SoftlySteph’s The Friction of a Modulated Soul took home the Best Dance Experience at Raindance Immersive in a groundbreaking performance that tells the “story about the different cages that bind us from our authentic truth.” It’s a piece that completely blew me away with it’s technological innovations, her fluid and emotionally-driven dance, a moving story that takes you on guided journey towards authentic identity, and an excellent curation of music from other VRChat creators. The piece manages to tie together so many different strands of technical innovation, storytelling, and performance, and it was one of my highlights from the entire Raindance Immersive festival this year.
The crux of the innovations within The Friction of a Modulated Soul are from the new holographic shader (aka the “Apple Global Illumination”) developed in partnership with SNR Labs’ Apple Blossom, A://DDOS, and namoron (covered in great detail in the previous episode #1413) that both plays back recorded holographic objects that are a part of a timed dance performance, but also replicates and mirrors her dance performance at different scales in real-time. There’s also real-time lighting effects on the 1.4 million point-cloud pixels that are utterly awe-inspiring, and took lots of black magic shader wizardry pull it all off by encoding and decoding information from video streams (again many of the more technical details are covered in episode #1413).
I saw this piece as a live performance during Raindance, but they’re also working on a replayable VRChat world that should be ready within the next month or so.
SoftlySteph also curated a soundtrack of independent music by VRChat creators with five of the songs specifically composed for this piece. Everything in this piece was designed around story, which takes the audience on a journey from resisting internal disconnections, to achieving authentic connection to self, to then resisting collective pressures to disconnect, and then finally culminating with authentic connection.
Overall, this was a beautifully-executed piece that is pushing into new forms of dance genre and performance, and was well-deserving of the best dance performance at Raindance Immersive. I had a chance to catch up with SoftlySteph to get a bit more context about how this project came about, her journey into VR via the stage dance and dance performance scene, and then her intentions with architecting this story about authentic self.
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Music: Fatality
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.438] 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 future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So on today's episode, we'll be diving deep into the best dance experience from Raindance Immersive 2024 called The Friction of a Modulated Soul. This year at Raindance Immersive, there was a brand new section called The Best Dance Experience and actually had the pleasure of serving on the jury for these experiences that were pulling from a lot of different communities within VRChat, doing different types of stage dance and dance performance, and just generally weaving in dance within the context of story and immersive theater. So it was a really exciting new category. And Maria from Read Dance had reached out to Softly's staff to see if she wanted to submit something for their program. And she then went to Apple Blossom and Adidas where she had seen this holographic shader that I talked about in the previous episode about the Apple Global Illumination shader. This is a really radical new technique to capture objects to create this holographic particle effect point cloud kind of aesthetic where they're able to record these virtual objects and then recreate them with these kind of particle effects that have lighting effects on them as well. And so Softly Stuff actually was working with the SNR Labs crew to be able to further refine it and put together an experience that completely blew me away on so many different levels. I mean, just the technological innovation that they're doing to pull this off, but also just the emotionality and the storytelling that was woven into this piece. It's called The Friction of a Modulated Soul. It's a story about the different cages that bind us from our authentic truth. And so it's a very personal story about identity and the different barriers internally and externally and culturally. This whole journey that it takes you through. And not only that, there's a whole amazing soundtrack that are from lots of different VRChat artists and musicians that are also collaborating on this. And so really, all in all, this was a completely amazing experience that was totally awe-inspiring, deeply moving, and just totally blew me away. So the experience was a live performance. And so probably within the next month or so, they're going to be having a replayable version of The Friction of a Modulated Soul so that you can go and experience it for yourself. The preferred version of this interview would be to go watch it and then come back and listen to it. However, not everyone will have a chance to see it if they don't have PC VR hardware. You can also listen to it and perhaps go see it and get even more out of it because you have a It is abstract enough and it takes you through this whole guided journey. And also there's just a lot of amazing volumetric experience of the whole thing that is just beyond words. It transcends your ability to even describe what it's like to experience it. So with all that, we're going to be diving deep into kind of the process of how this came about, the story that Softly Steph is trying to tell, and also a little bit about her own journey into VRChat and the stage dance and dance performance scene. and how she's been weaving all these different insights into this magnum opus of sorts of her creative expression of all the work that she's been doing in VRChat to both do the storytelling, collaborating with all her musician friends, and to do this really groundbreaking dance performance that was featured at Ring Dance Immersive 2024. So we're coming all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Softly Stuff happened on Friday, July 5th, 2024. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:03:29.896] SoftlySteph: Hi, this is Steph. I go by Softly Steph in VRChat, and I do a lot of audiovisual dance performances. And I was most recently featured in the Rain Dance Film Festival in the category of Best Dance Performance.
[00:03:46.482] Kent Bye: Awesome. And maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into working with VR.
[00:03:51.678] SoftlySteph: Yeah. So I've been in VR chat for gosh, been like a denizen of VR for over three years now. So mostly involved in the rave scene, but then ended up in the dance scene. Both are just massive communities.
[00:04:07.288] Kent Bye: Right. And so like, what was your introduction to VR?
[00:04:11.983] SoftlySteph: Um, you know, it's hard to say, cause I had like, well, I've been a fan of gaming and tech since forever. So I remember when I first tried the like Oculus dev kit at like a PAX East must've, I mean, who knows how long ago that was. But I remember being on the show floor and putting on the headset and playing a silly game and being completely immersed in it so much that I forgot that I was at a packed convention hall. And ever since that moment, I knew that VR was something I was going to love and going to be a big part of my life. I didn't really get into VR until later when a friend introduced me to VRChat. And eventually I found Dance Dance VR through Reddit. And that was my jump into the deep end, so to speak.
[00:04:59.811] Kent Bye: Okay. And so when you got all your VR gear, did you immediately have full body tracking or did you first start to go in without that and decided that you needed it in order to do the type of dancing that you wanted to do?
[00:05:11.992] SoftlySteph: Yeah. I mean, I didn't have full body for a while when I started in VRChat, but once you see other people having full body, you kind of realize what you're missing out. And also I wasn't much of a dancer. Well, that's a lie. I've always been a dancer, but I wasn't used to people seeing me dance. I didn't think anyone even wanted to see me dance really until I started dancing at shelter and then dancing with people. Then eventually people were like, Hey, Steph, you really ought to join so-and-so community to, you know, we really like your dancing. So I kind of got pushed into the dancing scene in VR chat.
[00:05:48.408] Kent Bye: Okay. So it sounds like you started with the music scene and then from the music scene more and more into like the dancing scene, but what kind of clubs or what kind of things were you going to in the dancing scene?
[00:06:00.747] SoftlySteph: Yeah, well, the dance scene is massive. So I actually got my start getting like lessons and doing stage performance dancing at a club called Virtual Pantheon. And then I eventually moved to a club called Phoenix Palace, which is really, really old and has a ton of lore, as well as Monstrum Inn and Dance for Lost Souls now. But gosh, it would take the... I think most people don't understand how large the stage dance and dance performance scene is in VRChat because it is larger than the rave scene, which is more public-facing.
[00:06:38.417] Kent Bye: Oh, I didn't realize that. I know that there's a whole timeline of different events that are happening at different clubs, and they have at least 300 different clubs that are having events either once a month or periodically or every week. But you're saying that there's even more dance clubs and dance scenes?
[00:06:54.722] SoftlySteph: Yeah, yeah, I would love to show you the calendar. I wonder if I can pull it up real quick here. But yeah, the stage dance scene is huge. I think on a typical weekday, there are 20 to 30 events. Wow, okay.
[00:07:12.131] Kent Bye: Okay. And so you're in the dance scene and you're in the kind of music scene. And then at some point you start to do VJ, video jockey or visual jockey type of stuff with some of your dance. When did you start to actually start to produce some visuals that were at some of these different clubs?
[00:07:28.725] SoftlySteph: So yeah, that actually started with a visualist named Silent, which I don't know if you've interviewed before. Did you get to talk to Silent?
[00:07:35.430] Kent Bye: I got to talk to her and she mentioned your name as someone involved in that, but yeah, go ahead.
[00:07:40.293] SoftlySteph: Yeah, so Silent was involved in doing visuals for me, like with me, involving my VRChat avatar as part of the visuals three years ago for my birthday. So I try to make a special visuals, art, and music performance for my birthday every year. It's kind of like the gift to myself is being perceived. You know, I want to... kind of have this like selfish moment where I get to play my music and do my art and say my shit. So I do that every year. So over, so three years ago, that would be like 20, gosh, 2021. I can't, time is so fake. But yeah, it was then. So Silent helped me do this audio visual performance. And since then, the kind of wheel started turning of how can I do this myself? I've got a background in streaming. I used to be a full-time streamer. So I'm quite well familiarized with OBS and like how to do visual effects in OBS. So it kind of became this like... This is a natural progression to using my OBS skills to do live visuals in VRChat. So I essentially set up like a stream deck software. It's called SAMMI, S-A-M-M-I, which is an enthusiast stream deck, like macro board kind of system. So I made a control panel that I could click while dancing to switch my visuals around to different scenes.
[00:09:09.850] Kent Bye: Okay. Okay. So it sounds like you've got some software outside of your chat. I was also talking with Rue of the Kaleidosky and she was telling me that you were using the kaleidoscopic real-time feedback loop to use your body as a way of controlling what people were seeing in the context of this big giant dome and full dome, what ends up being an entire sphere, which is projecting this kind of kaleidoscopic fractal representations of these feedback loops. And so- Yeah, it sounds like that you've done some VJ work outside with your own tool set and pipeline, but also being within VR itself and starting to play around with tools within VR to do some visuals.
[00:09:48.502] SoftlySteph: Yeah, I'm a resident visualist at Kaleidosky. And so sometimes it's fun to just use Kaleidosky's tools, but using my own tools is just as fun because I am messing around with, like you said, fractal video recursion type visuals, and then using my body as the visual instrument to create shapes. Sometimes it's very abstracted, so you can't even see that there's like a figure creating it. But still, if I fill the screen and then unfill the screen to the beat, we have this like very organic fractal like geometry visuals that are beat synced because it is a dance.
[00:10:26.283] Kent Bye: Okay. So I had a chance to talk to Apple, Blossom, and Adidas, and they were talking about their creation of this whole new holographic system and that some of the first three artists that they brought in to start to look at it were Silent, Namuron, and yourself to see what was even possible with this new system. And so take me back to that time of seeing the very early beginnings of this holographic system that you ended up using and the friction of a modulated soul.
[00:10:53.857] SoftlySteph: Yeah, what a fascinating thing. I mean, it had the vibe of like a mad scientist experiment when we were first looking at it. Kind of like this new frontier of 3D visuals. And there's something very like... beautiful about an art form that is just uniquely VR. Like you could compress this down to 2D video and have a recording and do it some justice, but it is truly a three-dimensional rendering and those sorts of visuals can only be appreciated, like fully appreciated in VRChat, I think.
[00:11:31.431] Kent Bye: Yeah. So Apple and Adidas had said that they'd showed it to you and then that you had gone away and then came back to them and said, Hey, I've got this idea to do this dance. And so they said it was really catalyzed by you coming back to them with this idea. So what did you go back and tell them that you wanted to do?
[00:11:49.895] SoftlySteph: Well, we saw it. And I think the first time we were talking about it, it's like, hey, like, it'd be really cool to adapt my visuals to this system. But I mean, that was quite a large undertaking requiring skills that I didn't have, because I'm very two dimensional. I mean, I work with video feedback and that sort of thing, but I don't have the unity and knowledge to figure out how to render my 3d shape and then apply transforms to do cool things so i remember like the first time i saw the system with apple we were talking about and apple was excited and i was excited to eventually do something but it wasn't until rain dance really that it was like Raindance reached out to me to do a dance performance for their new category. And the first person I talked to was like, hey, Apple, can we make this happen? So...
[00:12:44.443] Kent Bye: Okay. So it was really catalyzed, inspired to create something for a brain dance. And so the piece was an amazingly beautiful piece. I mean, I was so moved by the piece and many different levels of the story that you're doing. You're telling a really in-depth personal story about identity and all the different phases of what's happening in the collective and your own internal process and journey. And then also you've got the technical aspects that have these different innovations that are happening from the different types of dance and ways you're really pushing the edge of what you could even do with the technology and how your dance is then being mirrored or amplified by this completely new holographic system. And then there's all the independent music that you've curated for it. And so there's lots of different parts to this piece that you're able to pull together. And so where did you begin with this as a piece? Do you start with the dance? Do you start with the music? Do you start with... the story or like walk through this iterative process that you went through?
[00:13:44.513] SoftlySteph: Yeah, sure. Gosh, you're right. There was so much that went into it. I think it started with trying to figure out the story because that was core and actually had a lot of difficulty coming up with the vision for the set. Because we had the prototype of the hologram. I could see myself rendered. We had the ability to... So the system has two simultaneous holograms. It has the regular or the traditional SNR Labs hologram, which is taking a video feed and and rendering any object in 3D or any scene in 3D, essentially. I mean, some of the noisy scenes get a little bit lost. And then we have the holographic projection that's getting rendered live that's from my avatar dancing. So we had that tech established early. It's like, this is what it's going to be is what we can have. And then the problem is that the design space is infinite. My avatar could be any scale and the scene could be any image. So what kind of story do I want to tell? Is it going to be something more abstract? Is it going to be something more narrative? So I ended up spending a lot of time iterating over and over and over to try to figure out what the story was. And I was actually torn between two different narrative tales And on iterating on both of those narratives, I ended up kind of realizing that they had some shared themes. And so I ended up abstracting those themes into The Friction of a Modulated Soul, which is kind of a story about being perceived. It was very like this meta take on these more literal narratives.
[00:15:35.384] Kent Bye: Yeah, you have different chapter titles. You pass along the transcript and there's different themes that you go through, these kind of higher level themes that you're talking about here from like apathy, judgment, armor. You kind of go through this progression of, in some ways, being more closed off into eventually becoming more open and accepting. How would you describe that? the journey through these different themes, you know, it's frictions of a modulated soul. So the name implies that there's some friction or fracturing of self and identity, at least that's how I was reading it at the time. But I'd love to hear how you start to describe what you were wanting to really explore with, you know, from one theme to the next, this progression through that, the story.
[00:16:16.200] SoftlySteph: Yeah. I mean, the story is to me, the journey of finding yourself and finding your authentic self. The pitfalls, the highs and the lows, and the frictions, the things that are holding you back or keeping you from living your most authentic self or being your highest self. So it is a story of how society and the eyes of others, there's this recurring theme that starts the show and ends the show, which is this cage of eyes, which is visually represented. Namorin did all the cage of eyes scenes, which is visually represented by these blinking, like all seeing eyes that are surrounding me. At one point, they entirely engulfed me. And that represents the gaze of others and how the gaze of others is like affecting us. In the beginning, we're talking about judgment, which is how other people are modulating how we act, how other people kind of impose their will on how we should behave. And existing in society means, you know, having to kind of conform in some amount of way. And that's chapter one. Apathy is kind of a prologue, so you could call judgment chapter one. And then chapter two is armor, which is how internalizing that judgment of others is ends up making us wear this armor or this skin that dulls us from the outside world. It's kind of like a protective shell. And during that dance, we reduce the saturation of the set, of the performance, because it kind of gives this idea that we are limiting our view of the world or limiting how much joy we can have for the world because we are protecting ourselves so much. Let me close my door. I could go on chapter by chapter. Sorry, I got a little bit, you know, there's a lot of ideas here.
[00:18:24.997] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, before we continue to dig into the story, I wanted to take a step back and ask a question because the themes of this type of identity expression and this journey that you're taking us on, I'm curious just to hear any reflections that you have on virtual reality as a medium with social VR, because we're talking about identity and trying to overcome some of these perceptions and judgments. And if you've been able to find new aspects of your own identity and artistic expression within the context of VR.
[00:18:54.616] SoftlySteph: I mean, absolutely. I love VR for that because I didn't really discover myself in VR. I feel like I had already kind of understood my identity and had that like personal growth. I am trans. I transitioned like... eight years ago, eight plus. So I had a big transformative moment in my life then where I was really trying to dig in and figure out who I was. And I still have a strong sense of identity now. And VRChat just kind of let me express myself as I am. I got to really be perceived and appreciated for my dance and my art. That's been really new and I have been growing as a person, but I feel like my sense of identity hasn't really strengthened or weakened because of VR, but I have seen that in other people. I've seen how dramatic a shift VR has been for some people. I think the primary reason for that is when you enter VR, and you start involving yourself socially, you realize that you kind of have to decide what avatar you're going to wear. And there's lots of options, and you can go looking and kind of trying stuff on. But I think... For a lot of people, they haven't actually ever had that idea of like, who am I? How do I want to be perceived? And you really don't have a choice because you're going to have to choose something to represent yourself as in VR. And I think that can be a very dramatic, like life-changing question for people.
[00:20:30.734] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I think that this piece, by the end of it, I was just in tears. I found it so moving, both visually and the story that you were sharing. And I could hear a lot of people around me also crying. I felt like you were able to really tap into these universal aspects of ourselves or our identity, how we're perceived by other people. And so you're kind of slowly in each of the different chapters talking about these different aspects of your own sense of what it feels like inside of the different internal phenomenological experience of your life, but also the external perception of whoever you're in relationship to and the different types of judgments or whatever that comes from. folks outside of yourself. So identity is always relational in the sense that it's you as yourself, but it's also you in relation to other people. And so I feel like this as a piece is really exploring many different dimensions of that relationship between self and other. And I feel like throughout the course of the whole story, you're taking on this journey that it sounds like a big part of your own journey, but also tapping into those universal aspects of what everybody has experienced to some degree. Right, right. 100%. So it sounds like that in order to really develop this piece, you had to break down each of the individual chapters and segments where you have a song where you've collaborated with different VR chat musicians to pull in the music, but also to kind of have a different vibe shift or a different technique that you're exploring or maybe just different ways that you're trying to metaphorically explore the themes of that chapter. And so just talk through a little bit of that process of once you got a little bit where you wanted to take people with the story, how you then started to work through each of the different design of the dance and the music that would go along with it.
[00:22:20.863] SoftlySteph: Yeah. So we created the 12 chapters and, So the chapters are titled, well, introduction, then apathy, judgment, armor, So I talked up to that. Then after armor is becoming, which is where you kind of like get inspired to be your authentic self. It's kind of the, in response to the armor, maybe you realize your world is very gray and you're not really living your authentic truth or you have a vision of what what your ideal self could be. And Star Heart took that one on. After I had all the chapters done, I kind of had this loose framework of like where we're going. And I sent that to every artist I could think of in the VR chat scene. So, and fortunately, a lot of them wanted to take it on. A But several of them wanted to actually write songs for the set. And none of them took the same chapter, which was really fascinating. I had some really lovely, like, back and forth conversations with some of them as to like, what does this chapter mean to me, but also what does this chapter mean to them? So Starheart is a star. Starheart is incredible. They're trying to be a professional V singer entertainer in VRChat. And they really resonated with the Becoming chapter, which... between us, it wasn't its first intention, but between us, it became kind of a metaphor for the trans experience, where she sees who she could be, and in seeing who she could be, she sees color for the first time, and the sun starts to rise. The lyrics are very colorful from And the contrast of color for saturated versus desaturated, inspired versus repressed. So that's the kind of push-pull that's happening in Starhart's section, which is becoming. And then, yeah, do you have any questions?
[00:24:32.992] Kent Bye: No, no, no, no. I was just going to say that I have an interview with Starheart during the airing on episode number 1400 here, either later today or tomorrow. And yeah, her Elsewhere video that she has as her debut of Starheart really played with that type of saturated color versus black and white of this journey that sounds similar to different themes that she's singing about in this song as well.
[00:24:55.038] SoftlySteph: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. And so becoming is very beautiful, but then I am very hopeful, but I contrast that in our next section, which is expectation, which is one of the cages, quote unquote cages that are created. It continues the cage metaphor in the whole piece. And expectation, the cage of expectation is very literally stated in the performance because it's a little esoteric. But the cage of expectation is kind of this idea of like, okay, you see your highest self. You can visualize who you want to be. But sometimes that can be almost paralyzing because it's outside of your present moment. You don't know which higher self you should be going towards. You know, it's like having a paralysis as to what profession you should be pursuing or, you know, what hobby you should be doing. And if you are always in the ideation, you're not in the present. And so my favorite line and what I really wanted to share in this moment was knowing what you want is only as important as it can inform your present. And that's something that I try to tell myself and that kind of thing. Like, yeah, it's good to, it can be great to ideate, but how is your ideation informing your now? Because, you know, the now, the present moment is all we have.
[00:26:21.797] Kent Bye: Yeah. And just to jump in to say that as I was watching the performance, I was really struck by how you were using these holographic systems to, well, you're mirroring yourself. So there's ways that you are amplifying your own embodiment at larger scales and But then there's sometimes where you use the holographic system to create these spatial metaphors that are amplifying different aspects of whatever you're singing about. And so just the ability to pull in these different spatial objects, like a cage that you're inside of and these steps that you're going up and down and All the ways that you're able to, because usually with dance, you're stuck with just your body and being able to dance. In VR, you have the capability to expand out and to further the spatial context. Obviously, as a VJ, you're also bringing in other ways that you're modulating the visual impact of your body and how that gets rippled out into all these different abstractions through these visual processing that you're doing. But in the context of this performance, I was just really struck by how there's like this new grammar of pulling in these spatial metaphors that are then able to amplify the story that's coming through. And then also how you're dancing through each of these different chapters as well.
[00:27:35.612] SoftlySteph: Yeah, especially in that cage of expectation, we have these gigantic clones of myself that are live rendered of me inside this cage. But since the scale, we've got a scale modifier applied to me. If I'm on the outside edge of the cage, then the larger scaled out multiplier of me is outside the cage. So that was a very like... A little bit of a difficult dance. I have to be very aware of not only where my body is, but also where my larger clones are. And it's very fun to play with, like holding up the cage with the clones or like doing this little miming of clones. you know, what are my clones doing versus what am I doing and that kind of thing. And to do that, since I'm at a different scale modifier, I can imagine kind of recursively that inside the cage that I'm currently in, there is a smaller cage. And if I trace that smaller cage with my hands, then this imagined smaller cage, then I'm also, it's like the larger clones are touching the real cage. Sorry, it's very hard to explain, but yes, it is like this fractal recursive, but with size. But I had no problem really like grokking that because I'm very used to playing with scale in my 2D visual. So it's just an adapt adaptation to 3D.
[00:29:04.963] Kent Bye: Yeah, one of the things that you mentioned during the Q&A is that you actually have like a camera system with some overlays. Like how many different views of the scene do you have spread out when you're dancing so that you can really get perspective on these multiple perspectives of yourself as you're dancing?
[00:29:21.728] SoftlySteph: Only one, unfortunately. So I just had the one view of the scene from afar, kind of the audience bird's eye view perspective to help me understand where the larger parts of me are moving and that kind of thing. But yeah, I only had that one view because rendering more camera angles, I mean, you can't even do it, but if you could, it would be very computationally intensive. But I have that one view everywhere. So no matter where I was looking, it was within, I shot for me to see that one camera view gigantic monitors all over.
[00:29:55.244] Kent Bye: Okay. Okay. So you had multiple monitors of the same view, but it was still just one view, but that's what I remember that you had monitors everywhere that you're able to see it for no matter where you're looking, you can kind of get a sense of the larger context. Yeah, yeah. One other, I guess, follow-on technical point to make is that in talking to Apple and Adidas, they were saying that there's actually two versions of the hologram. There's one that's a live capture of your avatar, but there's also a whole other version that is pre-recorded. And so as you're dancing, you have to both react to the pre-recording aspects, but also be aware of whenever you're puppeteering the larger aspect. And so maybe you could just talk about different ways that you're kind of looping aspects of these visuals where you're recording stuff and then playing them back, but also doing things live on top of it. So love to hear about that dynamic of being able to coordinate those two things.
[00:30:46.754] SoftlySteph: Yeah, sure. I mean, most, yeah. Yeah, so there's two simultaneous systems happening. We have the pre-recorded, you know, all the shapes, all the cages, the eyes, anything that's not my body was pre-recorded. So that was on the track with the audio. So that was going to happen when it was going to happen. And everything with my avatar, all of those shapes were all created live. There wasn't actually any like looping of my avatar of my dancing or there wasn't any pre-recorded dancing either. Which could have been really cool. It was originally in our script, but we didn't end up getting around to it because it would have been really neat to dance with a clone of myself. But because of how video compression works, any pre-recording of the clone wouldn't be as crisp. It would be kind of distorted because of the video compression. So the live capture is actually really, really sharp because we have access to the alpha channel since we aren't running it through like a video streaming pipeline. It's direct to your computer.
[00:31:51.389] Kent Bye: I see. And is some of that happening on your computer doing that live? Or is that because I know you said you have like either one or two computers that are running all this. Is that on your side running it and doing that capture and broadcasting your dancing in real time?
[00:32:07.143] SoftlySteph: Um, no. So for each person in the audience is rendering the six virtual cameras on my avatar, then compressing that feed into a 2D format and then re-expanding that out into the 3D image.
[00:32:30.770] Kent Bye: My comment when I was finished watching it is that there's a lot of black magic that's happening in order to make this happen. There's like a lot of really amazing technological innovations to kind of pull all this off.
[00:32:40.535] SoftlySteph: Absolutely. It is pretty much beyond, beyond me, but I'm sure you already talked about how that capture system works in your previous episode.
[00:32:50.720] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. Just the being able to basically encode all this information, the six views into a video and then decoding it. So yeah, it's a pretty remarkable, like, you know, for me, I was asking, well, why don't you just use JSON data to send it over? And yeah, just, it's like way too much data to do that. And that the video compression actually ends up being a really efficient way of enabling what is essentially a brand new type of volumetric capture technique in the sense that you're able to capture things and play things back in a way that is starting to catalyze completely new forms of expression. And I feel like you're really on the bleeding edge of taking what this technology can do and then taking it to the logical extreme of how you can use this for an expression through dance and your art that you created in this piece. Yeah, I think it's certainly a real achievement on all the fronts of everybody coming together to put it together.
[00:33:42.291] SoftlySteph: Yeah, it was incredible to work with all these super talented people and for them to believe in my vision for the narrative. And that's something that really kept me up late at night trying to get my narrative right because it was the core to putting the whole show together.
[00:34:00.572] Kent Bye: Great. Well, we got up to around the chapter five expectation, and then you have collapse, lonely, jealousy, perverse. I'd love to hear you expand a little bit about for each of these chapters, how you start to put language to what you were doing with the dance for each of these different scenes and how the story is kind of progressing.
[00:34:17.833] SoftlySteph: Yeah, absolutely. So when we left off, we were in the cage of expectation. So we were kind of inside this cage and outside of us where all these are ideal selves, representations of our ideal selves, just out of reach. You know, the grass is always greener on the outside of the cage or something. And in that, the lyrics are kind of telling us that we have to figure out how to just be present and exist and, you So I have the clones kind of attack the cage in a way or reach into it and break this fourth wall. And as the cage disappears, I try to have the clones kind of hold their hands to grab me and let me down to the ground. And at that same moment, the scale of the capture cube increases to one-to-one scale. So the clones are no longer larger. They actually just kind of like schlorp into me and I get like reabsorbed. And this is kind of the start of, I forget what the, what's the next chapter? It actually is the last chapter.
[00:35:26.739] Kent Bye: Yeah.
[00:35:28.183] SoftlySteph: Oh yeah. Right. So, so right. So we'll call this collapse part two. This kind of got added in because of the music and because of how the narrative, this is kind of like a rising action that just got added in because of our state song warrior. I wanted to kind of create some kind of moment of like, yeah, how do we learn this lesson and actually like really become our highest self for this moment? Yeah. So in Collapse Part 2, we are kind of an actualized being. We're glowing, and the hologram is so close to us that it's kind of creating dots on my skin and making me really, really bright. We also play with having these shadow clone effects. So there's a trailing particles behind me from the rendering. And it's like this very empowering scene. I also do a lot of hue shifts during the performance. And so this is the time when I hue shift to orange because it's such like a powerful, powerful color. And I'm looking all kind of superhero-y and the stage appears. I'm starting with these stairs that spiral around me and, you know... kind of have this stairway up and the music is very hopeful very like about the warrior like hearing her calling and rising to the challenge and the music also has a lot of themes about like movement and going far away like very hero's journey like on an adventure this warrior is moving so i play space move and walk up the staircase. And that kind of this idea of like getting up to this stage, this podium, actually, you know, this pedestal that I'm literally placing myself on. And this performance is very much like a solo dance of, um, Me like doing my most empowering visual dance moves, like try to channel that, like actualized, empowered, confident person and the visuals, the prerecorded visuals are these particles that are actually flying towards me. That's like a metaphor for movement. So yeah, I'm on this pedestal, but it's like trying to show that we're traveling very far. We're going places as much as we can. We are burning really bright. Unfortunately, our old state song, Warrior, is a very long song. I think it's like a five minute or more song with three drops in it. It's supposed to be mixed in and out, but I really liked how long of a song it was because it really drove home this kind of like, You're a little bit exhausted of the song by the end of it, which leads into Lonely.
[00:38:03.883] Kent Bye: Yeah. And I know in 80 DOS had like a shot behind the scenes where he's helping to change some of these different scenes. So you're, you have the prerecorded stuff, you have 80 DOS controlling some of these different shifts and then you're, you're dancing and then there's the live capture of it. And so when you get into lonely and jealousy and then perverse, what are some of the highlights in this next phase?
[00:38:28.018] SoftlySteph: Yeah, so something I really like is during our rising action, during class part two, while we're traveling and very empowering, very smileys, there's this gigantic tree that's part of the environment. When you walk into my show, you see the gigantic tree, you see the lights and the leaves, and it's very pretty. But actually, during this rising action, we remove the leaves and we make the tree kind of barren and dead. but you wouldn't notice because it's all flashy and that kind of thing. And it's very visually stimulating. But Lonely Starts, which is the most incredible song written by Naku, I'm very excited for it to get released because it exceeded my expectations. Naku's songwriting and storytelling through music was incredible and also very, it was very emotional. I'm getting emotional even thinking about it. But yeah, so our character, our protagonist is on this pedestal and the song is over and it's kind of like this now what kind of moment and this kind of dreary beat, this beautiful piano comes in and it says, you know, the lyrics are, don't tell me I'm alone. And you immediately realize that like, oh, like all of a sudden, maybe I traveled too far. Maybe I went too far. How how did I end up being lonely? And it starts this exploration of. after you've become your highest self or after you've figured out who your authentic self is, you end up casting off from your old support system and you very often lose your old friends because they see you as who you used to be and you're trying to be seen as a new person. So actually like the path to authenticity often has this like dramatic sense of loneliness that comes, that surprises you because you think you're, you know, you just became this better person. Why are you lonely? It's the surprise. And the pedestal disappears and the stairs come back and I walk down the stairs and slowly and eventually during the song like all the light gets drained from the scene the particle screen is off the visuals are off and it's actually just me playing with my avatar emissions to show kind of like this light and my avatar being my like heartbeat as it just about dies but And I had no idea how to come back from that. I was like, Naku, you can't kill me. If you do kill me, you've got to bring me back to life. And Naku said, no problem. let me write a resolve ending real quick and the next day had this like beautiful like section at the end that was like about seeing the light again and and like you know really just resurrected the character from this death which was uh it was perfect i the amount of like serendipitous moments that came to making putting the story together is just amazing
[00:41:29.874] Kent Bye: Yeah, I know that it sounds like you're collaborating deeply with each of these different artists that some of them had created custom tracks for you and some of them you chose already existing tracks. But I know that the very last chapter of Overcoming, there was some finger puppeteering that you started to do that I thought was really just beautiful the way that you were laying down and having, again, like playing with scale in a way that you're able to track very finely what's happening with your hands and kind of puppeteering what's happening with those animations. And so were there other times throughout the course of the performance that you were doing that type of finger puppeteering or was that the first time that it shows up in that last chapter of overcoming?
[00:42:11.952] SoftlySteph: Um, no, it actually comes in during Armor with Ivy Synthetic's song, which is that kind of like angry, an angry section. It's kind of like a, I don't know, it's very grr against the cage of eyes. There's several times where I'm fighting the Cage of Eyes or getting fought by the Cage of Eyes. It's a very almost violent portion. So with that, those are where the hands usually come in. So I do some puppeteering kind of early in that armor section, but there it's kind of tender, kind of like... I represent the armor by covering myself in hands, kind of like a cocoon in that section. And then later in the perverse, it's a very, well, the final two chapters of jealousy and perverse. In jealousy, I'm attacking the audience. With my hands, there's a little bit of finger puppeting happening, I believe, in that chapter where I'm, you know, I'm like very antagonistic towards the audience. And then in perverse, I'm antagonistic towards myself, like literally hitting myself with my hands. And there's some hand puppeteering happening there. And then, yeah, in overcome. very like organic flowy hand puppeting happening. That's a hopeful regrowth, regrowth kind of vibe. So, but yeah, in my normal visuals, my VJ work, I do a lot of hand puppeting. So I think that's something I'm maybe most known for. So of course had to be part of this performance too.
[00:43:43.914] Kent Bye: Okay. Yeah. So it sounds like you were previously working with the hand puppeteering and more of a 2d context where it was rendering out to a visual, but I feel like you were able to have this real sculptural, like you said, like a flower that you were able to have yourself like really being embraced by this kind of organic shapes and There's a clip that Madame Khanna had put out where she was featuring the words from that last section of Overcoming that had some other clips from other parts of the performance, but I thought really captured the vibe of what you were able to do and the frictions of a modulated soul, which ended up winning the best dance performance. I was on the jury and it just felt like it was a clear winner in terms of all the different technical innovations that you're doing. But I think more than anything else, especially for me, is just how emotionally moving it was throughout the whole. I mean, I know throughout the entirety of this conversation, we're kind of like unpacking the nuances of the story. At the time I was watching it, it felt like more of a poem that... like maybe I was capturing little glimmers or parts of it. And I don't know if I was able to kind of track the nuances of how the story was developing as I was watching it, just because there was just so much going on in terms of the visual experience of it all and the music. And so it was operating on many levels. And so I was taking in the entirety of the experience, but by the end of it, I just was like in a complete state of awe because it took me on a whole journey.
[00:45:13.095] SoftlySteph: I'm so glad. Thank you for the feedback. Yeah, it seemed to have a really profound impact on a lot of people and I'm really, really proud of it and just thankful for the opportunity to be perceived like that. And yeah, we're breaking down the nuances of each chapter, but I was hoping that it would be kind of maybe too difficult to follow, you know, and something that's really neat with the visual storytelling and through dance, it's very... up to each person's individual interpretation of what's happening. So I think by abstracting the themes out as much as possible, I was able to make it easier for people to apply their own experiences onto the piece.
[00:46:03.052] Kent Bye: Yeah, there's a lot of room for interpretations. And I think that's part of the beauty of dance is that you can have something that is abstract and metaphorical. And there is this kind of other track of the narrative that you're putting forth. And I think from moment to moment, I'm tracking things. But if you were to ask me, okay, describe what was happening in each of these different chapters, I would have difficulty putting words to it just because there's just so much that is happening that my brain's trying to process and observe. So I'm very grateful just to have the opportunity to kind of break it down here a little bit. And, you know, as you know, I go back and potentially at some point, it sounds like with these technologies that you can at least start to record different parts. You know, like we're talking about how there were some things that were pre-recorded. There are other things that, like you said, are being transmitted in real time. And so it's a matter of capturing that video, but also your avatar and how your avatar is dancing as another aspect of how you are going to go about perhaps creating a recorded version. So it sounds like that's part of what you and Apple Blossom and Adidas are trying to figure out is taking all those different things that were happening and putting it all together so that it could potentially exist as a standalone performance that people could watch the recording. So... I don't know if you have any other comments on the next phases of figuring out some of those other things in order to take something like this, which is a piece that has a lot of your heart and soul and performance and is really magical to see live in the moment, but potentially capture it so that if people can't see it in real time, that they would still potentially have access to it to watch later.
[00:47:39.471] SoftlySteph: Yeah, it's a challenge, but it definitely seems worth it. We're recording on the 5th. Tomorrow I have another performance in French. We've done the entire performance dubbed in French for a French showing. So this is to say that this performance has already gone past language barriers, which is incredibly, incredibly humbling. The struggle though, is that all the steps required to record this show is pretty extensive. We have to figure out shader motion, which is a way to capture live recording of the bone data of my avatar, then create another puppet of my avatar, then apply those recorded bone transforms to the avatar in pace with the music, then hand code in any things like hue shift and emission changes that I'm doing on my avatar. And then we need to add the Adidas control panel aspect onto that recording. And then that all needs to be synced with the music and visuals, which is a pretty large undertaking, but that's all to enshrine this piece for, you know, I would love to say forever, but eventually, you know, all things in the internet, especially these kinds of things seem to eventually kind of erode and decay as content patches and hardware change. But Also, we're going to have a nice recording done soon. So Madame Kana, who I met through Rain Dance, through the clip that she made of me, is currently working on creating a full recording of the performance, a high-quality recording of the performance. So that'll be the best way for people to experience this. But... We're pretty dedicated to having a replayable version. So you can really see how this looked in VR, especially several people requested that they have that kind of space to watch the performance again, because they were so moved by the piece is kind of hard for them to express their feelings or explore their feelings because it was pushing them to be more vulnerable than they want it to be in like a public group setting, which is super understandable.
[00:49:52.833] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. And I do think it's a type of piece that people can come back to and still get many layers. You've got lots to unpack in the different phases of this piece. And so, yeah, I'm looking forward to having it available for folks to go check out. And when I was talking to Apple, she seemed to think that there was nothing technologically that was going to prevent anything from being possible to capture everything and to create that replayable version. So I know she was a big part of creating all this magic to happen in the first place. So I'll take her word that it's just going to be a matter of going through all those different things, like you said. Yeah, just getting it done. Yeah, just getting it done.
[00:50:28.640] SoftlySteph: We'll get it done. It's worth it. It's definitely worth it. And especially now that we won, we owe it to our audience and ourselves to get this replayable in its proper medium of VR. Yeah.
[00:50:40.635] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, I guess as we start to wrap up, I'd love to hear what you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality might be and what it might be able to enable.
[00:50:49.479] SoftlySteph: Whoa, that's a large question. I feel like it's hard to imagine the ultimate potential when I think we're already there. It's just a matter of... more adoption, easier access, and better like mixed reality tools. I'd love to actually have friends over in my house by like scanning my space and having people be digitized into my room, like true holodeck fashion. But I think that I think we're already there. It's just a matter of the tech getting adopted and distributed. So I'm excited. I think in a world where The people in VR, people are like, you know, my social life is I'm in VR full-time. And there's so many huge advantages to that, like not having to travel to see my friends, being able to be wherever I want to be. And that enables one of my favorite aspects of virtual reality, which is when you're at an event or an occasion or a gathering in virtual reality, And you're not having fun. It's your own fault because there's a million other places you could be, you know, and that's just increasing over and over and over. And it gives this like social, this implication that everyone in the space is there because they want to be. if you're performing as a DJ or a visualist or what have you, you don't have to worry about pleasing a crowd because if the crowd isn't pleased, they can go find another show that they'd rather be at. So it gives a profound sense of like, I guess, I guess worth. I'm trying to find the right word, but it gives the sense of that you're being truly appreciated for the art you're bringing out because everyone's making that conscious choice to be there.
[00:52:49.300] Kent Bye: Yeah, it reminds me what people have talked about being at Burning Man, this fear of missing out, that you're kind of constantly dealing with people, checking out if they want. But if they are there, you have a sense that they want to be there, it sounds like. Yeah, yeah. Great. Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:53:09.330] SoftlySteph: No, thank you so much for giving me this platform and appreciating my work and I hope to keep doing cool stuff in VR. So thanks a lot.
[00:53:19.537] Kent Bye: Yeah, and really enjoyed watching this piece and hearing a little bit more about your journey through lots of different phases from the dance clubs and the music scene and then the dancing and then all the different ways that you've been experimenting with these ways of using your body as a way of doing visual DJ performance. And, you know, with this dance performance, really taking everything to the next level of using the technology to create what I think is a VR dance performance that could really truly only happen in VR, where you're pushing the limits of the technology and pushing into these new kind of genres of dance that have these spatialized components and mirroring of yourself, which I've seen some mirroring of avatars, but I think having the kind of voxelized, pixelized kind of versions of yourself and you know, just bringing all that together and all the different techniques of that specialization within VR. And yeah, just really tying it all together with the story that you're telling. So yeah, thanks again for taking the time to help share a little bit more about your story and your journey into VR.
[00:54:19.949] SoftlySteph: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you again. Gosh, I could have said, I could have said so much more. There's so much to it, but I appreciate like your work in sharing these stories and uncovering these stories. So maybe you'll have me on again sometime. Oh, for sure. Yeah.
[00:54:34.457] Kent Bye: It sounds like you you've been hanging out in the corners of the universe and yeah. So there's, as I start to piece together these different histories, I'm sure, you know, you've got lots of other stories to be told as well. So happy to have you on more again here in the future. Awesome. All right. Take care. So that was softly stuff. And her experience called the friction of a modulated soul was the best dance experience at ring dance immersive 2024. And yeah, it was just an experience that completely blew me away. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, Well, first, I think it's worth shouting out Apple Blossom and Adidas and Namuron, a system creator and the VJs with SNR Labs that were the technological innovation to even enable a dance performance of this magnitude to even be possible. So there are so many different technical innovations in this piece that were just completely mind blowing because, you know, there's some systems that were being developed and they're having some private screenings and showings. But this was really a great way to debut some of the different underlying core technologies that SNR Labs has been developing. And just in talking to Apple Blossom and Adidas, then actually this collaboration with Softly Stuff on this dance performance actually was a deadline and a catalyst to really refine all the systems and push it to the edge for what's even possible with the technology. I mean, I was just in this... instance with like 40 or 50 or more people at up to 80 people and then having like 1.4 million pixels at the same time with a live capture of live movements being mimicking and expanded out and sometimes duplicated like two or four times and then on top of that there's these pre-recorded interactions and holograms that are being interacted with. And then on top of all that, there's an amazing soundtrack that you listen to from original VRChat artists. And then yet again, on top of that, there's a story that weaves it all together that was deeply personal and very emotionally evocative and moving, not only from the archetypal way that this is a story that anybody could relate to, but it's also very much connected to Steph's own journey and her own story. And so there's a lot to kind of unpack that we talk about in this piece. And again, if you haven't had a chance to see it at some point, the replayable version of this is going to be made available on VRChat that you can go watch and check out. And if you already listened to this far and you haven't seen it, then it's for sure definitely worth checking out just to see some of the innovations that are happening. There is already a Night Under the Lights, The Seasons at the Moon Pool that on my previous episode, I have a link to that video. world that you can go check out some of the different aspects of this holographic shader that the SNR Labs did. It's pretty different in that scene because it's more of a 2D representation of these videos that are coming from VJs, but they'll give you a good sense of some of the vibe that this holographic shader called the Apple Global Illumination is able to enable. But what they were able to do in this piece was just on a whole other level because, well, first of all, Steph is at the core. She started with writing the story. So I think that's pretty unique in the sense that, you know, from the beginning, there was a journey that she wanted to take us on. And the underlying thrust of the journey was that it's a story about the different cages that bind us from our authentic selves. and so there's kind of a dialectic between like what are the barriers from that type of authenticity now you get connected to your true self oh now wait there's these collective things that then come in from outside in the culture that are going to then pull you away from your authentic self yet again and then you have to come back and be reconnected to yourself and so there's these kind of four different phases where the first phase of the barriers to authenticity with the chapter one of apathy chapter two of judgment with an original track by ej and then the chapter three of armor And then you start to get more into like the connection and finding of your own true authentic self with chapter four with Becoming with an original track by Starheart, which I also have an interview with Starheart back in episode 1400, where we start to dive in into her own journey into becoming a VTuber and some of her original music that was really talking about her own trans experience. And so that's a chapter that's mimicking a lot of the same themes of the grays of a world where you're not yourself and then finding and discovering yourself and finding different dimensions of color that are kind of metaphorically expressing your own self. And in that chapter, I believe that there's additional messing with the overall cue and the color. Now, when I was watching this piece, it was difficult to track every single thing that's happening. I mean, there's the dance, there's the amazing technologies that's happening. There's like the subtle nuances of the music and the story. And so from a cognitive load perspective, there's actually quite a lot to try to track and to pay attention to. But more than anything, I was able to stay with it. And there's an introduction that softly stuff does at the very beginning where she welcomes you. And she says that the friction of a modulated soul is a story about these different cages that bind us from authentic truth. And then she says, but these are just the forces I perceive, perhaps projections of my own captivity. And then she starts to create this invitation for you to really pay attention to your own experience. And she says, as I consider you the experiencer of this performance, present and future, I see the opportunity to be seen. I am thankful for you taking the time to appreciate my art and feel alongside me. I have no desire for you to feel the same way I do about anything, but I do give you permission to feel." And so throughout the course of this piece, she's actually using like more second person language where she's addressing you as the audience member of like, here are things that you may experience and things that you may have gone through. She does use some first person language of say like we or our. And so it's like this collective journey where she's talking about her own experience, but she's also inviting us to go along the way. And I talked a little bit about this during the Shadow Canyon where they actually elected to go more for a chief protagonist who's this puppeteer and then he's got this mystic and they're talking about their experiences. And so it was more about their own first person experience rather than inviting the audience along to have their own experience in their own journey. I do think that there is something around dance and dance performance where you see this kind of visual language that's being used, and it's very abstract and metaphorical. I mean, it makes me think of Sleep No More in New York City, where they're actually kind of translating the entirety of Macbeth into this type of interpretive dance that has this symbolic language of the meaning of the story. Like, if you're familiar with the story, then you can read more into these different actions that are happening. And so... There's a similar thing here where, you know, it was very interesting to hear that Steph was actually like deliberately making it a little bit more obtuse. She wanted to make it more abstract and general and not too specific to her own experience, but try to reach this kind of more higher level archetypal dimensions of these different phases of connection and disconnection so that she's inviting you to come along and she's describing her own experiences and general trends that happen but there's a lot of room for this piece where you can start to project yourself into it so i find myself kind of like watching it but also like reflecting on my own experiences and so there's a matrix of my own memories that were seamlessly woven throughout my own experience of this piece and so at the end it would be difficult for me to kind of like recount the journey i was taken but i did have a chance to have a listen to it again and to read the script and to have this conversation with softly stuff because there was this kind of like architecture to this piece that was a little bit mysterious in the way like it didn't fit any kind of normal narrative structure that i've seen before but i think it's part because it's trying to really direct you into like a journey of your own memories and your own experiences and taking you through this series of discovering of your own identity expression of your true authentic self some of the barriers that come along a way that you may face at the beginning and then once you get to that place of actually feeling like you're expressed as your true authentic self then there's all these other layers that come in that are kind of like this hegelian dialectic of a push and pull of connection and disconnection from your true authentic self and so The chapter four and five are like really this deeper connection to your own self with the original track from Starheart and chapter four. And then chapter five is an original track by Turquoise that starts to get more and more into your authentic self, but also having to deal with some of those outside pressures, especially with the expectations that we're being faced with. And there's a quote that Softly Staff has woven into this original track that says, so step by step, we learn to let go of our idealized authentic self so we can be who we actually are. To become your highest self, you need to mourn the person you'll never become. So it's starting to take the turn very quickly after you get connected. There's really only like chapter four, you get connected, okay, now we're going to disconnect you. And so then you go back into the chapter six of collapse, And chapter seven, we're lonely. Both of these are more musical track. There's not a lot of narration that's happening, but the original track by Naku and chapter seven is really talking about this sense of loneliness. And yeah, it's a really emotional and powerful song. So then chapter eight and nine, then it starts to talk about these larger collective backlashes that are still trying to disconnect you from your authentic self, the jealousy and the perversion of the culture. Chapter nine has a original track by Mioski. And then finally, the chapter 10 is the overcoming. And then chapter 11 is the connection. So you're kind of coming back to your true authentic self again. And I would actually have to go back and like see the whole experience again, just to see what was happening with the dance. I had my own memory of the moment. I was kind of paying attention to anything, but I wouldn't be able to explain to you beat by beat what happens in each of these different chapters. And so that was very helpful for me to kind of get an overall architecture of what was happening with her intention for the piece as I was talking to her later. So, yeah, just kind of like this overall journey of disconnection, the barriers, connecting yourself and then the connection and disconnection and then coming back to connection again. So just a really beautifully woven story. And I think each step of the way is not only having the dance that's being represented, but also these visual metaphors that are being used to help elaborate what that story is. And so there's a form of visual storytelling and dance that's happening. And because this was a dance performance section, Steph has a lot of experience within the kind of underground stage dance and dance performance scene, which I actually don't know a lot about in terms of like, I have some indications from, we met in virtual reality, Joe hunting covers the club Zodiac. I know that there's the new Eden Evergarden that was covered by Madame Kana in the latest rain dance immersive. And, I did get a chance to look at the overall schedule of all the different events that are happening in this kind of underground stage dance and dance performance scene. And by my estimation, there's around like 200 weekly stage dance or dance performance events that are a part of this scene with another 50 on top of that that are either biweekly, bimonthly or on hiatus or are happening periodically. Now, technically, there's more clubs that are happening within the clubbing scene. There's 369 clubs, as I just did a tally on the vrc.tl has a aggregation of all the clubs and all the different events. But most of the clubbing scene is happening on the weekends, like Friday, Saturday, Sunday, you'll see like a huge dump of all of the different events. And the stage dance and dance performance scene has like more of a consistent number of different events each and every night on average, probably around like 30 or 40 different events that are happening each and every day in that scene. So that's a whole other like realm that I haven't really dove into, but I've seen some indications. And at the very end of this interview, Softly Stuff was sort of like, well, there's so much more to say. And so hopefully, you know, I'll have her back on at some point or later. do my own kind of adventures into some of this underground stage dance and dance performance scene that really haven't had my own direct experiences with at all. But there's this whole like experiences that she's had within this community where her dance style is much more kind of watery and emotional and fluid in a way that it's very subtle in a way that she's moving herself and moving her body. But it's in a way that is really deeply connected to a deeper emotion or a feeling. And then on top of that, she's doing like finger puppeteering or using mirrors of herself as she's dancing that are pushing into like new forms of genre of things that dancers haven't had access to. The kind of unique affordances of virtual reality of playing with scale, playing with like replicating yourself and playing with these giant holographic shaders with lighting effects. that are able to kind of subtly change the mood. And on top of that, with all the music and the story that's on top of that. So really, for me, this piece was tying everything together in a way that just worked and was deeply moving. There were some chapters at the very beginning where she has a diversion into like biochemistry. And I was like, oh, geez, where is this going? And It can be a little bit of cognitive load, like I said, in terms of trying to pay attention with everything that is happening. It's so visually arresting. Then on top of that, there's kind of a poetic abstraction of a narrative that's happening that's trying to guide you through these deeper archetypal themes. And so sometimes it was difficult for me to connect the dots between where the story was going. This conversation was helping to kind of tie it all together, but it turns out that that sounds like it was very deliberate where I think she was trying to, at the end, let the visual metaphors and the dance kind of speak for itself with the augmentation of the story that's there as well. And when they were working together and really leading the audience along the way to invite people in and to think about their own experiences, then I think that's the times when it worked really the best. So I was just completely overwhelmed with the amount of technical ingenuity and creativity and the collaborative spirit between both the SNR Labs and the wider VRChat music scene with all the different original tracks. And yeah, just the very deliberate nature of the story and the journey that Softly's staff had a very defined vision for where she wanted to take the viewers. Everything else was kind of like rooted around that story. And so, yeah, just a super powerful entry into this new category of best dance performance. So very curious to see where Softly Stuff takes us in the future, especially with the technology to be able to capture some of these different dimensions and start to dance with yourself and play with those aspects. And so, yeah, there's more technological innovation to be done, but also, yeah, just the existing performance is in the process of getting captured to be in a replayable version so that you can all check it out for yourself. which I highly, highly recommend that you do once it becomes available. So that's all I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. So 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 can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
