I interviewed Strangeways co-director Adam Lieber, developers Dale P Deacon and Alex Bossman, as well as avatar creator Egbert Harm Westra at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.
Here’s their artist’s statement:
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 in today's episode, we'll be diving into another immersive story from Venice Immersive 2024. This is one of the three VR chat worlds that was a part of competition of Venice Immersive this year. It's called Strange Ways. And so they actually collaborated with this illustrator named Chris Bianchi, who had a lot of art that they were able to scan in and then basically translate his 2D art style into these fully immersive VR worlds that you kind of go on this journey. surrealistic adventure and then as you go through this adventure there's also all these avatars that are based upon these different drawings and so i happened to see it during a preview screening that was happening during rain dance with like 40 or 50 different people all wearing the same avatar so it's quite a surreal experience to go through these kind of trippy worlds but really pushing the boundary for what you can start to do with 2d images within the context of vr chat with a music design and also poem that kind of ties it all together as well So that's what we're coming on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with the team behind Strange Ways happened on Saturday, August 31st, 2024. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:37.896] Adam Lieber: Hi, I'm Adam Lieber. I'm a creative and director in various mediums of storytelling. And in VR for this project, I directed it and produced it and did all the music and sound. My background's music and film and traditional arts. And I came to space about five years ago.
[00:01:55.469] Dale P Deacon: My name's Dale Deacon, aka Deaconline. I'm a world builder, programmer, digital artist, I guess a bit of a generalist.
[00:02:04.466] Kent Bye: Maybe you could each give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into this space.
[00:02:08.755] Adam Lieber: Yeah, my background is traditional sculpture, but during that time I used music and sound in a lot of my work, and there was a lot of performance work. Not the sort of performance work people cut themselves in galleries, more playful, humorous stuff. I made inflating sculptures out of latex that had characters, bringing a lot of inanimate objects to life. And sound was always a big part of it, and from that point in my life I moved into sound quite heavily. I used to organize events, cultural events, parties. make music and i ended up in italy on a scholarship at a place called fabrica not far from venice in treviso which i was in a music department working on theater stuff and immersive content generally and but also learned a lot about sound design in that time for film i ended up in i'm south african as well a lot of the team are but i live in the uk now and i ended up there and did a master's in communication art and design and then moved into film and music. And for a large part of my life I've been a music supervisor and a composer, sound designer. And in the last five years I moved into immersive content. I've been a creative and a producer and an integrated producer for physical, experiential projects and interactive projects. And that led me into VR. I met a dev who worked on the last project we got into Venice called Bliss in the Air of a Storm, Sean Davenport. He is also based in South Africa, and he took me to VRChat. And we had this moment where, I mean, because I'm not a gamer, and it was Venice's first VRChat World, I believe. And we had gone to see an artwork. He was showing me the ropes. And he was an alien, and I was a banana. And we were talking about this artwork in VR, and I was like, holy moly, this is insane. Like, I've got to get involved in this. And then I met the Metaverse crew, who are a big component in this project. Deeks was a member of the Metaverse crew. And we were hanging out and meeting up on Thursdays in VR chats. And I met up with the Metaverse crew, and we were hanging out in VR. Every Thursday it was COVID and the community were just very proactively building content and collaborating. And essentially that's how I met the crew that built this project. So yeah, the Metaverse crew are a big component of this project. Yeah, that's about it.
[00:04:10.080] Dale P Deacon: So I guess I started out in this industry straight out of university. I went into what? So I studied informatics, which is a computers focused degree. And then I became an IT systems analyst for a couple of years. And I wanted to do something more creative and more interesting and more fun and more challenging. So I ended up working in marketing for a little while and I still wanted to push it further and further into like this more adventurous area to do something a bit more adventurous for my nine to five. So eventually I managed to save up enough money, quit my day job and started focusing on VR and AR development. Yeah. So in that sense, I mean, so I was one of the few people that, one of the people that started the Metaverse crew, which was a, a weekly world hop and now it's become this big sort of international community of people who are artists and bring an artistic eye or developers who bring a more technical eye. A very multi-talented kind of group where we do a lot of experimentation and building. Aside from the Metaverse crew, I started We Are VR Josie community in Johannesburg. So it's one of the big meetups on the African continent that focuses on developing virtual reality and augmented reality skills development and projects and trying to build up the industry in Africa.
[00:05:23.061] Kent Bye: Awesome. And so it sounds like you had your introduction into VR, your banana, talking to your friend who's an alien, and talking about artwork that was featured at Venice Immersive as part of the VR Chat Worlds Gallery. And so what was the catalyst for you to start to actually make stuff? Was this your first project, or did you create anything before this?
[00:05:43.359] Adam Lieber: You know, I've got a background, as I was saying, in music and sound and film, and I can work with linear software tools like digital audio workstations and video editing. I've done a bit of 3D work, but I've not jumped in yet. I really should. But meeting the Metaverse crew and seeing what people are building and how incredible it is to experience something in immersive in a social environment because I've tried a lot of gaming experiences solo and it's not for me. It's really about that shared experience. But seeing the crew around me building things got me very excited and people were up for building together. So yeah, we, Deke actually worked on a project, Sean, who I mentioned earlier, and someone called Face in the middle of a street, Jason Stapleton. We all produced a project together called Bliss in the Air of a Storm that was on Venice in 2022, I believe. Might have been 21. But it was at the tail end of COVID and we never actually made it out to Venice. I think it was a smaller festival. You might have been here, Kent. But yeah, we did that project together. It was a very different project. It was about music and sound's relationship to power in the broad sense from everything from people using the trumpets to destroy the walls of Jericho, to music as a weapon, to different styles of music having effects on political situations. It was a very broad subject and we worked with some AI artists, musicians actually. This was quite a while ago. They're now actually working for, what are they called? Oh gosh. Stability AI, who run all the open-source stable diffusion models, are heading up their audio department. I know AI is a contentious issue, and we can get onto that because we have used a bit of AI in this project. But yeah, we worked with them, and we had a live-streamed death metal never-ending band, which is still going. They created a thing called Relentless Doppelganger, which was a never-ending fictional death metal band that was streaming into this world. The world's still on VRChat, if you want to go and see it. It's called Bliss in the Ear of a Storm, but it is PC VR only. So, yeah, this is not our first project, but yeah, that's a very different project.
[00:07:38.395] Kent Bye: Let me just give a little bit of a recounting of some of the Metaverse Crew projects and like where you came in, because I know that there's been quite a number of different world building projects and stuff that you as an entity have been involved with since the pandemic.
[00:07:51.997] Dale P Deacon: Yeah, yeah. It's going to be tricky to recall all of them, to be honest. There's been quite a few over the years. I think in the early days we started when COVID was keeping everybody at home and we used it as a way for us to stay in contact with each other, but also to develop our skills while we're in lockdown. Let's see, one of the first projects we did was for the Amaze Festival based out of Berlin where we created a virtual train station where trains would act as the way to portal from one world to another and the station was the hub. That was one of the very first ones that we did as a crew. So I think you can look it up as the Amaze train station. I think that's what it's called on VRChat. And then fast forward a little while, Metaverse crew was involved with Mycelia, with Nanotopia, and Tyson Cross, and a couple other guys from the Metaverse crew, which did well. It won Spirit of Raindance award a couple of years ago. And we've done a lot of community building stuff as well. So supporting the Go East Film Festival, which has a big presence in VRChat. Getting to know the folks at Venice Immersive. So this year's Venice Immersive World in VRChat was built by myself and Mike Salmon and with support from the rest of the Metaverse crew. So yeah, there were tons. There were tons. We actually had a stall at VRCon a little while ago as well. So there are many, many projects out there. I feel a little guilty for omitting the ones that I can't think of off the top of my head.
[00:09:15.086] Kent Bye: Okay.
[00:09:15.767] Adam Lieber: Sorry, just on the Metaverse crew, you know, we're a very loose collective and very supportive of one another. And like Deke was saying, there's actors in the crew, there's who are involved in Uncanny Alley, there's devs, there's musicians, there are people who are just interested in VR. And a lot of the projects are, people do things on their own, but it's affiliated with the Metaverse crew. It's not a very formalized arrangement. It's more of a supportive community that are exploring different ways of producing immersive content with a heavy focus on social VR.
[00:09:43.584] Kent Bye: OK. And so with Strangeways, maybe you could give me a little bit more context for where this project began.
[00:09:50.461] Adam Lieber: Yeah, so I studied Communication Art and Design at the Royal College of Art, and part of that department, weirdly, even though I was doing experimental filmmaking, was illustration. So a bunch of illustrators, and someone I met there years ago, I mean, this is 20 years ago, Chris Bianchi, the illustrator behind this project, has been an illustrator most of his life. I met him there, and I ran into him a few years ago. I think it was about three years ago. It was about two, three years into my VR journey and we were just chatting and I was always interested in bringing different styles into VR and sort of trying to bring different makers into the space. I still am. And I just threw the idea. I was like, would you be interested in us trying to build something immersive with your drawings? And he was open to it, which was great. That's really how it was birthed. And then Deke and I and Chris worked on the first iteration of a project we did together. It was called Bonkers Gardens. It's actually the... second scene or third scene you see in Strange Ways. That was the beginning of it. And that then evolved into the rest of the project. And it grew fluidly over the last three years. You know, we won a small prize from a platform called Mona for Bonkers Gardens, which was quite helpful because this is very much a project of love, a bootstrap, basically no money. But we won a small prize, which was nice. Mona is a WebGL platform that actually enable you to mint your virtual worlds on chain. although it's kind of strange because the worlds are actually hosted on a service and they're not, obviously I don't know how many of you listeners hate Web3 or not, or blockchain, but obviously it's a way of creating a certificate of authenticity to the work. It's like an artwork certificate of authenticity, essentially. But Mona has a platform, and we won a little grant, and Bonkers Gardens was born, and that was very nice. But as you'll see in Bonkers Gardens, that scene in the world, a lot of this stuff is still quite two-dimensional. And from that, it grew. And then we did a second iteration of it. Deke was involved with that. Alex Bosman... who's another world dev who's involved in this project, we built a project called The Outhouse. So with Alex Bosman, we built The Outhouse, which was another sort of iteration on Bonkers Gardens, but we started to explore mapping Chris's drawings into 3D spaces and onto 3D objects, and really starting to mash up different aesthetics, which you see a lot of in the world. There's a lot of different styles. There's photos, there's 3D content, there's 2D content. It's a real sort of punk DIY aesthetic. But yeah, I've always thought this would be amazing as a VR project, because that was also WebGL, the outhouse. So Deke was available and very keen, and we got him back involved in the project, and Alex was keen, and... We then built this whole new project from those iterations called Strange Ways and it's become what it is. It's beautiful in VR, I'm very happy and these guys are very talented and it's been a huge milestone to get to this part of the project. And then right towards the end Egbert, who hopefully will join us in a bit, got involved and turned some of Chris's characters into avatars which enables you to embody some of the characters of Strange Ways and play through them and experience the world.
[00:12:55.404] Kent Bye: Great. Yeah, and I know that I had a chance to get an early look at one of the screenings that were showing at Raindance. And then, yeah, it was kind of like a group tour that I took. And so it felt like it was a whole communal journey, like a guided tour that being taken through and that there was like elements of narrative through a poem that was kind of spread throughout as well. Yeah, I'll talk a little bit more about a trip report in my experience, but I feel like one of the more distinct things is that over the past number of years I've seen a number of projects that are taking what are essentially like 2D planes or 2D drawings or something that was hand-drawn or something that is able to then collage it into a... VR experience, and this felt like a little bit more architectural in a way that you're able to form actual rooms and spaces, but also still have 2D billboarded sculptures, having a background in sculpture. It felt very sculptural in that way. And so as you were putting together this world, what were some of the considerations of how to translate what is essentially 2D sources and make it into a whole spatial volumetric
[00:13:56.309] Dale P Deacon: aesthetic that allows you to have the experience of the volume but not to the point where you have to fill in all the gaps to make it feel like you're in a physical reality yeah that's a good question i think there are a lot of challenges when it comes to trying to make a world like this we had a lot of assets at our disposal but the question was how to turn that into a journey how do you turn that into an adventure and go deeper and deeper and want to go deeper and deeper into the world one of the concepts that i really latched on to was that of contrast So when you're contrasting the inside of a room to the outside, there's a lighting change, there's a change in your sense of space and surrounds. So there are a lot of moments where you walk through a doorway and things feel very different, like you've moved into a different space. That was the sort of feeling that we were trying to capture with some of these transition periods. but also the transition from one room to another also became something that we wanted to play with. Some transitions are simply walking through a flat plane from a dark room to a light room and the transition is instant, but there are other transitions like falling down these rabbit holes that we have scattered throughout the world. It can also be a different way of transiting between one room and another and for some technical reasons we've also done some teleportation transitions between one area and another so that we can play with the the sounds in a very, very strict sort of intentional way. So transition through spaces is definitely something that we thought about a lot through this and experimented with a lot as well.
[00:15:21.328] Kent Bye: Yeah, I remember when I went through my tour, there was almost like a person who was guarding the next space because, you know, you risk as you go through a group with people going ahead and then you end up fracturing that group experience if you end up portaling ahead and speed running it in a way. So there's kind of the exhibition part of a festival context, which is a little bit different than just... opening it up as a world on VRChat that people can kind of go at their own pace and not have to worry about sort of the group dynamics. But I'm wondering if you could comment on the corralling of people. And it was funny because it would be like Maria from Raindance would be like, have her avatar there, like standing, like blocking the door. But you can actually just like clip right through her. So if you really wanted to get through, you could. But it was just kind of honoring that way of just like, not yet. OK, you can't go yet. OK, now we can go.
[00:16:10.560] Adam Lieber: Yeah, it was funny. I mean, look, I think as soon as you got very experienced VRChat users, which we did at that tour, you know, they fly through things and they know what they can and physically can and can't do. And I guess they respected that. It was great having Maria there sort of being a bouncer. Yeah, I mean, corralling people is hard. I mean, you know, humans are... sort of self-thinking creatures. And in VRChat, people get very excited in gaming environments. So, I mean, I think if you did the tour here, or did a smaller tour with four or five people, you might actually take in a completely different, well, you will take in a different experience, because there are not 50 people trying to see everything at the same time, making a cacophony and being wild, but that in itself is a great experience.
[00:16:49.819] Kent Bye: Especially when everybody's wearing the same avatar aesthetic, which is a whole other thing that we haven't talked about yet, but I think is a key part of it.
[00:16:56.164] Adam Lieber: Yeah, absolutely. It's quite funny when that... I mean, to me, that's one of the most hilarious things in VRChat, when you're in a space and then somebody pulls out a funny avatar and then everybody puts on the same avatar. It's one of those titillating things that VRChat does very well, and it's a fun experience. Yeah, I mean, it got a bit confusing, I guess, because everyone's in the same avatar, but it also turned the world into this sort of army of Strangeways characters, which was quite hilarious. It worked very well.
[00:17:23.203] Kent Bye: I know that in the video that you talked about the development of Strange Ways that there's reference to a poem and I know that there's certain parts of the experience where we stop and hear a few lines of the poem and so I'm wondering if you could elaborate a little bit about the poem, what's it trying to say and why you chose that as a way of providing the backbone to the overall arc of the journey and the experience that you wanted to take people on.
[00:17:45.652] Adam Lieber: Sure, yeah, you know, this whole project's been very organic and we've all been very flexible with our time and how we approach it. The illustrator was very flexible and because it's done on a shoot school, no budget essentially, You have to work in a very organic way and be very accommodating of one another. You've got to be open to the forces and letting go for the project. And I think most projects are like that. But I guess when there's funding involved, you can do things in a more sort of structured way. But the way that evolved was we got to a point probably, I don't know, six months ago. And a friend of mine is a writer. He writes a lot of comedy and magical realist stuff and does plays. He's also a poet. And obviously it was a commercial copy, he needs to stay alive. And I asked him if he would be interested, so I took him on a tour of the world and then I asked him to write a poem about his experience. And that's how the poem evolved, which was great.
[00:18:33.001] Kent Bye: So you actually had him go through the VRChat world and then he, from that, then he wrote the poem?
[00:18:38.087] Adam Lieber: Exactly, yeah. I mean, it was missing a few things and the avatars weren't built at that point. But yeah, from that he produced the poem, which was wonderful. And then, yeah, and then the poem, and the poem was a way of creating, we did that for Raindance initially. It was a way of creating a sort of narrative that wasn't too rigid. because it's a poem and it's open to interpretation. And it worked really well. And then as I was developing the audio and sound, I was like, okay, I'm going to bring this into the project. And then I started playing with... I'd done all the music and the sound design, but very recently, as you all know, AI music tools have become very prolific and insanely good and kind of horrifying, but amazing. I mean, if you want to talk about AI, we can talk about that later. But I'm quite pro-AI content generation. But yeah, and I started feeding that into some of the tools, and I mean, it takes ages to get something you like. Like I said, I have a music supervision background. I've had days where I've worked on jobs and had to listen to a thousand pieces of music and choose ten and submit them in for a job. So it kind of suits me, but I don't know if any one of the audience have played with these tools, but you end up with... 50, 100 iterations of something that are only minuscule different from one another. And it gets very confusing. But then I started playing with the lyrics and just concepts around Strangeways to generate music content, which was initially for the bar space in the world. But then it became the music for the credits has its own music. And we keep visiting the poem and reinforcing the ideas in the poem, using that as lyrics in different pieces of music.
[00:20:10.390] Kent Bye: Nice. And I originally thought the poem was like an inspiration for the world, but it sounds like the world was coming first. And so you're kind of like iterating. And so maybe just talk about your own design process for how you're taking this and collaborating in a way of trying to have an initial intuition or thought and then get feedback and then start to then develop things or, yeah, just a little bit more around the actual process of building out the world.
[00:20:34.129] Dale P Deacon: Building out a world for VRChat in particular can be a lot of back and forth when it comes to testing because to do a screen share and share a change before we even had a chance to run around and actually feel out the space is a little counterintuitive. So we would do a build and then get the crew in together and do a run through together. And as we would go explore and see where we can change things. So even that process of changes and fixes and updates and stuff was also very organic. But I think it worked really well. It was pretty smooth. One of the things that VRChat also really lends itself to is this idea of open-ended storytelling where you create your own adventure. Just like those old books, if you want to go in a certain direction, I think VR is the perfect medium to pick that direction and run in it. So there was a bit of back and forth about how we make the loop, like the narrative loop of Strange Ways, start at the beginning and work through in a linear fashion, but while still giving the impression and feeling that you can go in any direction you want. Trying to get that balance right I think was a little bit tricky, but I think we managed to pull it off pretty well. But yeah, generally pretty organic, pretty fun, and pretty hands-on as well. in that we would just jump in together and sort of poke around and see where things can change.
[00:21:47.275] Kent Bye: Yeah, I really appreciate it. At the beginning, there's a big giant hole that you have to jump into. And I feel like there's a going down the rabbit hole, and then you're entering in to a series of what feels like, I don't know if I could identify an architectural through line, because it could almost be in any order of my memory of it, at least. And how do you decide? how to structure it or what order to go in or if there was like chapters or if it is non-linear but still linearized because you have to get people through in a practical way so yeah i'd love to hear you explain a little bit like actually kind of architecting the journey and what considerations you were looking at in order to to create it as like a beginning middle and end
[00:22:29.349] Adam Lieber: Yeah, in the same way as the whole project was quite organic. We tried things, we threw them at the wall. If they stuck, we rolled with them and we built on them further. There is a sort of evolution in terms of the way the world evolves. As you enter, it's slightly changed since you've seen it, but there's now a lobby waiting space, which is just pitch black. and then the lights fade up and you're in the first scene which is white and you encounter the hole and a 2D image and then you go through and everything's 2D and flat planes and as you progress we start introducing the 2D images mapped onto 3D things, 3D objects or into 3D spaces or they make up the space, or we've brought in some 3D elements now. So as you move through it, it becomes more complex. And it also goes from being quite insane and sort of peaks in the middle, and then towards the end it becomes almost quite meditative. You end on a space called the Temple Garden, which is sort of a space of contemplation where, because we can talk about it in a minute, but there are themes in the world that relate to the way the structure works.
[00:23:30.032] Kent Bye: Yeah, go ahead. Yeah.
[00:23:31.613] Adam Lieber: So, I mean, Strangeways is fictional, but it looks at the way creatures engage with one another. Creatures in the natural world, but I don't know where you draw the line on those things. So it's magical, realist, it's fictional, it's psychedelic, it's pretty wild. And it looks at how, in an earthly way, how, for example, humans create content, cultural artifacts, buildings, stuff, and we make all this detritus or this primordial soup, and then nature reclaims back from it. And some good analogies are like... a rusting, sunken ship, barnacles starting to grow on it, and seaweed, and then fish start to reappear in there, or when Detroit was abandoned, wildlife started to come back into the buildings, and sort of wild animals and plants, and it's this idea of how there's this constant back and forth between creatures on a planet, in this case at Strangeways. And that's one of the overarching themes in the world that we explore. And yeah, it gets quite intense in the middle, sort of sonically and visually, there's this passageway in the middle that's just quite out there where it's just plastered with chris's drawings and textures and then beyond that point you eventually end up in this temple garden space which is um it's a sort of space of contemplation really there's music that's been made with an element of tube and throat singing and some wild animals some real birds and things that have been quite heavily affected and you can jump and float through the space and suddenly all becomes fairly calm and sort of more sort of um meditative, I'm trying to think of a word, contemplative I've said, just a pleasant sort of dreamy experience at the end before you finish the world.
[00:25:04.811] Kent Bye: And I think another big part of the experience was choosing those different avatars and so maybe you could explain a little bit more around like the drawings and how some of those drawings got translated into these five different avatars.
[00:25:16.587] Adam Lieber: Sure, yeah, I mean, there's quite a few characters in the world, so I just need to, I mean, we'll probably mention the game, but I'll get a nice audio chunk in now. Chris Bianchi is the illustrator who drew, I'd say, 90% of the content for the world. He draws on paper with ink. He's a very traditional artist. He's come into the world once or twice. He doesn't really engage with VR a lot, but he loves what we've been able to do with his work. So thanks, Chris. You should all go and look at his work. Sadly, he's not here on the interview. Chris Bianchi, I don't know if you can put links in your work, .co.uk. He's a wonderful illustrator. He has a very unique raw style, does beautiful drawings, and he's got lovely concepts in his work. Sorry, I've totally forgotten the question.
[00:25:57.630] Kent Bye: The avatars.
[00:25:58.591] Adam Lieber: Oh, right. So Chris has drawn a lot of characters, and there are a lot of them in the world. And when Eckbert... Akimbot is his VRChat name, came on the project. He was up for doing the avatars. We just sat together and chose five. It really had a lot to do with what he was interested in doing. We wanted a variety of avatars. Initially, we did four, and one of them is a bird character. I think he's going to be here soon. Hopefully, he can talk about this, but I'll speak about it anyway. so Egbert did the avatars and one of them you control the heads of this two-headed bird with your hands one of them is a sort of mime artist the other one's a bat creature that has these wonderful wings that are part of the avatar that open up when you open your arms and the other one's the blob possibly my favorite which is a very funny character that actually welcomes you at the very beginning of the experience it's a very sort of abstract blobby looking thing with a spiral on it which patterns its body. And all the avatars are actually black and white. A lot of the experience is black and white. And that's something I should have said, was as you move through the experience, we start to introduce color as well. So it starts out black and white. It's very much like stepping into the drawing, and then it sort of starts to evolve and become a bit more crazy. And then towards the end, when we realized we needed a host, we decided to use the Shaman character that tells you the poem in the third scene as the avatar for tour guides, because Venice, we've got tour guides who are hosting it, and it makes for a totally different experience. So we wanted a unique avatar that would guide the users through. And the Shaman's the only avatar, really, that has color on its body, wearing this sort of tiny colored coat. Yeah.
[00:27:26.587] Kent Bye: Yeah. And so in terms of the world building, were you given these themes that were trying to evoke some of these different feelings? And I know that from my memory, there's like elements of like contrast in terms of the gravity that is changing or you're flying around. And so... Yeah, how do you match up the artistic intention for what the atom is wanting versus like trying to actually translate some of those concepts into how the world is being able to tell this story through like a form of environmental storytelling?
[00:27:58.675] Dale P Deacon: Well, you'll notice a lot of the rooms and a lot of the spaces in Strange Ways, they're almost like pedestals for Chris's art. So we try to find a way to make an entire space dedicated to a certain art piece or a bunch of different art pieces. So I think a lot of the intention behind our room building and our architecture building was to try and showcase the art, the 2D illustrations as best as we could, but also in the most varied and interesting way that we possibly could as well. So yeah, I think there was quite a lot of experimentation early on to figure out what clicks with using what assets. And then there was certainly like a sort of hard split between where I handed over the project to Alex around about the fourth scene. And you can see he takes it in his own creative direction as well. And, you know, thanks to Chu, we managed to keep it all together and make it into a cohesive experience. But yeah, there was a lot of sort of experimentation and freeform trial and error to see what works and see what doesn't work. And then a bit of collaboration to make sure that we all agree that this is the way that the project should shape itself or bring itself, you know, flow through from start to finish.
[00:29:08.823] Kent Bye: With your background in music, maybe you could just elaborate a little bit more on the process of the sound design and the music.
[00:29:16.331] Adam Lieber: Yeah, I've done a lot of sound design and music for linear content film and commercials and things. But I've got a very... I mean, I'm into a lot of very out there music as well and experimental sound art. And I think a lot of that informs my thinking. I like contrasts. I like funny titillating moments. You see a lot of that humour in the project. And we use the sound and music to... elevate that element of the project. So in terms of sound design you'll notice that all the scenes are sound designed in a way to emphasize those changes and make it feel fairly cinematic. A lot of the portals have sounds on them to sort of accentuate the movement of moving through the portholes and a lot of the sound In order to keep the world's eyes down, you know, we limit a lot of the sounds to loop. So what you'll hear, for example, in the Bonkers Gardens, Chris is a Maltese person. We got this Maltese folk musician that he knows and we took some of the music and we used that as the basis for what you hear in the Bonkers Garden. Some of the scenes are just quite atmospheric. You've just got wind and mosquitoes and insects, but they're generally all a bit sort of tweaked and tripped out and funny. And then there are moments where it becomes more intimate. So you enter into the outhouse and it becomes sparkly and quite quiet as you contemplate that drawing of the two people at the table having a conversation. But yeah, so some of the scenes are quite atmospheric, but then some of them have music. And then obviously you enter this bar space, which is sort of meant to represent a club, a bar. and we've got the music streaming in there, and that's where you actually hear tracks that could be thought of as musical tracks. And then, I think, you know, my approach to it, none of this project has been a sort of very linear process. It's been, like we've said, quite sort of organic, the way it's evolved. But yeah, a lot of the sound was really built to support what we were building in 3D, what the guys were doing with Chris's drawings, and just what I felt worked, I guess, as any composer would. And, you know, the running themes of the project are sort of out there, psychedelic, and a lot of the music emphasizes that. And we also use the music, as Di mentioned earlier, there's a lot of things that are about contrast, you know, the world is quite sort of punkish in its approach, it's got this kind of fanzine, sort of collage aesthetic to it, because there's 3D elements and hand-drawn elements, and the music sort of is there to partly emphasize that. So, for example, also the new lobby space, there's a poem that brings you into the world, and it's this very kind of alluring music. But then as you enter, you're sort of in this expanse and it's just wind sound, you know, you're in nowhere. And then, you know, and essentially a lot of the sound is there like Atmos in the film to support the scene. And then some of it's like sound design, which is supporting the action in the world. And then the musical elements bring a lot more emotional content to the different scenes. For example, as well, the end credit music is, it's got a very sort of come together and somewhat melancholic feeling about it for the closure of the project.
[00:32:08.626] Kent Bye: I don't know if there's any other explicit inspirations or points of reference that you're looking at in order to put together this world.
[00:32:17.062] Adam Lieber: Well, look, Chris's drawings have a very particular aesthetic, and as that was the starting point for the very first iteration of this, that led a lot of the visual aesthetic. And then when we built the second WebGL project, which was called The Outhouse, When I proposed that, I was like, we should really start mashing up styles. Because that was something we'd talked about, but we didn't do in Bonkers Gardens. Bringing in collage and it's just, you know, I've seen things like that before in VRChat and they resonate with me when people play with aesthetics in the platform. And it's that thing again of contrast. You know, what happens if you put a 3D TV next to a hand-drawn plant that's flat? you know and then there's a photograph on the wall and i love that kind of mash of sort of that kind of collaged approach um so that also partly dictated the way it evolved stylistically we really kind of threw stuff at the wall and if it worked we ran with it kind of like yeah so it was it was organic the process really also evolved into what the aesthetic became yeah gotcha and then
[00:33:21.784] Kent Bye: Is that your other collaborators there?
[00:33:23.666] Adam Lieber: Yay! Alex and Egbert have just arrived. We're in Venice having the interview and it's quite hard to get around on the boat here. It's kind of chaotic and it's very hot, but well done for getting here. Welcome.
[00:33:34.675] Kent Bye: Yeah, welcome and just have you maybe each introduce yourself and what you do in the realm of VR.
[00:33:40.260] Alex Bossman: Hi, I'm Alex. I was a world builder for Strangeways, creative technologist by trade, but yeah, built some really cool stuff.
[00:33:48.151] Egbert Harm Westra: Hi, I'm Akbar. And I was the avatar creator for Strange Ways. And I'm very passionate about VR and XR and especially avatars.
[00:33:58.538] Kent Bye: Great. And maybe just a bit more context for each of your backgrounds and your journey into working with VR.
[00:34:04.454] Alex Bossman: So I'm a creative technologist by trade. I do anything from hardware, IoT, all the way into software. A lot of VR and XAR stuff, a lot of XR. But I got into VR just before 2020, where everything changed. And I've been part of the MCV with Rick and the whole gang for quite a while now. Been ball-topping in VRC for years and years and years. Been building small little worlds, but then we got together and decided to do something slightly different.
[00:34:30.501] Egbert Harm Westra: So I've been in the industry for about eight years with XR. I have my own company called Akimbo Studio. And yeah, it's just been great to get involved with XR companies just from the beginning, just like playing around with the tech and just really enjoying VR.
[00:34:48.925] Kent Bye: Nice. Well, we've been talking around like just the process of building the world and reflections on it. And so we've covered a lot of ground already, but I'm just curious to hear from each of your perspectives as you're coming on to this project, what some of your impressions were and what were some of the problems or challenges that you were trying to solve? And yeah, just kind of hear some reflections on the process of you working on this project.
[00:35:08.086] Alex Bossman: I mean, there's a few things. Firstly, I never met Adam in real life when we started. We only met in VR. And when we started conceptualizing, we did a lot of world hopping, a lot of chatting online, and all that kind of jazz. And then, you know, I think it's probably been said before, but the main idea with the world is to show people you don't need an incredibly well-crafted three-dimensional space. You can work with 2D planes and kind of putting together 3D environments with flat surfaces. imagery with illustrated backgrounds, with pen and paper, ultimately. And I think with the process, it was an incredibly loose process. We just kind of jumped on, built, shared ideas, shared thoughts, continued building, shared more thoughts. And the fake 3D vibe, it just kind of happened through the idea of creating collages, mixing 3D and 2D, audio and video. I like to think of it a lot as almost like a scrapbooking exercise. But now that we have the power to utilize different types of media, ultimately mixed media in a digital space, I think it's a really cool way of showcasing this weird marrying of bits of 3D, bits of 2D, audio. Very nice.
[00:36:18.732] Kent Bye: Awesome. We talked a little bit about the different avatars, but not specifically around the different characters that you chose and that there was a number of different characters that were provided from the illustration. I'm just curious to hear your reflections on translating what these 2D characters were into these 3D avatars and just what you were looking for in having a range of those different characters.
[00:36:40.908] Egbert Harm Westra: So yeah, first of all, I really love Chris's work and I love the aesthetic of the 1920s kind of style. So yeah, it was quite challenging to take two illustrations and convert them into polygons and texture maps. One of the biggest challenges was the quest standalone. So to actually not be able to use certain modifiers like cloth and things like that for wings and clothing, I had to rig that into the skeletons but the greatest thing for me is to actually see his drawings and then to see how at the end where I embody them and that feeling of like embodiment is great so like yeah.
[00:37:23.828] Kent Bye: So I guess there is a quest compatible version for this world then?
[00:37:27.202] Dale P Deacon: Yeah, yeah, there is. We always try and keep our PC world and Quest standalone world in the same scene, which can be a bit of a challenge. But yeah, we managed to do a Quest compatible version. And I think that's why it's being picked up well on VRChat now that it's public. It's getting a lot of hits. And I think that's partly because Quest users are looking for something interesting, unusual, and out there, which I think this definitely ticks those boxes.
[00:37:50.765] Kent Bye: Yeah, when I was looking through my ex slash Twitter feed, there was a post from VRChat from their account that were promoting and announcing the different worlds that are being featured here at Venice Immersive and perhaps even in-world. Or maybe just talk about how they've been featuring it and then some of the reactions you're getting.
[00:38:08.953] Adam Lieber: Sure, yeah. I mean, it's wonderful. Obviously, Venice Immersive have partnered with VRChat this year. And Venice have always been very supportive of VRChat and used it to host their worlds. They've got a whole section, which I'm sure you've talked about on the podcast, of popular worlds or worlds that have been curated in that aren't actually in competition. But yeah, and they've used it to host their hub where a lot of the projects are sort of featured or even just talked about if they're not VRChat worlds. So yeah, it's on the VRChat website, and they're promoting Venice. But it seems to be getting a lot of traction and resonating with people. I don't know where it's at now. I think this morning it was sort of 20,000 visits and 4,000 likes. And it's nice to get the likes because you know people are going to keep it in their favorite worlds and maybe show other people the project. But no, it's great. I mean, it's clearly resonating with people. But yeah, I think the tweet this morning from VRChat was saying, if you're new to VRChat, must see worlds. And there were four worlds in the tweet. And very complimentary. And thanks for doing that, VRChat. Put ours in there. Yeah.
[00:39:04.710] Kent Bye: Yeah, and one of the things that I had mentioned earlier was that part of my experience of going through this at Raindance was that it was like a group collective experience and how there's something that changes when everybody is the same identity or at least the same aesthetic. And usually when you go into VRChat, there's a lot of anime avatars and a whole wide range of different identities. But then to have everybody as the same identity But there is something different around having your identity and what your identity is expressed, but also being around in a whole group of people that are also dressed in the exact same way. And I've seen a number of different communities within VRChat that have that as a conceit, where everybody's dressing the same. In this particular instance, everybody's wearing those same avatars that you created. So I'm just wondering here, any reflections on what that creates when you're in a space and everybody's wearing the same avatar representation? Different than the same clothes because it's like your full body.
[00:40:00.227] Egbert Harm Westra: So I think there's something different But yeah, just love to hear any reflections on that So yeah, it was quite crazy when I was in the rain dance tour seeing so many people in the avatars I created and it's just like and They also kind of blend in with the black and white scenes so it just became very abstract seeing everybody like kind of huddled together and
[00:40:23.487] Alex Bossman: Yeah, I think you bring up a really interesting point with having, you know, largely juxtaposed avatars in a world that has an obvious illustrative style. And I think when everyone was in the same avatars, everyone blends in and it becomes part of the world. But I also think it's super interesting seeing the few avatars that aren't actually part of it. And I think it also goes back to that mixed media, you know, that punk rock kind of pushing the boundaries, taking things that people might think don't work together or might be ugly together, and showcasing it as a hero of some sort. There was a really interesting thing that happened. There's a hidden disco fridge in the main bar area, and as you walk in, you walk inside of this disco fridge, lights are going crazy, and somebody turned themselves into a roast chicken. And then all of a sudden, everyone was dancing around in this disco fridge, a different, you know, somebody or someone was a leek, someone was a piece of bread. And it was really, really cool. And then I was standing outside and then you see this disco fridge and I obviously know what's inside. And then all of a sudden you see all of these fruits coming out of this fridge. And it's almost like going to like a little standing outside of like a really exclusive club where you're in this crazy world and then you see these like realistic things. roast chickens coming out of this fridge and i think it's a really really beautiful juxtaposition and you know it gives people that also that freedom of choosing their own thing so you can be part of the world you can be a part of this you know the strange just like a strange world or strange narrative of strange ways but you can also not and i think that's also the partly the the beauty of having a world that has a quite a cohesive unique visual style
[00:42:00.256] Egbert Harm Westra: Yeah and also like when I went to the last tour there was a lot of full body trackers in VRChat and I really enjoyed seeing them like dress as the mime and actually doing the whole mime move like kind of like taking the characteristics of the avatar and actually really playing that out that was really really cool.
[00:42:20.551] Adam Lieber: Yeah, on avatars. I think there's always that moment when you, especially, I mean, I remember when I first came to VRChat, my mind being blown. You know, you put on an avatar and you look in the mirror and you look at your hands and it's like, am I real? What the hell's going on here? And the way that plays on the brain is fascinating. And I think what's nice about this project is you come in as whatever you want to be. And then there's this moment now, we've moved the avatars back a little bit. They're now in the bunker's garden. And you know, everyone looks as they look, how they've chosen to be, and then you get this opportunity where you can try on four of the different avatars and there's a mirror there, you're in the space full of plants and different characters, and then people get to choose which one they want to be, and it's that lovely transition of going from one being into another, I think that really plays quite beautifully on the brain, and the avatars just look great. I mean, Chris's drawings being interpreted by Egg into 3D have come out beautifully, and yeah, we're very happy with it, it's lovely.
[00:43:14.682] Kent Bye: Awesome. And finally, I'd love to hear what each of you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality might be and what it might be able to enable.
[00:43:24.560] Adam Lieber: Oh, lordy. Well, I'm actually very interested in the way VR plays on the brain. There's this theory that VR experiences are stored in the same part of the brain, in the memory, as real experiences, which is why it's so prolifically used for various types of therapies. And very commonly, probably everybody knows about it, people have phobias, exposure therapies, and it's very effective. This idea for me, I mean, I love play and humor and titillation and I'm always up for doing lots of projects like that and Strangeways really falls into that space. But I'm also very interested in using VR to build digital therapeutics, which is one term for it, but experimental ones that enable one to really play with how technology and it can be used as a sort of way of, as a good for altering the mind and dealing with therapies. I mean, The world needs a lot more mental health services and I think there's something in VR that could definitely help change that and make it more accessible to a bigger audience.
[00:44:25.077] Dale P Deacon: I think when thinking about the ultimate potential of VR, we need to keep a time frame in mind. You know, what's going to happen in five years time is going to be very different from what happens in ten years time. But if you're talking sort of high level ultimate potential, I think really it gets a little abstract. But I think we're able to truly embody ourselves within our art and embrace our art in a way that is very rare these days but I guess it'll become more and more common as a way of portraying art but I think it's letting go of the self and becoming part of the art I think is the ultimate you know trajectory
[00:45:03.817] Egbert Harm Westra: Yeah, so I can almost envision in the near future, especially with mixed reality becoming quite popular, that if it becomes more lighter, like lighter glasses, the whole idea of opening up a new dimension in reality and mixing the two together and having a choice to... go completely immersive or like mixing or seeing reality the potential of working with your hands and anywhere in the world and not even having a to have a laptop and everything using hand tracking or eye tracking like i'm very excited about the future so and i really hope it actually starts happening pretty soon
[00:45:43.584] Alex Bossman: I think there's a couple of things you could kind of look at the future of VR, but I think one for me that really hits home in more ways than one is for me, VR is a place where people can experience other people's points of views and other people's art, not only along the lines of, you know, getting a theater, for example, a theater group in South Africa to perform globally. where they are stuck in a small town somewhere in the middle of South Africa. And it brings eyes to experiences that previously you could only see on a flat screen. Which takes me to the main point of being a part of the art and being a part of the experience and having that emotional connection rather than being a bystander and a viewer. So it becomes less of a voyeuristic experience and more of an interactive experience. And I think that, especially when going back to the point of, you know, a South African group of people that may not be able to show their experiences or show their movements or show their arts to the rest of the world, it becomes far more easy because you can do a South African experience from your own home.
[00:46:43.825] Kent Bye: Awesome. And is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:46:50.093] Adam Lieber: Well, we've got a little website up. So if anyone wants to see a trailer of the project, it's strangeways.ink, I-N-K, like to ink a tattoo. And there's a link up there to the VR chat world. No, I mean, just go out there and have fun. You know, I think VR and social VR really enables people to communicate in new ways and experience things and absolute madness and beauty and serenity all in one way. Yeah.
[00:47:19.813] Dale P Deacon: Gosh, I don't know. Maybe just thanks to you, Ken, for documenting this whole thing. I'm sure people say that all the time, but what you're doing in this space is really appreciated, and I hope you keep it up.
[00:47:31.125] Alex Bossman: Thanks. I guess the one thing I'd love for people to see is if you're listening to this and not experienced VR or experienced VR and haven't started building, dude, build. It's a lot easier than you think it is. You can be far more creative. The space itself currently is so incredibly open and so incredibly welcoming. You can ask questions. There's a million resources online. And it really is a welcoming community that they just want people to succeed. I can make a comparison to, I'm big into climbing. And it's very similar to the climbing community where when you start, people are like, okay, now you do this and now you do this. And how do I help you with that? And it's a really great community. So if you've come across this and you're not part of the VR community or just dipping your toes in, just give it a try.
[00:48:16.584] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I know that I've had at least one person come up to me at Venice Immersive here and said, I just saw Strange Ways and I'm going to make my own world. And so inspiring people with that DIY punk aesthetic and democratizing what's possible for people to have some minimalist input and to really shape a look and feel and vibe and create a whole journey out of it. And I think that's what you've been able to do here and also create a collective embodying and immersed rubber crumb comes to mind in terms of like the types of like illustration cartoons and yeah just kind of enter into the mind of this illustrator of chris and and to really uh see how that can be fleshed out into an entire world an entire experience so yeah just had a lot of fun going through it especially with a group of like 50 people who are all wearing avatars i highly recommend that be a way that you experience it because that that gives a whole other experience to uh just the world itself and uh yeah definitely a collective communal experience so yeah just thanks again for each of you for joining me here on the podcast to help break it all down
[00:49:14.175] Adam Lieber: Thank you very much, Kent. Reiterate what Deke said. It's incredible. I don't know how you do it, but thank you for all your work. And thanks to your audience for listening.
[00:49:23.423] Dale P Deacon: Thanks, Kent. And thanks to the VR community. See you soon.
[00:49:26.789] Alex Bossman: Thanks so much, Kent. Appreciate it. Yes, thank you very much. Sorry for being late.
[00:49:31.592] Kent Bye: No worries. It's a part of Venice. It's part of the Venice experience. Getting it specific places in time can be very difficult here. So it's an embodying of part of the experience here, of both the frustration and the kind of the beauty of entering another mode of time. But yeah, I'm glad that you can at least make it and have your voices here included at the end. So yeah, thanks again.
[00:49:51.062] Adam Lieber: Thank you so much, Kent.
[00:49:54.073] 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.
