arc of trying to feel like he has some kind of piece of control over what's happening in his life. And I think, you know, like all good stories is realizing how little control you had the whole time and ultimately how little control we'll ever all have over some of the elements that are happening. So it's really Koro's story and And, you know, there's a lot of great moments of him and his dad, him and Roger and, you know, the father-son dynamic. And, you know, I think Roger's a great character because he's just excited to be there. And, you know, isn't really cool enough to understand exactly what's happening, but, you know, just wants to be included in a tough part of his life, too. So, yeah, I think it was rewarding getting to see our fantastic cast bring that together on screen.
[00:10:29.070] Kent Bye: So there's a interesting choice of how to represent the Dungeon Master within the context of the imagined worlds. And I'm not sure if we necessarily have that same character within the physical reality representation, or maybe we could just describe this face that pops in and out embedded into the world as kind of like this voice of God, who's like the Dungeon Master, who's helping to kind of set the bounds and rules of what can and cannot exist within the world.
[00:10:54.295] Connor Illsley: Yeah, our character Terry, the dungeon master, played by the very talented Chris Siddiqui. Yeah, we integrated him in a few ways. He plays our barkeep in our fantasy world. And then at the same time, we have him as the dungeon master, his face kind of morphing through the wall and talking to the players at a certain point. And certainly a thing we found, no matter how many games we played and no matter how long we studied our character sheets, we were constantly asking, what's my initiative? What's this? It's not complicated, but it takes a fair amount of clarifying questions. So we really wanted to have this idea of the Dungeon Master having that half presence in the world where he'd pop in and out. And in very early discussions, we wanted to CG, the Dungeon Master's face on every character inside the world that wasn't our main heroes, but that became financially prohibitive as we continued to develop.
[00:11:52.057] Kent Bye: Okay. Okay. So the Dungeon Master that's in physical reality, that's the same character because he does actually appear as a character as well, which I haven't played a lot of D&D, but I usually think of the Dungeon Master as someone who's more of an omniscient third person rather than an embodied character as well. But he seems to also have an embodied presence within the scenes as well. Is that correct?
[00:12:09.986] Connor Illsley: Yes. And that was because when you're playing a campaign, the dungeon master, he does all of the voices and interactions of all the NPCs, the non-player characters. And we have an amazing dungeon master, Anthony Saul. And when we were playing, he would come up with just like amazing voices and characters that we would, you know, meet along the way and have these interactions with and carry it on. But it'd always be this one person giving them the voices and giving them all that character. So we wanted that to come through in the experience by having our barkeep be played by him as well, just because he's really our only other real non-player character who interacts with our crew. So that was nice. We really liked having that touch of having him play that character as well.
[00:12:59.167] Kent Bye: And there's also this narrative tension that I guess is informed by D&D where you create characters. Sometimes it takes a long time to create and develop a character. And then there's sometimes the phenomenon of having like all of your team killed within a campaign, like the total team kill experience. And so maybe just talk about the dynamics of building up characters, but also the threat of death and how that plays into the narrative of this story.
[00:13:27.384] Connor Illsley: Yeah, you end up spending so long with this imaginary person who you named something weird on a whim when you started out. My character was Larry Peters, a hobgoblin rogue, when we played, and it's shocking how quickly you become attached to this kind of imaginary being that you're continually flushing out and giving detail to. you know, all the weird weapons you acquire along the way, you know, all these abilities end up feeling very earned. And I think the story aspect of the game of Dungeons and Dragons is something we wanted to pull through into the narrative of our film, because when you're playing, you're developing this story in real time and you're that much more invested because you've come up with it and you've reacted to it. And all of our characters have different levels of investment in the story. Jesser, whose birthday it is in the story, is clearly the most D&D head of the group. And he has a line that Grayson Moore, our writer and co-director, wrote that makes me laugh every time, where he goes, I have Sicarius back in town making me a Sparrowwood cello. And there'd be all these times in our campaigns where, you know, you'd end up talking to some weird craftsman in town and giving him gold and ingredients and then ending up getting chased out of town. Oh no, but I'll never pick up my enchanted battle axe that I was having made for me. You end up leaving yourself a weird trail of breadcrumbs of imaginary tasks. So yeah, we tried to work that in and also that feeling of, you know, I don't want my character to die. I don't want to, for our different characters in the film, it's, you know, some people are a little more fast and loose with, oh, let's just go try and fight that guy. And, you know, when there's the stakes of losing this character, you've invested hours and hours into building it. Uh, yeah, it feels a little bit different.
[00:15:29.451] Kent Bye: And I had a chance to see it at home and there's a couple of builds you sent. I was trying to get the ambisonic audio to play and I found it to be remarkably difficult to find a good video player that rendered out the ambisonic audio properly. I'm sure there's probably something that's out there and stuff that you're exhibiting there. I was able to get the gist of everything, but when I was turning my head, the audio was locked to the position of my head rather than actually being true ambisonic audio or a lot of the different video players I was trying out. There's three or four different tracks of ambisonic audio, so then it would only play one of the tracks rather than all of them, or it would mux down all of them without actually, like, giving the spatialization. And so I'm just curious, like, how are you exhibiting the ambisonic audio there at South by Southwest? And if you had run into similar problems of trying to find players to actually properly render out the ambisonic audio.
[00:16:20.498] Connor Illsley: Oh, I'm sorry you had trouble with it. For a lot of the stuff as we're building it, we're just looking at it through the Oculus TV app on our Meta 3, and that normally just plays fine. For our exhibition here, we've just built it into a very simple app where it's face-based. You look at a play button and it plays. I'd have to ask our co-producer, Cora, who's here with us, who did the final build, exactly what's going on behind the scenes. But then we're also exhibiting it in two of the new Apple Vision Pros. And yeah, we're playing it through, I think it's called Moon something player.
[00:16:54.502] Kent Bye: Yeah, Moon Player. Okay, so how did exhibiting it on the Apple Vision Pro go? I mean, that, I would imagine, was a bit of a nightmare just in terms of having to have lens inserts and having to do eye calibration and put it into guest mode. How were you arranging how to show it on the Apple Vision Pro?
[00:17:13.685] Connor Illsley: So I just watched it in the Apple Vision Pro for the first time this morning, which was really fantastic. Yeah, it's a pretty easy setup. You put it on and you hit the two buttons and it automatically adjusts for your eyes and you've got a 30 second onboarding process. So it's fairly straightforward. It takes a little bit getting used to moving menus and stuff around. What I'm most impressed by is just how it spatializes the audio. Like we're able to watch it without any headphones on and it sounds incredibly loud and the voices really come across quite crisply. Yeah, I would say as an initial run with the Apple Vision Pro, it's working quite well so far.
[00:17:48.719] Kent Bye: Okay. And when I was watching the piece, I think most of the audio is pretty linearized with one person talking at a time, but there are some scenes where you're like sitting at a table with a lot of crosstalk. And as much as I could tell, sometimes the audio was a little bit ducked out, but I couldn't tell if that was like an artifact of me not having proper ambisonic audio. And some of those scenes, were you trying to give the sense of like, depending on where you look, you could listen to any of the conversations or was it ducking out some of the conversations to really guide your attention to the most important conversation that was happening?
[00:18:20.828] Connor Illsley: It was a little bit of a mix of those two. Certainly, the very first thing we shot our first day was our real world basement scenes. And we did have to find a good balance with all the actors because, you know, everyone gets quite excited, you know, to get into the table scenes. And, you know, we spent a lot of time making sure that everyone was always kind of doing something to make sure that no matter where you look, there was something interesting happening. So in the sound mix, it is a mix of spatialization, but also making sure that the key dialogue is always coming through to make sure that all the key story points are being preserved. So yeah, it was a little bit of a mix there and just how to achieve that.
[00:19:00.508] Kent Bye: Okay. Were you able to make a proper app for Apple Vision Pro? I mean, did you have to like create a test flight or how are you actually like logistically showing it on Apple Vision Pro if it's wrapped in an app or a video or like, how'd you get it on and get it to play?
[00:19:15.385] Connor Illsley: I don't have all the technical details because our co-producer Cora did the final packaging, but my understanding is right now it's just a video file playing back in that new VR app. I believe they have an almost finished festival playback app for the Apple Vision Pro, but I think it's just not quite all the way working in the crunch time to get us here.
[00:19:36.364] Kent Bye: Okay. Okay, well, I have an Apple Vision Pro here at home, so I'll have to take the video file you sent and try to play it in the MoonPlayer and see if I have a little bit better luck and just experience it to see how it plays. Because I know that the resolution is really a lot higher than any of the other headsets that are out there on the market. And so, what resolution did you end up shooting this in?
[00:19:56.593] Connor Illsley: So we shot on the Insta360 Titan, which gives you a max stitch of about 10K. And we mastered everything at 8K across the board, which we're exhibiting here at full 8K on the Apple Vision Pro, which looks really fantastic. And I'm happy to share with you that higher res file if you want to pop that into yours. And we try to do everything at 8K just so when we do compress down for any headset, we just have the most possible pixels to start with.
[00:20:23.759] Kent Bye: Okay, yeah, I'd love to check out the 8K version just because, you know, I think I saw a lower resolution on my Quest 3 and yeah, just also see the whole spatialization and everything. I know that with 360 video in general, there hasn't been as many different robust distribution options, especially if you're trying to sell an experience or have any sort of business model around it. There's obviously YouTube you can just upload it to and hope that you might get enough response or, you know, I know there's some people like Huho who's doing some tailor made 360 video for YouTube, but I don't know if it's at the scale to really sustain businesses yet, or it doesn't seem to have as much of a distribution economy to support the further development of these types of 360 videos. Gaming certainly had the infrastructure and support from Meta. Maybe with Apple Vision Pro, there'll be more opportunities, but I'm just curious to hear some of your thoughts and reflections on the state of distributing this type of cinematic 360 video content.
[00:21:24.509] Connor Illsley: Well, I'll tell you, I don't have a good answer for that. You know, my company, we do a lot of linear video production, but as well as industrial video, commercial video tours for high end plants around the world. But at our core, we're storytellers. And so, you know, the group of us who made the film, it's kind of an odd niche that we found ourselves just very interested in. And we joked for the last many years as we made this that I think, you know, we're making something that no one's asking for, and there isn't necessarily a place to put it. But we were having a lot of fun making it and we really liked the idea. So for us, this is really just being able to create something we're excited about in its most pure core. And I think being able to have our world premiere here at South By is a huge tip of the hat that I think we're going in the right direction. And I'm very interested to have the conversations here at this festival and See, especially with the Apple vision pro and. You know, with this kind of new, another generation of newer headsets coming out, just to see what's out there and what evolves from that. So I don't know what, uh, what the future of the distribution in this world is, but you know, for us, it's worth it just to be able to, you know, make the art and exhibit it in places like this and, you know, see where it goes from here.
[00:22:50.996] Kent Bye: So, yeah. What's your plans with, you know, what's next for last we left off.
[00:22:55.688] Connor Illsley: Well, I'd love to make it into an anthology series with the core idea of doing an episodic series where we're dropping into these key moments in an established campaign with these different groups of friends. We really liked being able to focus in on a story that's already well underway, just trying to find the most interesting moment to drop us in as an audience into the story. So yeah, we'd love to keep expanding the universe into more of an anthology.
[00:23:27.116] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality and immersive storytelling might be and what am I able to enable?
[00:23:36.199] Connor Illsley: Wow, that's a big question. I think that at its core, VR is so powerful because it allows us to create so much empathy that you can only gain through the feeling of presence that you get in a headset. there's something magical and unique when you get those first few minutes in and you kind of forget you're wearing a headset and you're drawn into the story and it makes it so you have to pay attention. You know, it's not like watching a movie on Netflix where, you know, you can get tempted to look at your phone or if something goes off, you know, it demands 100% of your attention and allows you I really think to connect with a story in a different way that you can't with a linear video. And so I'm excited to go through all the experiences here at South by and. Yeah, just also see what all these other artists are doing. I think the especially as we're getting more and more resolution in the Apple Vision Pro, you know, that's a huge step forward, not only in the capability of displaying content, but just changing consumer behavior from a headset adoption standpoint. I think that's what Apple is particularly really great at is making it cool to get in a headset. I think, you know, No matter how much better, you know, a meta headset gets made or a Pico headset gets made, it's hard to convert people who haven't already converted to that. And I think the Apple headset really represents bringing a new crowd into that space. From a lot of the reviews I've read, and I've only really just tried one here recently, you know, a lot of people describe after a few hours starting to lose the sense of I'm wearing a headset and seeing the real world put through cameras. And so I think that there is a huge potential there for, you know, we're now getting the screen that are being put in the headset to the point where it's that much closer to replicating reality. And if I think back to the Oculus Rift, the first developer model, and you get the screen door effect and you can see the lines and pixels, see how far we've come in such a short amount of time. And to see the camera technology advance, the custom camera technology that we're using for the Sphere in Vegas, these large format sensors, these super wide, sharp optics. you know, from a tech nerd perspective, I think it's an incredibly exciting time for creating immersive experiences right now. So I'm really excited to see what happens in the next couple of years, especially mankind and Apple with their hat in the game and just seeing what kind of doors that opens up.
[00:26:18.413] Kent Bye: And I'll be very curious to hear any feedback on the Apple Vision Pro by the end of your experience at South by Southwest, just because they have created these like facial interfaces that are very custom bespoke designed shapes for different heads. They have the eye inserts, so you can't really wear glasses, but for your experience, you're not doing any eye tracking. You're just 360 video. So does each person who goes through it, do they have to do the eye tracking calibration?
[00:26:45.017] Connor Illsley: Um, I'm not sure when you sit down, you hit the one button and it changes the IPD and it does that in about four seconds and then you're good to go. And the moon VR player is a very simple interface. You just stare at the play button and it goes. So it seems to be working well enough right now, but I'll, I'll have to tell you after I put a few hundred people through it for the next three days.
[00:27:07.409] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. Cause I wasn't expecting it to be deployed in a location based context, like at a festival, just because it is so customized and yeah, if you have glasses and you need prescriptions, then you know, that also has certain implications. So yeah. Love to hear any other feedback you have. And I'll be talking to some, I think chief is another piece that's there at South by Southwest 2024 that also is using Apple vision pro. Have you seen any other Apple vision pros on that floor there?
[00:27:33.332] Connor Illsley: I think it's only that one other experience that I've seen so far. And for the glasses, I can tell you that we haven't been able to fit anybody's glasses inside it yet, that we switched them over to the Pico G3s if somebody has glasses available for the experience.
[00:27:48.647] Kent Bye: Gotcha. So you have to have like contacts or no glasses. If you have glasses, you can't see it. So I have my own custom insert lenses that I could use, but if you don't have that, then yeah, you're kind of not able to really see it in a clear resolution and, and the glasses would potentially scratch the lenses and everything. So yeah, that's just some ways that they designed it. That weren't really meant to be kind of passed around to other people.
[00:28:10.980] Connor Illsley: I think it's just a little too early for the perfect execution of a festival like this, but it certainly is getting people excited to come into the booth and see the experience. So it's not a bad trade off. And, you know, we just have to spend those couple extra minutes, you know, teaching people how to pinch and move stuff around. Very cool.
[00:28:28.631] Kent Bye: Awesome. Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:28:32.888] Connor Illsley: You know, the last thing I'll say is, you know, you know, myself and the rest of the expats are directing team and camera producer. I think we're all just, we feel so incredibly fortunate to get to explore storytelling in a new way. I think, you know, we're all huge film nerds. We're all, we all work in linear feature and writing and commercial work, but this is this odd, incredibly joyful little pocket that we all get to collaborate and you know, really lets you strip away everything you think you know and kind of from the ground up go, how do we make this cool? And for a long time, you know, the cliche thing you would say was the Wild West of doing 360 video and you know, it still feels like there's so much untapped potential in just how you tell a story. And I think we're incredibly privileged to be at this exact moment in time in history where, you know, to get a kind of undiscovered potential of cool things you can do and in the way people watch something is incredibly exciting to all of us. So yeah, we're just We're just so excited to also just be here at South By and get to watch people experience it. I spend hundreds of hours behind a computer and then hit upload and then a piece of content will go out into the world and you never actually get to have a sense of, you know, did anyone watch it? Do anyone enjoy it? So to actually, you know, see people having a laugh here in our, in our booth, we have a very funny looking booth, we have a full D&D table set up and a big happy birthday banner kind of like in the film. So yeah, it's getting to actually see the audience connect with the material is incredibly rewarding.
[00:30:19.025] Kent Bye: Nice. Well, Connor, thanks so much for joining me here to help break down a little bit more about your journey and process of making Last We Left Off. And yeah, very curious to see these overlaps between like Dungeons and Dragons and just the ideas of live action role play and how that's portrayed within the context of this more cinematic portrayal. But yeah, I feel like it's part of the larger culture that you're reflecting on and then using the affordances of VR to really blend between the physical reality and the imaginal reality. And I think there's a lot of really playful ways that you're making these cuts between these two different dimensions of reality of the imaginal space and the physical space and playing with that a little bit. And yeah, also just exploring comedy in a way that we don't typically see a lot of folks do. So very much appreciate the experimentations that you're doing here. And last we left off and thanks for joining me here to help break it all down.
[00:31:06.179] Connor Illsley: Awesome. Thanks so much, Ken. That was great.
[00:31:09.838] 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.