I interviewed director Wen Yee Hsieh about Limbotopia that showed at Film Gate Interactive in Miami Florida back in 2023. See the transcript down below for more context on our conversation.
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[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 there's one piece that was at IFA Doc Lab in 2024. It's called Lumbophobia, but before Lumbophobia was actually the previous part of the series called Lumbotopia. So I had a chance to first see Limbitopia at Filmgate Miami last year in December, and I had a chance to talk to Wenyi about Limbitopia. And then when I was at Ifit Doc Lab, I had a chance to do an interview with him about Libophobia, which is either a sequel or a prequel to the first piece. So Wen Yi uses a lot of these abstract, poetic ways of modulating space, his background as an architect. And so the next couple of episodes are ways of trying to find the language and descriptions of the different experiences. And at the essence, it's kind of like giving you this vibe or feeling that is exploring both the Libetopia and Libephobia. And there's also experiences that were originally VR pieces, and both of them were translated into a dome experience. At Filming Miami, it was more of a forward-facing dome where everybody gets essentially the same perspective. And then at DocLab with Lumbophobia, it was actually being more exhibited in a planetarium where you're looking more at this concentric dome experience. So yeah, this experience we'll be talking about limbotopia and then next episode we'll be diving into limbophobia. So that's what we're coming on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Wen Ye happened on Saturday, December 2nd, 2023 at Filmgate Interactive in Miami, Florida. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:49.872] Wen Yee Hsieh: Hello, I'm Wenyi and right now I'm a content creator from Taiwan and I have a studio in Taiwan right now. And I would say I was really fascinated by superstition and film and right now is XR technology. So I think it's a fact and show up in my content recently. And I'm also helping other artists and teams in Taiwan to help them build their imagination world. Great.
[00:02:22.428] Kent Bye: Maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into working with VR.
[00:02:27.560] Wen Yee Hsieh: Sure. I studied architecture design before. So by the time I, in the university, I'm also do photography and do 2D, 3D animation and visual effect and also CGI by myself. So I was really trying to connect these different materials together to build and, oh no, it's combining these materials to speak for myself. Yeah.
[00:02:57.366] Kent Bye: Great. And how did you come across virtual reality then?
[00:03:00.870] Wen Yee Hsieh: It's actually a very great opportunity at 2020. And there's a plan. It's called LabX in Taiwan at the National Taichung Theatre. And my mentor at that time is Tong Yan, which is the director of In the Mist. And I tried to tell him how I'm in love with visual art. I love film. But in my university or in what I'm studying at that time, it is really hard to turn the virtual stuff to connect with architecture design because that is quite different. And it is a very different industry for them, for the architecture design in Taiwan. So that's kind of an experimental platform for me to try out something new. So I was like, yeah, let's do it. Let's create something that might connect architecture, space, and also visual art, virtual content together. And I think VR and XR is a very great point that connects all of these materials.
[00:04:11.878] Kent Bye: And so what was the first virtual reality experience that you had a chance to see then?
[00:04:17.242] Wen Yee Hsieh: Actually, it's in the mist. Yeah, it's at the 2020 Kaohsiung Film Festival, and I watched in the mist at that time. And I find out, yeah, VR, XR is actually, there's some very similar materials inside VR that you can find out. that Tong Yan turned VR into a very theater style. And I was thinking of maybe I can turn the VR experience into some kind of very architectural way or a very space experience inside a space, but very minimal, very clean, and there's not any dialogue. But you can read. It's readable by space. Yeah. And so in 2020, I created a small VR demo. It's called Empty. And inside that experimental platform. And that demo is talking about there's dangerous outside. There are chaos outside. And as an artist, how can we pull back calmly into a peaceful or an emptiness space? And it is created by the artist himself. And it eventually turned out to be the previous concept of Limbotopia inside Filmgate Festival.
[00:05:45.031] Kent Bye: Yeah, and so where did you begin in creating Limbotopia? It's a real vast journey that feels like I'm going through all these liminal spaces and some really vast architectural designs that I think are leaning into your background in architecture. But where did you begin in creating this piece?
[00:06:02.870] Wen Yee Hsieh: Well, it is kind of, yeah, it's also a very great opportunity for me because I was trying to make up the VR experience and figure out how to connect it to my professionals. And I have a friend at that time, he's called Chunlian, and he's also studying architecture design at that time. and we both love photography we love minimal style we love very clean aesthetic so we are trying to build a project just for us and it turned out to be limbo utopia Limotopia is originally an architectural design in 2021, about February to March. After the architectural design finished, we first built the whole landscape, the cityscape of Limotopia. And there were many different maps inside Limutopia. And after we finished the architecture design, we wanted to try out some new storytelling to describe the concept behind Limutopia. So at first we tried to render out a small flat video. It was like a single channel video. It's only three minutes long. And after we finished that one, we soon realized that we need a much more stronger material to, like, the project is speaking for us. It is directly speaking for ourselves. So that's the point Limbotopia turned into a VR version. And April in 2021, we have to finish this project at June in 2021. So it is a very rush and yeah, it's a very quick and we have to make decision very, very fast.
[00:08:05.270] Kent Bye: Yeah, and so where did it first show? Did it show at the Kaohsiung Film Festival then? Where did it premiere?
[00:08:11.253] Wen Yee Hsieh: After we finished the first VR version, and it was a monoscopic version, and the team from Taika, at that time, they were all in the Kaohsiung Film Festival, and they were hosting Kaohsiung Film Festival, and in the competition selection, and before I get into the competition, they were selecting through the whole VR projects and they were like, oh, Limotopia is a very different project from others because there are so many camera rotation and position shifting inside a project. And that is very unusual compared to other projects at that time, because I think most of the creators will try to avoid making people very dizzy. But for me, that is the power of the virtual reality. So, yeah, they think this project is very, very different from others. So that's why I was in the Kaohsiung Film Festival and it's the world premiere at that time. And after the Kaohsiung Film Festival, it went to the Anna Film Festival in the Czech Republic and won the first prize at that time.
[00:09:30.492] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think it's a really beautiful and poetic piece. And yeah, it definitely feels like you're taking me on a journey. What can you tell me about the story or the meaning of Limbotopia or these liminal spaces that you're taking us through?
[00:09:45.808] Wen Yee Hsieh: In brief, I think limbotopia means the connection between the interior state and the exterior state of all of the human beings. And what is already outside world, it is created by ourself inside our brain, inside in the interior part. And because of art, because of the architecture design, because of visual art, because of this material, we are able to turn our thoughts into art and turn them into a real element or real thing that will affect our real world. And yeah, it's quite interesting because I played Alan Wake 2 recently and inside that game, it is also telling the player that how an artist can affect the outside world by their art piece. And yeah, I feel like it's after playing that game, it's really feels like I can understand what the creator of that game and understand what they are thinking of.
[00:10:59.653] Kent Bye: And so there's some quotes that you have at the beginning and end. One is a quote from the poet Pablo Neruda, and then you have some other more poetic phrases there at the end. Maybe you could comment on bookending this piece with some quotes from poetry.
[00:11:15.819] Wen Yee Hsieh: Yeah, there's a quote in the end of Limotopia and it was actually a quote from the original VR demo that I produced in 2020. The one called Empty. And for Empty, it is really a project that means a lot to me because I was like fighting with my original industry. I was in the architecture design. And I try to turn the virtual production or the virtual content and try to combine it into the architecture design industry. And I think there are some really hard times during 2018 to 2020. So for me, the situation was like the outside world is chaos because I was like doing something that nobody was doing before in our industry. And there was like 100 guns pointed at you to tell you to stop doing this because it may change the industry and it may change what we are used to forever. But I believed in what I thought and I just gave it a try. But there's so many chaos happened at that time and I was telling myself that maybe I can turn my art piece into some kind of relief for myself. And because VR is a virtual space, and for me, empty is some kind of the emptiness behind the whole chaos, and it can protect spirits inside that clean space and minimal space.
[00:13:08.416] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah, and talking to other architects who do both physical architecture and virtual architecture, Andrea Ayan-Katsukaru would talk to me about how in the architectural field, there will often be an emphasis of creating a 2D render of the external view of a building, and that a lot of the architecture will be driven by those 2D images. Whereas with VR, it feels like you have a capability of being immersed both in the outside but also the inside of these different spaces. And so maybe you could talk a bit about how virtual reality is opening up these more direct embodied experiences and your phenomenological reactions to your pieces of architecture rather than just putting them into more of an abstracted 2D render.
[00:13:56.414] Wen Yee Hsieh: Yeah, for me, because during our design process, we do build up many different landscape and virtual world, but it ends up being just a 2D rendering. And yeah, I feel like it's kind of a waste because those landscape represented the thoughts behind creators and the thought in their brain, in their head. yeah it feels like there are so many dreams inside our head becomes reality and virtual reality and extend reality can really help us to turn these thoughts these imagination into real stuff and yeah it can be touchable not only just a small scale model or just a 2d rendering on the paper It feels more flexible for our industry.
[00:14:57.290] Kent Bye: Yeah. Have you ever had a chance to see Dr. Morrow's work in VRChat? But a lot of your work reminds me of Dr. Morrow in the sense of using architecture as this kind of vast exploratory world. So in your piece, there's a number of different motifs repeating. There's like a lighthouse. There's also like a tree. So maybe you could talk about some of the different motifs. spatial context that you're taking us on to starting and ending with a lighthouse, but also trees that are repeating in there. And if there's deeper symbolism or meaning behind some of these different images or artifacts or objects
[00:15:35.820] Wen Yee Hsieh: Lighthouse and the light direct the audience, it represented about the hope and what we are looking for just for ourselves. And we need to follow the light and it's all on your own and nobody can help you and nobody with you during the whole journey. So the whole experience is just for you and you won't see anybody during the experience. And we designed the lighthouse or the light that is unreachable. We can't reach the lighthouse and we can't reach the light. It's just always in front of us and we keep moving forward, but we can't touch the light in front of us. And it somehow created the mysterious way how we live in our daily life because we need to follow what we believe, what we think the world should be. And we have to keep producing and keep making art to turn the world into what we want.
[00:16:51.991] Kent Bye: Were there any other virtual reality pieces or films that were providing inspiration for Limbatopia?
[00:16:59.555] Wen Yee Hsieh: Actually not, because I told myself not to watch so many VR works when I was creating projects. And yeah, I think if I watch so many other people's projects during my process, it will affect me very, very much. Actually not VR project. It's more like books or architects and what they thought, what they think the world should be. That's the point really affects me a lot. But it's not a virtual reality project. It's more like other form of art.
[00:17:40.742] Kent Bye: Well, there's a lot of themes of water in this piece where there's a boat and then at some point you end up inside of what feels like a train, what would normally be on land, but it feels like this train is going through the water and you're seeing these other boats that are going by. And then at some point you go underwater and come back up and you see these boats flying around and, you know, there's. Other key moments where you end up again on the boat and floating away from the lighthouse. And so I'd love to hear you reflect on the location of water and what were the themes around the boats and the water, if there was any symbolism or meaning behind that.
[00:18:16.448] Wen Yee Hsieh: Yeah, it actually is a real location in Taiwan and there's a place in Taiwan that is almost dying because of the tides and it feels like that is a very great location for us and it's sparkling our ideas so much because it feels like the outside chaos and aftermath after the whole chaos and we just walk through the aftermath and trying to figure out what has happened before and i think life and death is one of the concept behind the whole project the duality about a thing or yeah we feel like life and death really shows in that location And we're trying to use the real location, really what has happened in Taiwan to reflect what we want to say, want to describe and what's happening in our industry and what's happening during our lifetime at 2020 and 2021. And yeah, that place is a very great location for us to sparkling ideas about life and death and what's already gone and what survived there. Yeah.
[00:19:46.124] Kent Bye: Yeah, there are some moments where you're rotating the camera around, and when people talk about 3DOF, there's like the different directions, and so there's the yaw, which is turning your head left or right, there's the pitch, which is like lifting your head up and down, and then there's the roll, which is basically kind of twisting your head to go from upside down to right side up, and so I feel like the... The roll rotations are comfortable enough where it's kind of flipping the world upside down and you have that within the train. But I feel like, and sometimes the yaw rotation is a huge motion sickness trigger for me. And I actually had to like shut my eyes, otherwise it was going to make me sick. So it's a 360 video. So you could actually like not rotate the camera and just have people turn around and look. And so I'm wondering what the decision process was to do that yaw rotation or twisting the camera around at some point, rather than just having the person turn around and look the other direction.
[00:20:44.246] Wen Yee Hsieh: Yeah, we're trying to control what the audience was seeing in the Limbotopia and by creators, but not on their own will. And it actually came out very, very dizzy at the first version. And even me, even me, after watching the first version, I get very sick. Yeah, so we fixed that. We optimized that very, very much until the final version. It's quite hard to find the balance between you have to make people feeling a little bit dizzy like you get drunk or you just woke up in the middle of night that kind of feeling into the VR360 video. But somehow not to cross the line to let people can't enjoy the whole experience.
[00:21:44.045] Kent Bye: Okay, so it sounds like you left it in because you were trying to use that yaw rotation in a way that may invoke some discomfort, but use that discomfort as to serve the storytelling.
[00:21:54.775] Wen Yee Hsieh: Yeah, I think it's a part of the storytelling. When we are jumping through different chapters or different locations, the rotation will happen, the position changing will happen. And when that happens, when the rotation changing things happen, it represents that you are going forward, you are going into another realm. and it was like there's no gravity and you can find a very safe position during that yam rotation and when the rotation thing stop and then you enter another realm And yeah, I think that's the way how I do the transition. And I love that very, very much. And it shows up in my different projects. I love to do the rotation and position changing to let the audience know they are jumping in the different universe. Yeah.
[00:22:59.878] Kent Bye: And as an architect, if you're designing and building buildings for physical reality, it ends up being fairly static where there's not a lot of dynamic motion or movement oftentimes in buildings. And in this piece, you're able to explore virtual architecture where you have these big columns of white with these white cubes that are undulating back and forth where you have this real visceral movement of like these shaders or these cubes that are moving up and down in this big column of white light. So I'd love to hear any reflections of work as an architect. What's it like for you to work in virtual architecture that allows you to have more of these dynamic processes that are unfolding in the context of your architecture?
[00:23:46.297] Wen Yee Hsieh: Yeah, it really breaks the boundaries what we thought about architecture can become. Because how we build architecture is based on a roof and the ground and also the walls. And in the virtual reality, we can change the physical, we can change the gravity. At some point, the gravity is in front of you, not under your foot. But in virtual reality, we can destroy what the technology we have before and become a very new way and a very new experience. And the new experience we are going to take will let us know, yes, this is a totally different realm and a totally different universe because, yeah, it breaks our knowledge.
[00:24:40.595] Kent Bye: Yeah there's some moments where you do actually turn off gravity in this experience where you have like these boats that are flying up in the air and I feel like as you go through experiences like this I think of it as more of like a luminal space where you're in between the worlds where there's enough of the references to physical reality but it's not so chaotic as to not have any reference points but there is enough where you're kind of in this in-between space where i have some expectations for what i'm going to see but also it's enough of undermining those expectations to allow me to get into the state of awe and wonder and not knowing what quite to expect and i think that's a really nice place to go to when you have no idea what's going to happen next but overall just cultivate this sense of awe and wonder of You know, there's a lot of symbols in there. And as I see the experience, I don't know exactly what each of the objects mean to you. But I feel like at the end of it, I'm able to walk away with this sense of awe and wonder and this emotion of like being taken to a place of another realm that is kind of like a dreamscape in between world.
[00:25:47.573] Wen Yee Hsieh: Well, I would say in the end of the film, the two creators were fighting each other. Like, do we have to end up the project in a very depressing way or full of hope? And it ended up being very hopeful for me. And in the very first version, it's full of the depression after the film ends and audience will walk away the theater and carry the depression out the theater. It reminds me of the production and the decision we are making at that time. We actually studied and know the word liminal space after we finished the project. And we were like, yeah, liminal space is a very great description for this project because in the liminal space, we won't get to know what space is upcoming next. And the whole universe was like a mess inside liminal space. It was like a mental state, but in a very bug. It's like a bug inside a machine or inside a computer. And we accidentally fall into the bug inside the computer and see the very mess and see a very different side from our reality. And it was like combining by our consciousness, but the consciousness is connecting all the human beings. It was like a pool and we enter the pool and find out the universe and the whole space is constructed by our consciousness. Yeah, but in a very architectural way.
[00:27:45.680] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, there's the VR version that you're showing here, and we also had an opportunity to show it in a big dome experience. And so I'd love to hear about your process of converting Lumotopia to be able to show it in a dome.
[00:27:58.210] Wen Yee Hsieh: Yeah. The Dome version is actually, yeah, I have to shout out to friends from Taika because they opened up opportunity for me to create a Dome version at September. And it turned out to be a very, I think it's a very great experiment for me to, in VR, in the VR version, it's more like a subjective experience. It's only, the audience can only experience the whole journey just himself. But the dome version is a collective experience inside a theater. And yeah, it's very different from the VR version for me. But it turned out to be very, very well about how we can change the space by using the full dome and also using the same language of the rotation of the position changing into dome. And yeah, it turned out to be very well.
[00:28:58.137] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'm really glad that I had a chance to see the VR version first, because I feel like the VR version, I got a much better sense of some of the architectural scale of things, like to see it in stereoscopic view. And in the dome version, I felt like it was sort of flattened in a way, where some of the vastness of the architectural buildings that you had created kind of get squashed down in a way that was difficult to see that full spatialized perspective. So I actually really preferred the VR version more than the Dome version. I appreciated watching it with an audience, but I felt like the visceral nature of my embodied journey that I went on in VR was so much more visceral and impactful in terms of the spatial context that you had created where I wasn't as sure as how well that was able to be translated into the full scale and scope and majesty of the architecture that you created that didn't necessarily completely translate for me in the Dome.
[00:29:57.324] Wen Yee Hsieh: I feel like there are different, like, we can use the VR version to let the audience know how far or how close the object is from you and how big, how tall the architecture is, the arch is. And in the dome version, it's more like, for me, it's more, the production is more like doing a flat video, flat video version because it gives us a chance to do the dolly zoom we want to do inside the VR version. And before we are doing the production of the single channel video version, we have that dolly zoom in that single channel video version. But when it become VR version, we can't use the dolly zoom because there's no lens inside the VR and it's just space and 360 space. So we have to delete the original concept of the dolly zoom from the VR version. But in the dome version, we can reuse that concept again because it's more like doing a flat single channel video for us. Great. And so what's next for you? Actually, I just finished in 2021, August. After we finished Limbotopia, we soon write down the sequel. It's called Limbophobia. And we were planning to build the project in 2020. But it ended up showing and premiered in 2023, this year. And we just finished the Limbophobia, the sequel. And it's really related to Limbotopia a lot. But I won't tell anybody which one is first, which one is the second one. I feel like audience will eventually find out which one is the first one and which one is the second one after they watch both of them. But if you want to watch the Topia version first or Phobia version first, it's totally fine. The storyline is still connected.
[00:32:16.704] Kent Bye: Great. And, uh, I guess a question around, like there is a lot of dream logic or story that has symbols, but they'd have to be unpacked and described. And are you happy with people having their own experience and taking away whatever they want or is kind of describing or having them understand all the meaning and symbolism, a big part for you to also ensure that they understand all the deeper meaning of a piece.
[00:32:44.494] Wen Yee Hsieh: I won't force the audience to really understand what I want to tell them and for me it should be very enjoyable and it's just it's meant to be just a feeling for them but not reading the theory or reading so many words or so many feelings directly from creators I want them to like It's just a feeling created by me, but somehow you can have your own feeling, but directly from your past. Because your past can come out by the feeling I created. and it was very interesting to see and to hear the feedback from all the audience after watching Limotopia because there are so many different thoughts came out and Yeah, I was like hearing their thoughts, hearing what they are, their worries in their lifetime. It's very like I was hovering on the sky and watching all the worries that human being is suffering on the earth. And yeah, it's very romantic for me. Yeah.
[00:34:04.387] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality and immersive storytelling might be and what it might be able to enable?
[00:34:15.464] Wen Yee Hsieh: I would say because when I was studying architecture design, they're trying to tell us to close your emotional part because we won't need any emotional part during the progress of the architecture design. But when the virtual reality came out, I think the emotional state from human beings really became a very important point at the stage to create an art piece that will connect different people from different places because We have the same worries. We are all human and we have the feelings and that's how art piece is working. It's trying to express ourselves, but not only ourselves, also others. Yeah, I think the virtual reality or any other MR or AR will do their best to produce or to let people to understand the connection between our interior state and the exterior state. But somehow they are all connected together. There's no duality way like we are separate, the inside world and the outside world, but they are all connected together.
[00:35:42.145] Kent Bye: Great. Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:35:51.858] Wen Yee Hsieh: If you see LimboTopia or Limbophobia in any festival or any event, please sit back and enjoy the film because it's a very artistic project for me, but it's actually some kind of conversation that you have to have the conversation with yourself. And it might relieve some of the worriness or some of the bad situation you might be in right now. And I hope to give the audience a more hopeful way to keep going and keep going their life. Yeah.
[00:36:39.514] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, it's a really beautiful piece. I really quite enjoyed it. And yeah, it gave me this real sense of awe and wonder. And I always love meeting artists with architectural background because I feel like there's something around the intuitive way that you understand space and spatial design and moving yourself through these spaces and the way that you can use that spatial architecture to convey a story or a feeling or a journey that you take us on. And Yeah, just a really beautiful piece, and thanks for taking the time for sharing a little bit more about your process and your journey in creating Limbotopia. So thank you. Thanks so much.
[00:37:14.368] Wen Yee Hsieh: Thanks.
[00:37:15.528] Kent Bye: Thanks again for listening to the Voices of VR podcast, and I really would encourage you to consider supporting the work that I'm doing here at the Voices of VR. It's been over a decade now, and I've published over 1,500 interviews, and all of them are freely available on the VoicesofVR.com website with transcripts available. This is just a huge repository of oral history, and I'd love to continue to expand out and to continue to cover what's happening in the industry. But I've also got over a thousand interviews in my backlog as well. So lots of stuff to dig into in terms of the historical development of the medium of virtual and augmented reality and these different structures and forms of immersive storytelling. So please do consider becoming a member at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
