I interviewed Emissive / Excurio co-founder and CEO Fabien Barati at Laval Virtual 2023 after having tried the free-roaming Immersive Expedition edition of Éternelle Notre-Dame, which was really quite incredible. I originally saw the sit-down version of Éternelle Notre-Dame at Venice Immersive 2022, but the free-roaming, immersive expedition version was such a distinctly different experience that felt like I was going on a proper adventure. Here’s a showreel of Excurio’s immersive expeditions that includes Horizon of Khufu, Tonight with the Impressionists, Paris 1874, Eternal Notre-Dame, and Life Chronicles.
Emissive / Excurio had their Un Soir Avec Les Impressionnistes, Paris 1874 immersive expedition experience in competition for Venice Immersive 2024, and so I wanted to publish this unpublished interview from my archive backlog because their immersive expedition LBE experiences are really taking the immersive industry world by storm from France to China to Canada and beyond. They’re able to put over 100 people per hour through their experiences, and over a hundred thousand over the period of months for some of their runs. There was certainly a buzz around how successful of a model this has been on both the creation of IP but also for the third-party exhibitors who are managing the on-site logistics. Hopefully this archival interview provides a bit more context for how these immersive expeditions have been developing as it was certainly a hot topic amongst folks during the festival who are thinking about the challenges of distribution, throughput, and finding sustainable models that have the promise of growing the XR industry.
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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 in the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So I'm continuing on my series of looking at different projects from Venice Immersive 2024. However, this interview is actually done from a previous project that was back in 2019 about Eternal Notre Dame by Fabian Barati and Emissive. This year, they actually had another project that was called Unsur avec les Impressionnistes. It was basically about the Impressionnistes from 1874. And they've got this whole location-based entertainment approach for how they get like over 100 people to see some of these different projects per hour. And so that's a pretty innovative and exciting innovation for finding a new profitable model for LBE that seems to really work. So I actually had a chance to talk to Fabian back at Laval Virtual in 2023 about I wanted to talk a little bit more about his evolution and getting into this industry and some of the deeper context for having these really large scale versions of these different projects. Eternal Notre Dame was one of the first ones that showed at Venice Immersive. And I had a chance to see the version at Venice Immersive while sitting down and then had a chance to do the location based version of that where you're actually walking through the space and it's completely different experience. And so part of the reason why I like the Impressionist piece so much this year at Venice Immersive is because I've kind of seen the differences for what these projects are like when you're sitting down versus when you have the ability to kind of walk through these really vast spaces. And so I was kind of projecting out what the experience might have been had I had a chance to see it within its full context of this really large scale exhibition space. So it's kind of like the emerging forms of what the theater or kind of a movie theater version of VR might be where you're you have these social dynamics of people being able to go and see these really big, vast experiences. And so Emissive is really on the bleeding edge of that. And I wanted to air this interview that I did with Fabian because it seemed to be a trend this year of people really thinking a lot around distribution and these new models seems to be working and going around the world to China and to Montreal and just having really wild success for being able to bring in the public to see some of these different experiences. So Fabian, Wanted to dig into my archive to air this interview because I think it's very relevant to some of the hot topics and discussions that were happening this year at Fitness Immersive 2024. So that's what we're coming on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Fabian happened at Laval Virtual in Laval, France on April 13th, 2023. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:50.953] Fabien Barati: Yeah, so I'm Fabien Baratti. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Emissive. It's a 17-year-old company now. We founded the company in 2005, and we specialize in creating immersive experiences using VR mostly. And for a few years now, we're developing this format that we call the immersive expeditions. The first immersive expedition was launched in January 2022. It's Eternal Notre Dame. It was launched in Paris. It's still in Paris in operation in two different venues. and the second immersive expedition is the Horizon of Khufu that was launched in June in Paris as well now is in Lyon and it will be in China very very very soon in the next few weeks so I'm very happy about that and so we are really developing this concept worldwide by creating dedicated venues and also of course creating new content. The next Immersive Expedition will be with a co-production with the Museum of Natural History of Paris and it will bring the visitors hundreds of millions of years ago to see different parts of our Earth and different species that don't exist anymore. The concept of the Immersive Expedition is that it's a 45-minute experience in total immersion, of course, with a VR headset that you do in free roaming inside a very big space, at least 500 square meters. But for example, in Nyon, we have more than 1000 square meters of free roaming. It's something that you leave and you share with your friends or your family. It's a multi-user experience. You can see each other, you can interact with each other and really live those 45 minutes together. During those 45 minutes, you will see different things, of course. In the case of Eternal Notre-Dame, you start in the middle age, you see the cathedral when it was being built, you meet the workers, you meet different characters that will explain what they are doing, and so on. There is a lot of storytelling as well, a lot of emotions, sensations, and also a big part of education. So everything inside the immersive expedition is validated by experts, historians, architects. In the case of the museum, it's with paleontologists. So everything is very validated scientifically, so we can share the right messages and knowledge with the visitors.
[00:05:15.528] Kent Bye: Yeah, maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into making these types of immersive expeditions.
[00:05:22.219] Fabien Barati: So before creating Emisive, I was basically a student 17 years ago and learning how to use 3D engines to do something else than games. So like training applications, brand experiences, this kind of thing. And this is basically what we have been doing at Emisive for this time, working with brands and cultural institutions. and creating tailor-made experiences for them. So it's quite recent now that we are in a more like a product business model with the immersive expedition. And we had the idea of the immersive expedition because of our experiences with the brands and the cultural institutions. We know what works inside an immersive expedition. And also we wanted to use VR as much as it can offer, meaning having no limit of moving, of movement, being with other people, and having a long experience, this kind of thing. We wanted to do it. We also developed a lot of specific technologies that allowed us last year to launch the format.
[00:06:33.086] Kent Bye: I first had a chance to see the Eternal Notre Dame at the Venice Film Festival 2019 but I was sitting down and you're able to teleport but the space is kind of moving automatically and I just had a chance to do it at the site of Notre Dame underneath the ground right next to it and so There's a huge difference of being able to actually have this free roaming experience and there's a lot of coordination that you have to do in order to have this wayfinding mechanism where you have on the ground you have these little blue squares that are indicating for me to where to walk to. I also have the person that I'm in there with where I can see their name tag but I also see other people that I see their embodiment where if I If I see an avatar, I know it's an actual person. If I start to run or move quickly, I can bump into them. But it's a challenge to negotiate myself around them to go to those places. And if I don't get there in time, then it goes into this matrix-like area where it's like, please go to the obelisk of the light to try to keep people on the track. And so you have to do this dance, I'd say, between understanding what's happening in the physical reality, but also moving your body. through this space, but the experiential component of that was that it was a huge, huge difference between seeing it sitting down and not moving my body through the space versus actually moving my body around a space, and it gave me much more of a deeper sense of exploring a city or exploring different aspects of architecture or being able to turn my body in a way that more closely mimicked what it feels like to travel and to see these different architectural wonders of the world, like Notre Dame. So I felt like the embodied experience that I had with it was so much richer to be able to have that free-moving type of experience. But there's certainly a lot of cognitive load that I had to manage in order to not run into people, to move around them. And there's these kind of awkwardly placed columns that are in the space. That means that there's a virtual space that looks wide open, but then there's the red guardian that will come in that has to kind of like another obstacle to kind of navigate around. And so I found it like... As someone who's very familiar with VR, there was a lot of stuff that I was able to navigate. Not sure if it's too much for people, but it seems like you're able to put a number of people through who have maybe little to no experience with VR, and they're still able to kind of figure it out. So you're able to hit that sweet spot of, having enough throughput to make it a viable business, but also not making it too crowded to be overly annoying for people. But there's still this interesting mashup for when I went through the experience of enjoying the wonders of the environmental worlds and moving my body through space. but also having to negotiate this other meta dimension of the social folks and move it through. So that was sort of my experience of it. But overall, just a really magical, wonderful sense of being transported into their world. Probably the most that have walked through VR uninterrupted in a way. So it gives me this deep sense of really going on an immersive journey. So I feel like there is a lot of early iteration like this is like the first iteration so i can imagine a time where some of these more friction elements of managing the space and managing other people are going to be able to be handled over time but anyway love to hear some of your comments and reflections on that
[00:09:35.785] Fabien Barati: Yes, so you highlighted that free roaming is extremely strong in VR, especially when you don't see the limits very often. That's why we wanted to have a big space, a very big space to be able to move. It's actually for two reasons to be able to move and to have this kind of feeling of freedom, but also to have a lot of people. But I will go back to that later. It was a challenge at the beginning to have this big space because the challenge was really how can we make the visitors move physically inside the space without someone telling them to, basically. So it's part of the storytelling, of the staging, how we tell the story inside the experience. It's also thanks to the characters, the virtual characters that are with us inside the experience, and also with the visual clues that you talked about, like the blue squares or the monolith, this kind of thing. So it's a sum of different elements that allows for the visitors to comprehend that they can move and also give them the envy to do it. So this was the main thing. And then there is the fact of managing the flow of visitors. We adapt our content to the shape of the venue, of the space. And some spaces, as you saw, has a lot of pillars inside. It makes it difficult, but it's still possible to do it. We also have other venues with no pillars or just a few pillars or more distances between the pillars. So depending on those constraints, we can manage a bit better the flow of visitors. But still, I think we have the record of simultaneous visitors in free roaming at the same time. In Lyon, we were above 100 at the same time inside this big space of more than 1000 square meters. and that makes it a profitable business model. It's still a bit rare for VR to find the sweet spot where it can be profitable, but at least with the Immersive Expedition, we know that it's profitable. It can be a good investment, and for the whole chain, from the production of the content to the operator, and through, of course, the distributor and executive producer and so on and so on. So everyone can earn money with the Immersive Expedition. And that's because we can have a lot of people at the same time. So this was really one of our main objectives when we had the format in mind.
[00:12:05.049] Kent Bye: You have a question around, as I'm locomoting through this space, sometimes the orientation of the space would rotate and I don't know if that's just sort of built in and everybody experiences that rotation or if you're able to set the next waypoint of the blue square on the ground and kind of manage the flow of people through the space because My experience of the Eternal Notre Dame wasn't necessarily like a linear, like I'm walking in a straight line the whole time. It was more of like, okay, I'm going to turn right, I'm going to go this way, and I'm going to turn around, and sometimes you have to backtrack. And so I found that sometimes during the course of the experience that there's like a little bit more of like a traffic jam. like how people were running into each other a little bit more, and more times it was a little bit more open. But is this something that's calculated dynamically, or is this something that is on a set path that you've tried to optimize it in a way that, given an average of how the flow of people have met, that you have the same type of flow independent of when you go through it with other people? Or if you're sort of more dynamically paying attention to where people are and trying to manage the flow of people in a way that they're not running into each other as much?
[00:13:08.826] Fabien Barati: So that's a very interesting question. So we manage the flow of visitors, so the number of visitors, but not yet how the path they are doing, working inside the experience. At the moment, we manually decide the path beforehand that the visitors will take. There can be several paths at the same time, but every group of visitors is following one path. And so every group is following other groups without realizing it, basically. But we're managing automatically the number of people inside the experience. So we always have the same density, average density inside the space. But in the future, we want to also dynamically manage the path of the visitors inside the space.
[00:13:53.993] Kent Bye: Yeah, I imagine that, because you said it's theoretically possible to have multiple programs running at the same time, so that would constrain yourself if you're manually choosing it, that you would always have to have the same path for whatever experience you have. But you're able to still manage to do that manually, to have different... the equivalent like going to a movie theater and going to one theater and seeing a show, but it'd be almost like someone in the same theater watching two different movies at the same time because they're in the same physical space, but they're experiencing something different within the virtual reality headset so that you have the capability that you have this solipsistic, you know, people are contained within their own virtual world that they don't necessarily are bothered by another person that's in a different experience. But is that something that you've been able to start to experiment with of having multiple intellectual property shows show at the same time in the same physical space?
[00:14:39.361] Fabien Barati: Yes, so that's the big point of the format is that, as you say, it's possible to, at the same time and in the same space, have different content. So we have a group inside one content and in the same space you have other groups inside other contents. That means that it also makes it, let's say, more reliable in terms of profit for the operator who manages the space because If I compare with a movie theater, in one space, you have one content. And if this content is, let's say, not good enough, your space is lost. That wouldn't be the case with immersive expeditions. So that's one big advantage, I would say. The only thing that makes me think of this concept is a silent disco. I don't know if people in the same space listening to different music, but being together, I find it's kind of the same concept behind. And, yeah, and I forgot about the rest of the question.
[00:15:34.269] Kent Bye: Oh, yeah, just that it's possible to do that. Have you actually deployed that out?
[00:15:37.930] Fabien Barati: Yeah, so we did it technically. So we can have different content at the same time in the same space. We haven't done it yet in a venue because at the moment we are focusing on the content and not on the format. So it's a more marketing way of seeing things because it's a really beginning of the... of the immersive expedition and so we communicate more on the themes of one content rather than on the format itself. But I think in the near future we will communicate more on the format itself and the visitors will know that, like going to the movie theater, they will go to a specific venue just to have an immersive expedition and they will be able to choose which one when they arrive.
[00:16:23.866] Kent Bye: And you had mentioned that you had launched the Eternal Notre Dame in 2022. We're now into 2023, where you said you had your second piece that was coming out. So maybe tell me a bit about what that piece was about.
[00:16:34.655] Fabien Barati: So Horizon of Khufu, which was launched in June, is an immersive expedition that brings us to Egypt. Khufu is the pharaoh of the Great Pyramid, so the tallest pyramid in the world, in Giza. And in this experience, we meet Mona, who's our guide, Egyptian guide, who takes us inside the pyramid as it is nowadays. And I won't tell a lot about the scenario because there is a specific plot, but we will meet Bastet, who's a cat goddess of Egypt. And with her power, it will be possible to see what's not possible to see in real life. So part of the pyramids that are not accessible. that are impossible to see in real life, but also see the pyramid as it was in, let's say, its initial context. So being able to travel back in time 4,500 years ago to attend, for example, the funerals of King Khufu, see the temples, see the pyramid as it was before. And so, like Eternal Notre Dame, it's a whole journey where we will meet different characters, 45 minutes of adventure.
[00:17:43.123] Kent Bye: Yeah, and we're standing here in front of the Orange booth here at Laval Virtual, where they're up for an award, that they're doing different innovations of moving away from a backpack type of laptop compute that you have tethered to that display. I think it was on a HTC Focus 3 that you're using there at the Laternal Notre Dame. I don't remember any headphones. I think it was just using the inbuilt headphones. But they were showing that they have the capability to start to do 5G dispersal of the content. And so I'd love to hear what the interaction between what you're doing at Emissive and a company like Orange, which I believe was helping to produce the Laternal Notre Dame, but also doing different aspects of the technology, and just trying to get a sense of what you're doing at Emissive and what Orange is doing in terms of these different exhibitions.
[00:18:29.471] Fabien Barati: So at Emissive, we are a studio creating content, specializing in VR. We are also software editor because the platform, the software platform behind the Immersive Expedition is really a software that we are selling. And we are also a producer, producer like in the movies. And with all those activities, we can help big companies like Orange communicate, basically, better. So in the case of internal Notre Dame, the Immersive Expedition is a way for them to give funds for the reconstruction of the cathedral itself it's also a way for them to communicate through let's say light version of eternal notre dame so with the 5g version with the autonomous version which is available in the on the stores on meta and i think viveport and pico soon So we made a different version of Eternal Notre Dame, so partners like Orange can communicate, but also do something about what they think is good in the world, like the reconstruction of the cathedral.
[00:19:34.873] Kent Bye: So are you saying that there's different quality versions? So if they had a 5G version, would it be as high fidelity as you get with the back type version?
[00:19:42.748] Fabien Barati: Yeah, the 5G version is the same quality as the backpack version. Of course, the standalone version is lighter in terms of quality because it's only calculated inside the headset. Whereas in 5G, you have big computers behind in the cloud computing the pictures for the headset, like with the backpack.
[00:20:01.780] Kent Bye: Is that something that you've deployed yet at all in the production anywhere yet? Or is that just more of the future of the technology of where it's headed?
[00:20:09.471] Fabien Barati: You mean 5G? So no, we're not using 5G or too much streaming at the moment. We actually done it recently with the foundation Louis Vuitton, where we had an installation with 10 simultaneous visitors in streaming, but local streaming using Wi-Fi. At the moment, there are limits with 5G or Wi-Fi. You cannot have, like we have in the immersive expedition, around 100 simultaneous visitors in the same space. We cannot stream that much data to that many people. But hopefully in the future, it will be possible to have both very high performances and not having a backpack behind it.
[00:20:55.051] Kent Bye: Yeah, you said that you had 100 simultaneous visitors, and I imagine that there's kind of a beginning, middle, and end where people are going through that. Are you able to share about that average density, about how many people you're able to get on average per hour through an experience like that?
[00:21:08.601] Fabien Barati: Yes, sure. So the slots at the moment, it depends on the venue, of course, because it depends on the size of the venue. We can also limit the number of people per slot. But for example, in Notre Dame, I think it's 60 or 70 visitors an hour. It's a bit more in Lyon. So it gives you an idea of how many visitors we have per hour.
[00:21:31.384] Kent Bye: And you're making the content, but there's also the operators, which I guess is like another entity. So is that a part of your job is to help find other operators to help do all the logistics and actually deployment of that content?
[00:21:43.575] Fabien Barati: Yes. So we want to find the right partners to operate our immersive expedition. We don't want to do it ourselves because the job of operating can be very different if you are in Asia or in the US because it's also really related to how it works in those geographic areas, for example for the staff, insurances, security, this kind of thing. So what we're doing is that we're creating this network of operators and of course we train the staff so they can be by themselves. So this is actually the case with Eternal Notre Dame in Paris, Horizon of Khufu in Lyon. We work with operators who are taking care of the operation.
[00:22:21.867] Kent Bye: It's a lot of emotional labor to do all the logistics and everything. You don't see it a lot, but I think that makes sense to decouple your content creation from the operation because it's like, yeah, it may be two separate businesses. I know that the Infinite, I don't know if you have a chance to see the Infinite, but the FI Center, along with Felix and Paul, collaborated together where the FI Center was really taking lead on a lot of those logistics for how to do that. So yeah, I think that makes sense. But have you had a chance to see the Infinite at all yet?
[00:22:48.073] Fabien Barati: No, but I heard a lot, of course, about Infinite, so I think I know how it is, but I would love to see it. I think it will be back in Montreal soon, so we'll see.
[00:22:59.763] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's definitely worth checking out. So I guess what's next for you in Emissive then?
[00:23:04.130] Fabien Barati: So really, our objective is to make a new standard for cultural entertainment out of the immersive expedition. So we have two objectives, is to create this network of partners all over the world and create venues. And the second objective is to create more content, creating more content by ourselves, but also having other creators creating content, creating immersive expeditions in this format.
[00:23:33.427] Kent Bye: So when you say a new standard, do you mean in terms of quality or do you mean in terms of open standards so that it's more available for other people to use your framework to be able to do these type of expeditions?
[00:23:42.922] Fabien Barati: Yeah, so it's really in terms of framework, but I would say It should also have a level of quality, of course, to be in the stock.
[00:23:56.354] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality in these types of embodied expeditions might be, and what it might be able to enable?
[00:24:05.962] Fabien Barati: So first, I think that specifically with the immersive expedition, this is something you will never be able to do at home, for example, because you need a huge space. And being with other people at the same time in real life is also something quite strong. So of course, you can do it already in VR, in metaverse-like applications, but you don't have this real proximity. And of course, the possibility of walking physically, which is, again, extremely strong. So I think that we will be able to develop the concept and at the same time, in parallel of course, we will see VR expanding in a lot of different use cases, a lot of different formats. Here in Laval Virtual, we are seeing other kinds of formats, even LBE formats. Here with Gaudi from Small, they are also into creating a specific format. I think that's very interesting. We are not the only ones, of course. There are a lot of different studios trying to find the right niche, the right, let's say, also business model behind. And so I think it's going to increase and to develop. And this is in parallel with all the online cloud-based applications that, of course, will continue to be developed because, I mean, there are so many uses.
[00:25:30.751] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:25:35.213] Fabien Barati: I want to say that everyone has to see for themselves what brings an immersive expedition. So come in France, see Horizon of Khufu or Eternal Notre Dame. You won't be deceived.
[00:25:48.780] Kent Bye: Awesome, yes. Highly recommend it. And it was quite an embodied adventure that when I came out of it, it really felt like I went on an entire journey. So yeah, congratulations on the piece and all the innovations you had to do to get there. Yeah, good luck tonight for the Law Virtual Awards, and maybe your piece will be able to pick up an award. But yeah, thanks again for joining me here on the podcast and help break it all down.
[00:26:07.912] Fabien Barati: Thank you very much, Ken. Thank you very much.
[00:26:09.794] 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.
