I interviewed Impulse: Playing With Reality co-directors May Abdalla and Barry Gene Murphy at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.
Here’s the official launch trailer:
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] 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 slash voicesofvr. So continuing my series of looking at different projects from Venice Immersive 2024, today's episode we're going to be diving into Impulse, Playing with Reality, which is a continuation of the Playing with Reality series that originally started with Goliath, which won at Venice Immersive a number of years ago. So this piece picked up the third place prize of achievement for immersive experiences at Venice Immersive. And yeah, it's looking at experience of ADHD and some of its more extreme manifestations to try to understand what's happening inside of the brain, but also some of the different characteristics of folks who have been diagnosed with ADHD. It actually has a number of different phases in this piece. There's a lot of use of mixed reality and more traditional documentary storytelling, but also some interactive components that is really trying to get you engaged in how the story is being told. So really quite innovative of really pushing the language and grammar of interaction and the structures and forms of immersive storytelling. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with the team behind Impulse Playing with Reality happened on Thursday, August 29th, 2024. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:32.674] May Abdalla: Hi, my name's May Abdalla. I'm the co-founder of a studio called Anagram based in London. We've been around for 11 years. We've been focusing on experiences that are based in the realm of nonfiction and we're interested in finding ways of using technology to ask people to enter a story with their bodies and so actually presently we are focusing on a collection of work called playing with reality which is about using immersive mediums to give people a first-person insight into different mental health conditions and and they kind of each use a different kind of XR which feels appropriate to the condition and kind of explores particularly stigmatized or poorly understood conditions and what they really feel like from the person who actually has first-hand experience.
[00:02:34.525] Barry Gene Murphy: Hi I'm Barry Jean Murphy and I'm a director at Anagram and I guess I'm a filmmaker that kind of studied animation with a keen interest in kind of new technology and also with May I share this kind of passion for real life stories and documentary. So yeah we're here on the island as May said with a piece called Impulse which is about ADHD and focusing around impulse control and the mechanics behind that, the biological mechanics. We follow four characters whose lives have been extremely affected by this kind of aspect of the ADHD condition because it's such a vast... like condition that seems to just unpack the more you look at it and we kind of like honed in on kind of amygdala kind of fear pathways and kind of tried to discover what what goes on and why do people like you know find themselves in situations that you know they later come to regret so yeah that's why we're here and that's why it's called impulse
[00:03:42.662] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I know that I've had previous discussions with each of you, but I always like to ask a little bit more context about your background and your journey into working with this type of immersive and interactive media.
[00:03:55.753] May Abdalla: So where do you want to begin? I feel that everybody who's in this sector has, especially those of us who've been around for a while, there's some kind of curveball reason that we've put ourselves in a field where it's difficult to make this kind of work. I feel like I mean personally I think so I you know I worked in TV and I worked in documentary in the UK because I think about this a lot you know like 11 years in like why am I still trying to make these difficult to make difficult to present difficult to distribute difficult to monetize projects now in my fourth decade of life and I think there's just something around how people are represented in other mediums and what new forms of storytelling might how they could relate to different kind of ways of our own identity politics and I know identity politics is kind of like a bit of a gigantic umbrella at the minute but You know working at the BBC for many years and thinking about kind of how we talk about people and language and how people are like pigeonholed and you know in a way the traps of kind of verbal descriptions. I think there's something about the potential for like embodied understanding for people going like I get it not because of something you said but because of something they felt. and that kind of like more like animal relatability between something you feel and never forget basically changes your approach to that individual or that subject matter you know I think I have kind of always been battling with how people see each other you know living between two cultures yada yada that's a whole other story but you know, like the stereotypes that kind of get more and more embedded in our consciousness and especially now, hello the UK, hello Europe, like how do we kind of soften those edges and get understanding without having to, you know, always come back to this language which is very divisive. So I think there was something in that, that's kind of like the germ, that was kind of like the hope in this medium for me and of course you know there's loads of ways in which projects try to do that or fail but I still think there's like you know we've talked about this before like the language like you know if the medium is the message then what is the medium that invites you to participate and that invites you to kind of be there physically as opposed to just a pair of eyes going left and right on the screen you know what's that invitation for the audience that kind of empowering them that meaningful agency like we don't always nail meaningful agency but i think that's the thing that is worth trying to find so that's the kind of like you asked i don't know if that was my answer last time it's different every time that's why i keep asking it so yeah a little bit more context as to your background and your journey into this space
[00:06:53.204] Barry Gene Murphy: Okay, so, like, I studied engineering for a bit. I couldn't handle the maths and kind of applied to art college and, like, started doing animation, CG animation, and playing around with, like, early 3DO Studio, Release Tree, the beginnings of, like, homemaking kind of CG packages. And then I kind of went to art college and I got exposed to some, like, really, you know, experimental cinema and experimental animation and stuff and... And, you know, I kind of have always kind of held on to that, like animation that can really make you feel something, you know, so like some of my favorite filmmakers like Tim Webb and Jonathan Hodgson and all these people like had this kind of knack for combining documentary stories with animation, you know, and that just became my passion to kind of try to kind of represent like people's lives, like true stories and make it kind of connect metaphorically to kind of like, you know, your own experience. So like an internalized understanding of some things that are quite complicated, you know, to describe, but like trying to create a synergy between, you know, what you see and what you hear, but like in a way that isn't just didactic kind of like comic book. So, from there, a really good friend of mine, kind of a real geeky nerd, Owen Kidney, got the DK1 headset and he showed me it. I was waiting for something like that because I was trying to use Maya to draw pencil work stuff. I was always trying to make 3D come into the world and stuff like that. I just got into thinking about what's possible with this completely new world that you could enter into and work with stuff on. And then May came along and it just happened that we were converging on the same kind of journey. And so here we are with probably the fourth one that we've done together.
[00:08:53.442] Kent Bye: yeah that's why we're here yeah i remember going back to like the playing with reality the goliath and now impulse and so there's a theme of the mental health and also just when i think about this particular piece of impulse i think about adults who are like discovering that they were like undiagnosed with adhd and So when you start to think about these pieces and the target demographic and is it for parents, for their children, for children? I'm sure you'll say it's for everyone in this category, but I'm just curious if you pick like if there's a specific audience in mind when you start to. Or maybe I should take a step back and say, where does the creative process begin when you start to dive into these topics that are so vast and huge and so many different types of experiences? And how do you start to tell a complex of all these stories into one that is all kind of stitched together?
[00:09:49.014] Barry Gene Murphy: open on that but then they can definitely take in like in a way that we're looking at the stigma right like the effects and the negative effects of what how society deals with these conditions and so you know that's like the Goliath that the stigma was our kind of like pincer into and and similar with ADHD you know we're kind of looking at like So our audience are the skeptics, really. You know, that's what we want people to kind of something to click in them, you know. And so if it catches everyone else, that's great. You know, but I think that that's mainly like from that's where I'm coming from anyway. But, you know, may probably add a lot more about how we get to that because it's a long road, especially for this one.
[00:10:29.724] May Abdalla: This was a painful and beautiful road indeed. I think, yeah, it was clear that there was something in Goliath that made sense and it felt that actually what we wanted to do was get deeper into the usefulness of what something could show. And in many ways, ADHD is... I don't know, it's a less forgiving condition. So because of its kind of difficulty to pin down, because it's kind of everywhere, because people who don't have it, maybe, because there's a sense of like, do you or don't you have it? Have you been diagnosed? Have you been rubber stamped by the right kind of doctor? Are doctors just making it up? Are they private doctors doing it for money? Is everybody on speed? You know, like, there's this kind of quickly kind of snowballs into something a bit more out of hand you know schizophrenia in a way it's kind of in its box where ADHD it rubs up against society it's like well is this an excuse are you using this as an excuse aren't these kids just bad you know are you saying that he commits crimes because there's ADHD is this just kind of like political correctness gone mad and it felt like there was this heat quite close to the subject which in many ways like I said earlier If we could have done this project without saying the word ADHD, it would have been great. But it's kind of impossible, you know, because I think the more that we like, we really dove quite deep into the research and scrambled our brains completely talking to neurologists, psychoanalysts, philosophers. Yeah, like experts, like really, really long interviews, can't buy ask interviews with people about their entire life history. And I felt that through that process. I felt quite strongly something... in all of the stories that we spoke to that was a line. It was a connecting thread. People ended up in very vastly different places in their lives, but there was this heat. There was this emotional heat. There was this sensitivity. And it felt that when you read about ADHD, it was all lists. It was just kind of, oh, this might be a thing, a symptom on top of this thing. It didn't kind of gather into a clear world. It's almost like the kind of... you know scattered minds kind of like had that kind of like personal portrait of the individual which it didn't seem to kind of be anywhere else yeah I think you know you often get these kind of like oh if you have ADHD you have difficulty getting out of bed you have to feel to go into sleep but then inevitably somebody says well isn't that everybody you know and so it's kind of like well how can you put your hand on the way that you're thinking and then you know I I mean like I'm just being completely frank it's like there's something even if we don't solve ADHD let's say not that that's the mission of the project but I also think the conversation around ADHD other things like that is actually so now it's so kind of like people like we're talking about mental health I think mental health is a clunky term it doesn't quite like is it just kind of like our lives is it just that? You know, there's this thing of like this quest for diagnosis, which is really important in the project. It's kind of like, can someone outside of me tell me who I am in order to make sense of me? And I feel that that's, you know, when you look at the TikTok community around this or even around other conditions, that kind of like sharing to be seen, sharing to be seen, needing to find the right words, needing to kind of be let off the hook somehow. Like I need to kind of see myself in like a less harsh light. It kind of goes beyond ADHD and the fact that it is kind of, The term itself is really It doesn't quite connect to people's experiences. It's not attention deficit. It might be overwhelm. It's a lot of different things. So it felt like the conversation, it felt like the kind of ADHD-ness of the topic, the kind of spiraling, the kind of multiplicity of perspectives, the way that it goes into every different part of our lives was also part of the story. I mean, yeah, if anybody heard me talking about this, I think they'd think like, I'm definitely not doing that project. Sounds like a headache. It's actually not that intense. It's just an intense experience.
[00:14:46.236] Barry Gene Murphy: It's an intense moment, perhaps.
[00:14:48.537] Kent Bye: Well, I did get a chance to see the previous iteration that was at South by Southwest. I got access to remote build that I've been able to see that version and this version. It has certainly matured to the point where it feels like it's developed in the beginning a lot more. But there's also distinct phases of the medium where you have this volumetric scan of the room and you're playing with the mesh of the room and doing some interesting mixed reality stuff. And then moving into more of a tabletop mixed reality phase of telling stories of individuals and then going into a little bit more abstracted virtual reality, more poetic parts. And then in beginning, there's also like onboarding of interaction design and then also like onboarding and offboarding. And so like, how do you, I guess, start to think about the different chapters or phases of this project when you think about it?
[00:15:37.622] Barry Gene Murphy: I think that the chapters have changed title many times, but we definitely, because of the medium, you have to break stuff up. You have to have transitions. You've got to offload and onload stuff. From a technical demand, you need to have chapters. So in a way, we start to think about them in that way. Maybe each chapter, we did a lot of R&D for this phase, a lot more than we certainly did do any for Goliath. but like we did a long kind of like R&D phase and then found loads of things and then I think that at the same time as happening as the interviews and mulling over them you know things got put into buckets like I guess you know and that this will work this can represent this kind of aspect of it and I think that so chapters definitely but you know the flow between chapters honestly like that really just comes together at the very end you know like you really don't know what it feels like It's overly long and it's very drawn out, the pacing, the timing and the sound design. It all comes in at the very end, the final edit kind of thing. That's when you feel like you've got the flow. Things are very changeable up to that point or you have to keep them changeable as much as you can because if you crystallise an idea too much then it might not fit with the whole flow. So it's kind of weird to make, to be honest with me.
[00:17:03.755] May Abdalla: Yeah, so I guess, like, at the outset, we just really... We had a pretty fun R&D experience, to be honest. We, like, got our favourite collaborators, London for a week, you know, late nights. The new Mixed Reality headset, we had, like, some early access to it and really, like, we just wanted to see stuff you could do in Mixed Reality that we hadn't seen before and that would be interesting and relevant and we kind of threw loads of ideas to the wall and just iterated super fast until we kind of... Like, there was... I mean, there was, like, we could... Yes, we can add you to the Miro table if you want to see, but there's a lot of stuff that we went through and also just kind of like, how do you represent fractal thinking in MR? How do you make somebody alienated from their room and then bored by their room and then excited by their room? How do you do overwhelm? It felt like we were in the right medium, felt like mixed reality was a cool way of thinking about how we process information and that actually in many ways the headset is kind of like an external brain and we could use it as that and at some points the writing was like a little bit on the nose in that way and we knew at the beginning that Tilda was gonna, you know, she was gonna be able to pull off any versions of that kind of like fourth wall kind of insights. So we just really wanted to find those interactions that were pleasing. And so there's a chapter where you're, you know, it's that balance right between doing the documentary and also like talking to you, Kent. Hi, Kent, how are you doing? This is your thought process. Like, what does it feel like to put a thought together? How can we do that in a playful way that also speaks to the stuff we don't really know about how we operate? So yeah, so it's kind of like looking at the kind of gameplay mechanics And then, yeah, I mean, it's difficult then shaving things down and yeah, and then like we'll see what bits fit in. At the same time, you always just want to be able to do somebody's life story justice and you need it to, I think it is important that it lands somewhere positively, that it feels like it's not the story of a superhero, but it's the story of a normal person that finds a little chink that they can kind of get through and things get a little bit easier.
[00:19:09.608] Barry Gene Murphy: The diagnosis is in a way that there's a lot of people going wild, four people on a ledge or a precipice, and that's a kind of metaphor in a way, although the three of them were on precipices. But I think that we try to look at it through the diagnosis. It's a kind of profound moment for people. Everyone shares this profound moment. when something clicks together that they've kind of like you know a lot of their lives make sense you know they were always kind of missing some kind of one simple little kind of like way to look at things and then the diagnosis kind of allows them to kind of like review their life and like you know we've interviewed like a lot of people but the older people that we interviewed you know they were going through mourning because you know they're at the end of their lives and they had like you know, if they had just had a different perspective on things, you know, they were a deep, profound loss in that realisation. But like, you know, so in a way we felt that that diagnosis kind of was the way that we wanted to tell the story, you know, so it's smack bang centre of the piece. And, you know, and then like it kind of might make sense then when you see these small characters like moving around and stuff, because in a way, that's when the characters could tell their story. They could see themselves doing their actions. They could review it. They were reviewing their lives in that way. You know, so that's kind of. Yeah, just I don't know. I'm going to get lost here.
[00:20:28.996] May Abdalla: You know, I think. Yeah. So I think. You know, when you list it like that, that all of these different mediums, like, you know, the key thing is to try and not feel like you're in VR soup, right? You just want to be like, there's a reason why this is like the strong way through this experience. So fundamentally, when people get a diagnosis or the process of getting a diagnosis, they give the doctor or whoever that psychiatrist person is, you know, you do a case history. And there's something where like, oh, you know, that case history in documentary that kind of is you sit back and you say how things were. You start at the beginning and you tell that story. And then, you know, from the beginning, we kind of knew that the characters, we were going to see them from outside. And there's a moment where Omar says, you know, when he particularly when he was actually in prison and he had to slow down, he couldn't really just kind of run after everything. experience like he'd been doing his whole life and he said he started to write and he started to see himself in the third person and so the idea very much is kind of like you get this opportunity to see them from the outside in these kind of like tabletop miniatures and there's a moment also where you are in your room and you are also a shadow in the way that they are also shadows and what the refrain is you know this thing when I said like we're trying to find what is that feeling that unites ADHD beyond just saying like oh you're late for school and you don't do your homework till the last minute you know one of the people that we interviewed said this but it's like that need to be somewhere else you know either like a dissatisfaction with where you are or like an interest in being elsewhere and that sense of to be outside of yourself just a need to kind of not be here right now in this way a constant desire whether through escape or through excitement to be somewhere else and so the sense is that you know you start off in your mind and you start off thinking about thinking and then these characters they have gone through this process that precipice of kind of a moment in their lives which they had to decide how they were going to respond to you know the moment that Tara thinks about committing suicide or the moment that Omar is kind of committing a crime or Erol is risking his life doing extravagant, amazing, death-defying tricks or that Leanne is on a quest for adrenaline trying to overcome her boredom but doing constant mischief knowing that that she was an adult who was acting like a child, you know, and that sense of shame. So all of them have this moment where they have to look back and say, what's the kind of line of thought, what's the kind of prism through which I can look back? And we tried lots of different ways of inviting people to look back at their lives, but I think people will actually... You see yourself in someone else. That's also what happens with ADHD. People talk about their symptoms and eventually the penny drops. Someone says, oh, that's actually... I thought that was everyone. Maybe it's not everyone.
[00:23:30.341] Barry Gene Murphy: I guess in our research it was also patterns of behavior and breaking the pattern. There's also the biological, chemical reasoning for all this. There's a lot of talk around dopamine and stuff like that. And I think there's a lot of people who misunderstand it as well. Like we kind of had a Clore fellow, Deepthi, come in and try to visualize. I really wanted her to visualize what a dopamine uptake looks like, you know, from a neuroscientist perspective. And then we kind of discovered through that conversation the fear pathway and how adrenaline kickstarts dopamine like you know what i mean and so basically like there's um it's not called dopamine that was when nephrodrine i can't i can't remember the terms but like so you know it kind of that clicked with our characters as well you know because in a way we kind of wanted to show them that they're putting themselves in dangerous situations because in a way that's how they felt normal because you know they realized that they were scared and the adrenaline was like starting a chemical reaction that most normal people take for granted you know what i mean so the They had to climb to get to solid ground, base ground, I guess. And so we found that kind of interesting as well. And we wanted to put people into that situation, you know, so that's why you have that quite intense moment in the game where you lose, you know, even though if you think you're good at it, you're never going to win in a sense. And that creates a heightened sense of anxiety and then diffuses. And we wanted to show that fear pathway actually in action. So that's what we're attempting there. Yeah, so there's a lot of tie-ins and stuff as well, because a lot of it is metaphorical, like patterns and stuff like that, because you see patterns, you know, so there's silly things and some things that kind of are there to kind of make you really, to understand something in a kind of, like, I don't want to say embodied, but, you know, in a kind of a way that you understand poetry in a way, you know, so...
[00:25:21.532] Kent Bye: It's kind of a great paradox that we're using language and words to describe all the things that you are trying to also have people directly experience through your project and through all these elegant spatial metaphors that are much more poetic. But I wanted to go back to the very beginning where you start to play with some, what I'd say is they're virtual reality effects, but they're also mixed reality in the sense that it's the mesh of my room, but I'm in VR, but it feels like it's mixed reality. So there's dimensions of that mixed reality where you're able to, what I thought was a lot of like really subtle lighting effects, but were some of the most powerful experiences that I've found where I've just been noticing a lot with different projects that use light and how much light gives you the sense of environmental presence and really interested in like James Turrell and the light and space movement and using light as a medium. But just the way that you were using light in that I thought was really fascinating. powerful because it gave me that sense of being there but also knowing that it was like an unreality kind of virtual reality but still gave me that sense of deep presence that I was surrendering my disbelief there.
[00:26:26.362] Barry Gene Murphy: I'm sure there's a PhD in like how light affects us not on a conscious level you know like maybe it's like shadow of a predator overhead or something but you know our sensitivity to like where the light is and stuff is a lot more than we take for granted like you know And so you can summon feelings like nostalgia and stuff like that, true shadows and stuff. And we were interested in, I don't know if you tied it in, was it Plato's cave and all of that kind of idea of like representing stuff. But like, I wish we had more time to play around with that because I only started really. And, you know, we just saw there was so much more that we could try there, like, you know, and we kind of just... Oh yeah, so basically just in a way you're like with the MetaQuest 3 and all these kind of mixed reality headsets require you to have like a room mesh like you know for the walls and for your own safety and it takes away the border and stuff like that but it also allows you to kind of mix reality and mix this virtual pretty clearly we stripped it right back in a way to kind of just use kind of like subtle light and dark kind of effects so because if you didn't have a window in your room you would have you'd have a window in your room and like we kind of mixed it with color as well for a police chase moment and we had a disco ball effect and You know, so we kind of really were interested in using that room mesh, not for just a portal, which is kind of like, you know, the given for what we saw or the roof falling in or something. We kind of wanted to kind of like make the person aware, like it's kind of the room mesh is there, the room is there, you're in the room, like we're not trying to make you forget too much. But also how do you in a way that's a lot of like distracted thinking is you're in the room, but you're thinking about something else. So like having this overlay and kind of distraction is kind of nice. You know, it is like how we think, you know. So I think that's what.
[00:28:16.209] Kent Bye: It's one of the first moments where I said, okay, I could see where mixed reality could really go down a real pathway. Because a lot of the stuff that I had seen had not been as, I guess, I'm more of a fan than VR than AR. And it felt like a lot of the mixed reality I was seeing was like something that would normally be an AR experience, but you're in VR. It's just sort of like... Seeing it as a VR pass through AR type of experience, but really using the volumetric space of the space to kind of transform it and to create this metaphor that is a part of your brain that then is connected or disconnected to another part of your brain. And just the way that you deconstruct the mesh and make that spatial metaphor, I thought was just really powerful to start to play with. How can you start to use the unique metaphor? topography of your space to then explore stories with that. And a lot of them that I'd seen were been like, OK, we're going to have a murder scene in your room. And now you're going to like whenever you walk into that room, you're going to think about this murder. And it's just like it didn't feel like a pathway that was on some sort of like end goal where this was going to turn out to be something that was truly interesting or innovative. But this this feels like some of the experiments that you're doing in different chapters of this piece with playing with the room space, but then mixed reality storytelling and then moving into the VR so I'm wondering how you think about what the unique thing that you're able to do with each of those different formats because there are some pretty distinct shifts that you're taking throughout the course of this project and really quite experimental and trying to experiment with what you think is an aesthetic or a feel or kind of a unique thing that you could only do in that medium but wouldn't always necessarily work in one of the other ones.
[00:29:53.129] Barry Gene Murphy: That's like Anagram's remit, but I let May talk to it. But it's like the technology has to do the work to be relevant. It's the idea first and then does it work? So I think that you could speak across that one because that's kind of what you've been doing since the beginning.
[00:30:10.049] May Abdalla: Well, I mean, it's great that you think that, because I think we also, like, okay, genuinely, we were dealing with the Meta Quest 3 when it was pretty early. We had, like, the prototype headset, and the room meshing wasn't quite up to it. We actually had a whole different interaction.
[00:30:26.774] Barry Gene Murphy: When we first got the headset, we didn't have it, and then we had it. So we changed course towards it, you know, but it was a good challenge. Sorry, but...
[00:30:36.673] May Abdalla: I mean, I think the challenges and, you know, because you kind of want people to forget the tech, right? Which is just so hard when you're in a headset. But you kind of want it to feel as organic as possible that this then happens and then you're kind of led. Which for loads of challenges, why it doesn't feel like that sometimes because of the whatever technical chapter offloading thing. But then in terms of avoiding the gimmick of trying to deal with... any kind of cgi being a character just walking in and kind of having to deal with that and that call that the reality i think the stuff around lighting i mean really it was barry um like banging his head against unity for like 20 hours a day for about six months i don't yeah and and like the whole technical art team just trying to get something that didn't that felt that it related and wasn't about you trying not to see your room because it was like I think what would be interesting for me is that a lot of people will do this here in Venice it's a different context there's an installation but many people will do this like in their bedrooms and you know all their living rooms but it's annoying you know we were trying a I think that's something that Anagram's always been interested is like connect the piece to the place you're in don't use it as an escape portal And if it is an escape portal, let's talk about the fact that you're in your bedroom in an escape portal. Like, why don't you want to be in your bedroom? Look at those walls. What are you feeling? Insane boredom? Why don't we go into the boredom and through the other side and just get a sense of kind of what is that presence there? And it's difficult because that's the kind of level of, let's call it interaction, but kind of relevance that everyone's going to relate to differently, but it does still relate to everybody, which is that sense of... You know, like if you are in your bedroom in an MR headset, you're looking for something else to happen. And in a way that is part of the kind of description of ADHD. So, yeah, that kind of like subtlety. And I just put it down to like, you know, like Barry was saying, his background is animation, cinematic techniques, really kind of old school. You know, the lens rather than a screen is important to you. And so... lighting and lensing and like so much of that work that the art team were doing led by Barry was about trying to create lens effects and not that sense of kind of digital artifacts and everyone was looking at that sense of kind of like the subtlety of their reality perhaps being more interesting and more emotional than the CGI character
[00:33:09.077] Barry Gene Murphy: I just have to say though as well, I think that it's something that we found we didn't intend to do in a way as well. And that's a lot to do with this kind of process of letting stuff go if it's not right and just keep going and trying to find something that fits what we know from the research and the voices and stuff like that. So we're trying to listen and look out for a synergy. So we're fortunate to be able to kind of just discard and move on and stuff like that and find something. In my eyes, it's like we've only scratched that surface as far as that goes. You know, I really want to kind of like, you know, I wanted more time to do it and do it better, you know, but you never get it. But we were lucky enough to be able to throw away stuff. Because if you have to commit really early to something, like I said, like you'll find yourself really struggling with what you've committed to because it becomes impossible to solve feeling. It doesn't feel right. But what can you do? It's there. You paid for it. You know what I mean? There's no money left. You know, how do you make it work? And that's a horrible dilemma to have. And so we were fortunate that we didn't have that dilemma there. We found something and it was exciting. And it was probably at a low point in the production as well, which kind of buoyed everything up as well.
[00:34:21.572] May Abdalla: The shutter effects at the end, that was something that has been, you know, we discovered kind of on day three.
[00:34:25.975] Barry Gene Murphy: Some people don't see it. If you're impatient, you won't see it. Kent, did you see it?
[00:34:33.880] Kent Bye: I'm trying to remember. What else is happening in the very end?
[00:34:36.764] May Abdalla: The very end. It's after you press the button.
[00:34:40.208] Barry Gene Murphy: No, it's before you press the button.
[00:34:42.010] May Abdalla: It's before you press the button.
[00:34:43.592] Barry Gene Murphy: It's like you have a moment to pause, but do you pause?
[00:34:48.078] May Abdalla: There you go, guys.
[00:34:49.540] Barry Gene Murphy: Or do you just go straight away?
[00:34:51.242] Kent Bye: I think I might have just pushed it. I don't know. I'll have to go back and try.
[00:34:54.225] May Abdalla: I mean, at the very beginning, the first thing you see is this button, and you push it. And then the first thing that you read is, like, some people push buttons without thinking. So then the whole point is, when you then see the button at the end, you're not supposed to put the button. But you are supposed to do whatever you are. But just remember, some people push buttons without thinking. And perhaps that is you, Kent.
[00:35:13.216] Kent Bye: It was in that moment, for sure. I think it was like, I'm singing a four-dance, a big giant red button. I push it, you know? So I think another way that Room Mesh is used, and I don't know what chapter number it is, but when you're telling all the stories, then you have the pull quote that you're highlighting, and then you have the opportunity to kind of spray it like digital graffiti on your room in a way that, by the end of it, I just found it really powerful, because I ended up doing it in my VR office at home, and so I had... All my space, I've done a lot of VR in there before, so I was like, oh, this is really quite interesting. Because sometimes when I'm listening to stories, it's like I can track it, but then if you ask me what was the story three times ago, I'd be like, oh, I don't know if I'd be able to identify it. There's a way that it was able to capture an essence or a takeaway of a story that then created like a digital graffiti on my wall that allowed me like a spatial memory palace to have a little bit more access to those stories that were flooding in. When I say flooding in, I mean that there's a sort of like... Not a clear arc of like consistent narrative, but kind of more of a pluralistic multiplicity of many different experiences that I'm trying to get a sense of like, okay, everything's unique, but yet it's different. But there are some consistent patterns here that are all under the umbrella of ADHD. So yeah.
[00:36:36.004] Barry Gene Murphy: May wanted to kind of like, she had like, we didn't get one of her ideas in there. And I'm sorry, May, for like, like time. But you know, May really wanted to reinforce that. So but like, we're glad that you got it, you know, in a sense that you in a way you were kind of doing a kind of diagnosis in a sense. And that is the chapter diagnosis, really.
[00:36:53.955] May Abdalla: But um, Did you have a question? Or should we just talk about?
[00:36:57.337] Kent Bye: Yeah, no, just Yeah, just go ahead and talk about your process there.
[00:37:00.307] May Abdalla: Yeah, so I think with that, yeah, like what Barry was saying. So the idea is, you know, let's say in the process where you're doing your case history and you're talking to yourself, you're like, something's not quite right or something isn't right. I don't know. Is it just me? Is it the world? Let me just tell you everything. So you tell the stories and like you said, they're just a bumble of like, you know, how do you look back and make sense of something? And these little takeaways, you know, what you then hear is that. They do kind of connect different, let's say, that checklist in the DCMS-5 of what are the diagnostic criteria. You know, this thing where she says, I always have to be the winner, or why do I do that?
[00:37:36.293] Barry Gene Murphy: I'm never going to do that again. Never.
[00:37:37.654] May Abdalla: going to do that again and then it kind of connects to like um dopamine seeking behaviors or all of these kind of like dry restlessness and so that you hear the kind of echo characters just listing out these criteria and yet criteria is kind of a world away from the messy reality of our experience you know so um there's just something about kind of it felt
[00:38:05.133] Barry Gene Murphy: relevant not just to kind of help people and take notes which is really nice i do think text and vr often works usefully if you kind of figure out what your localization plan is it doubles down on the idea as well like you know it's echo echoes it and you hear with the text flowing through you you also hear it more maybe i don't know that's probably another kind of outcome of it, but it was also graffiti artists. We wanted to do something creative, you know, and you are doing something creative, you're making creative choice when you're like, where you're positioning it, and we kind of love that, you know.
[00:38:38.908] May Abdalla: And then I think that kind of this idea of like, you know, you said, who's the audience? And it's like, yeah, perhaps it's the skeptics, but it's also perhaps, I mean, we're all kind of a mixture of skeptics and people who are somewhere on the spectrum. It kind of is that thing that you then hear the story of the woman who says she didn't know she had ADHD until her child gets diagnosed. And that's when you start to see your own shadow and this idea that sometimes you see yourself when you're looking at someone else. And actually through kind of like mulling over these phrases you know people might connect or not connect and I think actually what's really curious is that often people say like oh I felt like this is the story for me like this is the person I related to and um I find it always very surprising actually who tells me what who they're related to and um
[00:39:23.718] Barry Gene Murphy: We should say as well that like we were thinking of just one character and then we have this expert, Doc Edmund, and he's like, you cannot tell just one person's story for this. So, you know, in a way we had to, you know, we took that on board from the very beginning, but it meant interviewing like four times more people, you know what I mean? And and it was quite it became, you know, we held on to it, but it was very difficult and probably not advised kind of process to do. but in the end now it's really what made it like in that sense of like having those all that various things instead of just a profile you know like the way goliath was just one person so yeah that's i just thought i'd add that like
[00:40:05.965] Kent Bye: I feel like the spatial medium of XR allows you to tell these many branches, multiplicity of stories that have many different ways that they're showing. So you can kind of use the spatial affordances to paint the different... highlights on or i don't know i feel like that's a theme that i see like stories that may be more difficult to tell in traditional 2d linear media that there's something around like having the spatial nature that you're able to maybe get into the multiplicity and the process relational dimension of some of these topics because you can kind of hold on to a little bit even as you're moving on yeah you can keep a bit in your pocket you can have a little hyperlink that you can turn around and see it yeah i think there's definitely something there i mean i think we were kind of
[00:40:52.691] May Abdalla: You know, mixed reality, hyperlink thinking is often how they refer to people with ADHD. That sense of like, can you, you know, it's not a branching narrative, which is ironic given that would be the only reason ever to say.
[00:41:04.456] Barry Gene Murphy: We did try to do a branching narrative. We did try. We prototyped the branching kind of system for a long time, but it was kind of like form over content, kind of like why, like, yeah.
[00:41:15.077] May Abdalla: And I think the important thing is you still want that emotional moment to land, even if you're kind of slightly going, you know, adding bits and bits incrementally as if you're kind of like defragging your hard drive. It's important that each person, you kind of feel what they're saying. And it did feel very much like, you know, their kind of intensity of where they all are, which is quite different, is quite complimentary. If you know, you know, kind of thing.
[00:41:43.596] Kent Bye: I did have one technical question that I ran into because I don't know if this was a part of the deliberate experiential design or if it was a bug that I was running into, which is when I was doing the tests, I played through it twice where there's four tests. And the first time I got past one test and failed the other three. The second time I got past two tests but failed the second one. It feels like the last one was clearly designed to be failed. I don't know if when I was clicking, like, the object was changing. And I was like, I don't know if the object's supposed to be changing to kind of give this feeling of fleeting attention or if it was, you know, that it was, like, at first I was like, oh, there's a bug. But then I was like, the second time, I was like, I think this is intentional to, like, be frustrating. So anyway, there's a little bit of confusion there. Stuff that I was expecting to happen and then it was different and I didn't know if the experience was broken or if that was... By the end of the fourth time, I felt like, okay, this was probably meant to kind of mess with me.
[00:42:38.597] Barry Gene Murphy: Yeah, like it needs finessing, but it's not a bug at all.
[00:42:41.300] May Abdalla: It's not a bug because the thing that she then says to you, some games are impossible to win, can't...
[00:42:47.605] Kent Bye: I know. I didn't know if that was the fourth game or the previous three. I just didn't know. Because when I did through, I didn't know if it was different outcomes or different dialogue. There was different dialogue that I detected, if you got it or not. So then I was like, okay, well, there's clearly, like, there is something on the other side if I do get it. So it was in my mind, feeling like, hey, what? I knew that there was the end that I couldn't. So anyway, I just, yeah.
[00:43:10.489] May Abdalla: That's right, yeah. So you can win all of the levels except for the last one. but each time you either win or lose, the interstitial level experience is about you dealing with either the kind of like, yes, I can do this, I'm good at this game, I'm gonna keep going, or like, I might as well give up, because it just felt like anyway, you know, that kind of quest for dopamine, adrenaline, winning, it's already kind of the paradigm of how we use mixed reality or VR headsets. So it's just like, well, let's just use that because then that feeling's in your skin. You can feel the like adrenaline. And then, you know, somebody said, you know, why does it go from this really exciting bit to just being in your room with just shadows? Like, can't you just can't you just cut that scene? You're like, no, no, lady. Actually, that's the point. Like, why don't you just have fun all the time? Why don't you play Beat Saber?
[00:44:08.379] Kent Bye: Yeah. Mission accomplished, in other words. I kind of felt that in the experience. So yeah, well, I guess as you're here at Venice, and then it's going to be, do you have a release date? Or what's kind of next for this piece?
[00:44:22.626] May Abdalla: Yes, it is being released in September. Very soon. I'd say a week after Venice. You can actually get pre-order discount if you go on the MetaQuest store now. And just like, subscribe. Get in touch with us on the Anagram website. We're also developing the necks in the collection. Another kind of experience. Another kind of... technology so this is looking specifically at body image physical experience multiplayer installation based vr get in touch for more info but we're pitching that tomorrow you'll hear this long after it's been pitched but that's really exciting and yeah so i think you know there's still still two parts of the collection and this is two down two to go
[00:45:10.219] Kent Bye: Gotcha. Great. Well, I'd love to always ask what each of you think the ultimate potential of immersive storytelling, immersive art might be, and what it might be able to enable.
[00:45:21.447] May Abdalla: Oh, the ultimate potential of immersive art. I think I'm excited about that kind of line where we don't have to talk about technology, like it's something that's not just like everything that we use, you know, pens to jewelry. Once we kind of... I don't necessarily feel like there's something particular about immersive in general, but we've been talking about spatial and, you know, we've actually had a few conversations about spatial storytelling and what it means to think of culturally for things to change from like a linear to a. exploratory way and how that might affect how we see ourselves and all of that stuff. So on an extremely profound, not related to what you should invest your cryptocurrency in right now, my only real interest in it is this kind of way in which we can use it to kind of bang at the barriers that we constantly put up between us and other people, one barrier at a time.
[00:46:25.746] Barry Gene Murphy: I think that, like I said, gaming is great. You know, I think that there's a lot of viewer, kind of gaming can really, you can get a lot of camaraderie and, you know, and I think that that area, that platform has only really just, it's slowly going along. I know it's because of market and stuff, it's going to be super powerful. But personally, I think, like, a filmic brain and kind of stories, and I feel like, you know, every year or every two years are edging closer to kind of, like, less compromise, do you know what I mean, for what you're doing? And that's good, you know. So, yeah, I think that, like, really, really, like, mind-blowing but profound experiences await, you know, in the future. Thanks, Sarah.
[00:47:09.889] May Abdalla: Experiences. Collective physical experiences. Once we kind of nut out the details and kind of smooth the processes, then actually like collective physical experiences that feel seamless is a weight also.
[00:47:28.844] Kent Bye: Nice. Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the immersive community?
[00:47:32.372] Barry Gene Murphy: Like, you know, everyone knows it's a really difficult medium. And I think that one thing I've learned is, you know, like the way that you view these kind of experiences now isn't, you know, it's important to remember like the pieces like the iceberg, but beneath the surface, there's so much more people and work involved. Then you can imagine really, I feel that's kind of one thing. And another thing, because I missed saying it last time, is that we really need to think about access and able-bodied people have no problem doing VR, but you have to think about it from that side. And I'm always really disappointed that it's the last thing that we ever get to, you know what I mean? And it's always a sideline. We try to think about it as much as we can, but it's to think about how we can make interactions more universal for everyone, in that sense. and so it's just that's something that's a topic that should be discussed more and there should be a foundation that i know a gog are really into it actually amy seidenworm's a gog but you know that really needs help you know what i mean i think and support and stuff like that yeah
[00:48:41.440] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, May and Barry, thanks so much for joining me today. I feel like Impulse playing with reality is one of the experiences that's here at Venice this year that is really kind of hitting all the different marks in terms of the different affordances of immersive storytelling with the different environmental experimentations with mixed reality, with the story that you're telling, with the information dimension there that you're kind of teaching people about this. But also, yeah, just the different interaction design that you have throughout, I think, is really on point where a lot of times when I see interactions it's like push this button to continue this experience and I feel like the type of interactions that you have are really deeply woven into the fabric of the stories that you're telling and it just really makes sense and kind of flows together in a way that at the end of it, is able to cohere all these multiplicity of perspectives that are all coming together. So no easy feat, but great job for, again, on the impulse playing with reality. And yeah, best of luck as you put it out into the world and continue on into the series. So thanks again for joining me here on the podcast.
[00:49:40.776] May Abdalla: Thank you, Ken. Yeah, you rock. Keep going.
[00:49:43.737] Barry Gene Murphy: Keep it up. Thanks a lot, Kent.
[00:49:45.885] Kent Bye: Thanks again for listening to these episodes from Venice Immersive 2024. And yeah, I am a crowdfunded independent journalist. And so if you enjoy this coverage and find it valuable, then please do consider joining my Patreon at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
