THE SECRET LIFE OF MONSTERS: THE GATEWAY EXPERIENCE is a mixed reality puzzle game created by Wallrus Creative Technologies as an immersive demo in order to feature the unique tracking technology they’ve created in order to better facilitate LBE mixed reality experiences on the Quest. They built a tracking system hidden within their custom tiling in order to have all of the Quest HMDs know where true north is located, and avoiding some of the more annoying and time-consuming calibration steps involved with mixed reality experiences. The experience itself featured a seamless transition between floating mixed portals and immersive worlds where you have to find and scan corrupting monsters in the parallel realities. I get the full story of how the project developed from Emile Arragon and JP Desjardins, and it’s interesting to note that Arragon is really sensitive to motion sickness from virtual locomotion in VR, but mixed reality experiences where you only move when your body moves are a lot more comfortable for him. And the experience does demonstrate their elegant solution for a mixed reality calibration and orientation solution that could open up a number of new mixed reality experiences within different LBE contexts.
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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 and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So continuing on my series of looking at different immersive stories from South by Southwest 2025, I'm going to start to get into a section where I'm talking around both mixed reality, and then later I'll be digging into curating archives and AI. But this piece is really a mixed reality piece that I'll be diving in today. It's called The Secret Life of Monsters, The Gateway Experience. So this was by a creative technology firm called Walrus Creative Technologies. And the way that this experience came about was that they had this tracking technology that you'd be able to precisely locate the boundaries of different spaces which allowed them to open up a quest headset not have to really orient or set up the mixed reality spaces and have a number of these different trackers attached both headset and hidden in the ground and they're able to very precisely place these mixed reality portals so you walk in and you see these portals and you solve a puzzle to go into this whole other realm You scan these different monsters and then you go out and you have this whole narrative that is around this mechanic of this gameplay loop of going into the portals, scanning and finding things and coming out. But the real innovation, I think, is that they're able to really create a solid location based experience with mixed reality and have the core technology underneath that is able to make a consistent experience. And so that's how they started with it, was to create some sort of demo in order to demonstrate this broader technology that they've created, hoping that they're able to spread it out to other location-based entertainment contexts, whether it be museums, other LBEs, or just trying to push forward and solve one of the problems that you can add a little bit of hardware and integration to just make the whole experience of mixed reality a little bit more seamless. So that's what we're coming on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with JP and Emil happened on Tuesday, March 11th, 2025 at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:17.903] JP Desjardins: Hi, I'm JP Desjardins. I'm CEO and co-founder of Walrus Creative Technologies, and I manage all of our project development at Walrus.com.
[00:02:27.669] Emile Arragon: And I'm Emil Alago, I'm also one of the co-founders and I was a creative director on the Secret Life of Monster Gateway that we're presenting here.
[00:02:35.054] Kent Bye: Great. Maybe could each give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space?
[00:02:40.097] JP Desjardins: Absolutely. So we started as filmmakers. I started as a director back in the days, making short film. And then we quickly pivoted toward tech development simply because at that time we wanted to build technology that we could sell all over the world. And then we started building brand activation using those technologies in events across the world. And today we kind of use the R&D that we do in brand activations and so on to build more artistic personal project. And the Secret Life of Monsters Gateway is a little bit of that. And at the same time, we're trying to innovate and invent and develop a new format of mixed reality experiences.
[00:03:21.092] Emile Arragon: Yeah, as JP said, that's pretty much it. I have a similar... I mean, we've been working together for over 20 years.
[00:03:26.274] Kent Bye: Yeah, 20 years at this point.
[00:03:27.554] Emile Arragon: My God.
[00:03:29.175] Kent Bye: So, similarly, a background in filmmaking?
[00:03:30.756] Emile Arragon: Yeah, exactly. So, I have a double major in philosophy and film production. I started out as a cinematographer. I was camera department in a couple of Hollywood films, and then I pivoted when I met JP and Jasmine, our other partners, and we've been doing crazy stuff ever since. Any specific area of philosophy? Mostly metaphysics and epistemology. And I would not say that it transcends into the work that we do, but somehow there's always this philosophical aspect of everything that sort of decides how I live my life as a nihilistic person. No, I'm kidding. But no, no, no. Studying in philosophy was extremely interesting. I think it sets the tone for everything, every decision you make and how you approach the world and what's around it. Yeah.
[00:04:17.210] Kent Bye: Interesting combination of philosophy and film majors. Did you ever feel that those were combined in any of the other projects that you did or the work that you're doing now?
[00:04:26.385] Emile Arragon: Yeah, maybe not in Gateway, because the point of Gateway was for people to have a lot of fun in a really short amount of time. And so we worked more with concepts that had to do with what everybody knows. They're non-tropes, they're non-things, so that I can sort of throw you out there, throw terminology and imagery, and you're like, okay, I already feel at home, this is fine. But in other pieces that we worked, in some of the old films that we used to do, it mattered more, yeah.
[00:04:51.488] Kent Bye: Okay. I always appreciate when people are bringing in different disciplines and backgrounds into the space. So thanks for that. Well, maybe we should start from the beginning in terms of where did this project really begin? What was the inciting moment for what you wanted to start to explore?
[00:05:06.521] JP Desjardins: We've been trying for five years to find ways to get people to... really have the most intuitive immersion between physical and virtual space. So we started with The Secret Life of Monsters about, the idea was about five years ago. And at first it was a public art experience where we managed to do a geomatic scan of an environment using lasers and then we took that mesh that we had and integrated it in unreal to create a virtual environment that's really like a third of an inch give or take scaled to the reality so all the volumes are the same and so on so the goal was really first of all to get an environment that even though it's different all the volumes are the same with the real environment that you're exploring and then At the time, we did a research and development project around 5G streaming. So we used one of the first private 5G network to live stream content that was being rendered on the edge. So like to get a rich 3D experience on mobile phones. So people could use the phones as a window on the world around them and explore a world that's like overlaid on top of reality so that took us like three years to get off the ground to build out and to deploy so we actually deployed this downtown montreal in a space that was around maybe like four thousand square feet oh ten well yeah it was ten thousand square foot which was quite something So 10,000 square feet, so even larger than I thought. And then once this was done, we were excited to see how people interacted with it. But you still had the phone. There was still a bit of jank with the technology. So we wanted to find a way. to make it even more intuitive. And that's when Emile had the idea to take our experience that we had on, we use Samsung folds. So the foldable phones that had incredibly powerful GPU, I knew they were so expensive for what they had, but we wanted to be able to have people actually walk through the experience and always be immersed. So I'll hand it to Emile to take it and explain how we got into the next step of a project.
[00:07:21.021] Emile Arragon: So the Secret Life of Monster had like an impressive Bible as a project of about 50, 60 page of backstories, what the world was like, what the things was like, but there was no story to it. It was just visual storytelling. So whenever you were going and you were looking at the world, things were passively happening everywhere around you, but not at a level at all as what we're doing with Gateway. So the first thing we said was, well, now we have those Quest 3 headsets and there is a way for us to immerse people a lot more deeply. Why don't we make a story about it? And that's where Gateway came through. So that's why they share a part of the name and Gateway is sort of a spiritual successor of the art piece that we initially did. Except now it's this whole science fiction saga where you're a scientist on this alien space station and the monster world becomes a place you travel through using quantum tunneling. And then, because I, as a person, have a lot of difficulty with VR, I have vestibular sensitivity like a lot of people actually do, VR tends to make me really sick. Meaning that the moment I have a game where I need to physically push a joystick for the character to move in VR, I'm unable to experience anything at all. And then it becomes, well, I want to be able to take these participants to different places of this world, but I have a limited space because we always do, and yet I want to bring them everywhere. How do we do this? And this is when mixed reality came into play. What if we build a physical set that can serve as a hub where you are on that space station with holograms and people talking to you, and this becomes a place that you use to move from one place to the other in the world. And so by meshing this mixed reality with virtual reality and going in and out of both mediums throughout the piece, all the pieces sort of fell into place and then the story just emerged on its own.
[00:09:07.162] Kent Bye: Yeah, and so when did the mixed reality component start to come on? And seeing that Quest 1 had come out in maybe 2019 and Quest 2 came out in 2020. And so you're talking around not even having real functional mixed reality functionalities. And so now with the Quest 3, it's a lot more viable to do a project like this with color pass-through mixed reality. But up until the release of Quest 3, there wasn't really a viable platform. But you'd been working on it for a long time. And so was this a project that you had anticipated that the technology was going to get better by the time that you were going to finish? Yeah, just trying to get a sense of the timing of this exploration of mixed reality when the technology really hadn't even been developed fully yet.
[00:09:46.030] Emile Arragon: So Gateway as a project, we started working on it, I think it was two weeks after the Quest 3 release. Two weeks after we got the first headset in our hands and we started playing with it and I was like, JP, this is it. We now have it. And he was like, what are you talking about? I'm like, this is the first time I'm excited with VR in my life. This headset is fun. I can wear it. I feel great. I'm having fun at home, just walking around, holding windows and doing things. this is it, we can tell something. And yeah, I think it released in September in Canada and we started working almost right away on it. It was really like this is the medium that's made for us.
[00:10:21.249] JP Desjardins: And it kind of tied in because we as a creative technology agency, we worked a lot with like WebAR, for example, AR using app, using ARKit on phones. And it's kind of a medium that unless there's like an OS integration that Apple does in the future, it feels like a dead end just because there's so many limitations and there's still kind of a lot of jank. And when we started experimenting with a Quest 3, like the software was just so good and mature that it just worked. So we were like, how can we take this hardware functionality and integrate a really good story and integrate VR elements because VR are really good for full immersion, but at the same time, create an experience that doesn't create what we like to call VR fatigue, where you feel like completely drained after doing like a 30 or 40 minute experience.
[00:11:13.120] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I overheard you talking to someone about some of the really fancy tracking technologies that are in the floor. Because this experience, you're going to three different portals and triggering based upon the location of those portals. But in order to determine the location of the user and the headset to those three different waypoints, We had to have some way to communicate these different regions. So maybe you could just elaborate a little bit more around the underlying technology that enables you to trigger location-specific points that you can launch into the experience.
[00:11:47.168] Emile Arragon: So we're from the brand activation world, so we always have in the back of my mind, how can this be deployed as easily as possible? How would it be used by the brand ambassadors, the people that are orchestrating the thing? And we know that technology needs to just work, or else it's unsellable, it's unusable, because this thing is not made for home, it's made for LBs, it's made for specific places where you build the set. And so one of the issues we had with the quest is an issue of orientation and implementation. So basically, when you boot on the quest and you draw guardians, it will determine that one way is forward. And then based on that, everything that will happen will follow this thing. Even though the Quest has a built-in magnetometer, it doesn't have a way to give us information about where the true north is, and it sort of decides this orientation kind of on its own. And this was an issue for us, because once you build the set, once we have many headsets and we need to be able to go through them and change them and things, we need north to always be where north is. We need our portals to always be where the portals are. And we simply could not do that efficiently without having to build new versions of the game all the time. And we're like, this as a format does not work. So what we did is that we use ultrawideband sensors, basically with their own magnetometers that we put in the floor at various places, one at the entry of the room, the other one where the portals are. Every headset has one in its head. And when you basically boot the game, It pings each one of them. We have small sensors. And it automatically draws the shape of the room and positions a portal and gives the information to Unreal. And then they fall asleep. So we're not draining the battery, so you don't need to change them. It's really low energy. But it makes it so that all of the issues we have are all of a sudden nonexistent. It also makes it so that if I'm being told, well, I like this. I want to do it. But my room is not a square. It's a rectangle, and I have a thing over there. we don't have to build a new game. I simply go, we move the sensors around, we move the art direction around, and then you click on the thing, and the room is automatically drawn. The portals are where they need to be.
[00:13:51.239] Kent Bye: Just a quick clarification, is the room also drawn for Oculus' internal chaperone system, or is that separate?
[00:13:57.361] Emile Arragon: For the chaperone?
[00:13:58.161] Kent Bye: Yeah, on the quest system.
[00:14:00.882] Emile Arragon: Yes, and no. Basically, it draws a guardian that is larger than everything, basically, around it, and the shape is there. But in our game, I don't know if you've seen, but when you're in full VR, There are their own boundaries that are drawn in those sort of spheres that is not part of the Guardian system. Basically, if you step out of them, what we do is that we transition you back in reality and you just go back to mixed reality, but you don't step out of the experience. And the Guardian is larger than the zone itself so that it's completely transparent and you never have to face the fact that you're playing a VR game. one of the things that we were trying to do is full immersion we didn't want to have anything that is extra diegetic to the experience that you go through so we don't want you to see the portal we don't want you to see the menus we don't want you to see anything we want you to forget that there is a technology that is happening we want you to be immersed completely in the adventure and so the technology should serve that purpose to promote immersion and not create more technical complications
[00:14:59.685] JP Desjardins: It's funny that as a creative tech agency, we put so much work to kind of remove the tech from the experience to make it as seamless as possible and to put it on the purpose of a story. And that's kind of really everything that we put in was all towards the story, but also to make the transitions as seamless as possible. And I think that we've achieved that quite well in this experience.
[00:15:26.892] Kent Bye: Yeah, and so I'm trying to get a sense of, as you were developing it, at what point did you realize that you needed to do this bespoke custom tracking of True North system in order to really pull off the vision that you had? You get to Quest 3, two weeks later you start working on it, but at what point do you run into this as a kind of a blocker that you need to do some yak shaving and solve this problem before you can come back to the story?
[00:15:48.098] Emile Arragon: So this ultra wide bend positioning system has been something that we've been working on, generally speaking, because it's something that we believe we can deploy in museums and anything that can be multipurpose. So right now we're repurposing it for this type of need, but the idea of it did not come for this project specifically. So it was kind of like right place, right time. We're already working on this. We know how to solve this issue. So let's apply what we know. but the point of the system initially is for more interactive experiences when you can also use it for example for escape room type things or for museum to detect when you're at and playing background sounds you know like showmaster deployment things so it was something we already had in back of our pocket and it simply fast tracked our development of it because now we had a goal to have it ready but when exactly did we notice it? about October last year when we were working on it and it was like okay this is shifting this is shifting even more I don't like this shifting and now I need to find a solution for this but yeah it came out of like us already knowing how to fix the issue or else I don't know what we would have done honestly
[00:16:57.901] Kent Bye: Nice. And so maybe you could go through a little bit of your creative process for you're creating like an interactive game, you know, and some people are coming from a film background. They'll start with a script and come up with a story. There's some, you know, like Alex McDowell will talk about world building. So there's the development of the world before the story develops. Also, there's the game design element, so thinking about some of the core interactions that are also influencing how everything is being put together. And so it's an iterative design amongst all of these different things. And so I'm just curious what that development process was and where you began and how you started to iterate between these different modalities.
[00:17:32.997] JP Desjardins: I'll start and I'll let Emil go. So for us, it's kind of different because we work with private clients and brand activation with like sports teams. So we have a tech development pipeline where there's different technologies that we work with. And then we're like, oh, this is cool. This is cool. And then we try to put things together to create something new. And then when we think we have something new, for example, like seamless transition between mixed reality and VR, and we're like, wow, this is really cool. We think this has a huge potential. We think we could deploy this with some entertainment properties, with sports team, with location-based entertainment, with existing IPs and so on. We're like, we want to share this with the world, but to be able to get people to understand it, we need to build content for it. and the secret life of monsters is their own ip so it's creating a story that uses this is like the best way to explain the potential of what this is to the world to the people and that's why we wanted to do our world premiere at south by southwest because we think that the people that come here are exactly aligned that's what we're looking for we're looking to see what's next So we're technologists, but initially we were storytellers and we think like this is like a medium that we really love creating stories for. Emil, I think you can pick up on that.
[00:18:56.062] Emile Arragon: More to the point of what you asked, it started as a world building. So we started by creating the world of monster. Basically, JP came up at one point and was like, wouldn't it be cool if we could tell a story where we get to see where the monsters from our stories live, where they come from? We took that and we're like, yeah, sure. How would that work? And then it was like, well, perhaps they live in an alternate reality. And what we see basically of them when the mesh between different realities become so thin that by mistake they come into our world and that's where we see them and we're scared of them because of the unknown and they're scared of us because they don't get why they're there and So this is where they come from. Okay, but then what is their world? What is their thing and we started planning what their world would look like what their interaction would look like and it was interesting because You have those monsters that are 350 feet tall, and you have those monsters that are a feet tall. And it's like, okay, how do they coexist? And that's where the worldbuilding really started. We started crafting all those buildings with different sizes of doors and things, and imagining how each one of them would fit into the ecosystem, which one did what, which one were more human-like, which one breeded other types of monsters and things like that. And it really started from the worldbuilding. because of the art exhibit piece, which was really about showcasing the world and the interaction. And then when we started working on Gateway, it was like, well, I want to build a story about how we get to go to their world this time. Then how do we do this? Well, we would need a hub for us to teleport to their existence. And then the story sort of came backward from where we wanted to go into how I get you to go there. So I don't think that's the standard creative process because of the way it was sort of reversed engineer in this case. But I think the important thing is the final product and not necessarily how you get there.
[00:20:46.232] Kent Bye: And it also sounds like that you wanted to exhibit this core technology that you had built in order to show a use case for how it could potentially be used in other use cases. And so before we continue to unpack different aspects of your experience, I'm just curious if you could elaborate on what are some of the other use cases that you would see this core technology that you built, and then Also, the difficulties that you faced in October of last year of trying to match the virtual and the mixed reality with a consistent orientation. And what other type of context do you think that would be very well suited for in an LBE context or other contexts?
[00:21:22.165] JP Desjardins: We think the mixed reality medium is a great way. Well, first of all, we feel it's like a new way to consume information. So just as a way to kind of better understand how humans can so easily interpret and mediate information between something in a physical space using mixed reality we think this has great potential so museums are definitely a place that are looking and we feel that it can tie in well with a business model where you can just pay let's say 20 more and just add a part of the experience where you get a headset and then you get to go into paintings, for example, go into a sculpture and so on. While before doing that, you can get information in mixed reality, which kind of allows you to instead of having to read, it allows you to feed the information with a different rhythm, with richer content, like with music, with sound, with voices, which is a lot more aligned with how we're used to consume content today, instead of just reading, which is just the state of society now, for better or worse. Then we see this being deployed as well in museal type of brand activation, like for example, Hockey Hall of Fame in different venues as well. even B2B events where you want to do a tour, for example, of different complex product where you want to show different information. We think that this is a good medium to mediate the information. And then, obviously, we're looking to deploy this in ticketed experiences that can be from theme parks to location-based entertainment where we would have a first room that would be interactive, then we would have an experience like that that's about 20 minutes, and then a third room that would also be interactive. But we think that the sweet spot for a VR, MR experience like that is about 20-ish minutes to keep everyone fresh and engaged all the time. So these are the three, and for that we're looking into existing IPs as well as Secret Life of Monsters, the IP that we developed in-house, but we're looking to work with established IPs as well.
[00:23:34.569] Kent Bye: OK. And so back to the secret life of monsters, you have the world building is the core where you're starting with the design of these worlds. But you also have the world building and the design of the actual physical set that you have. On top of that, there's the design of the puzzles to get inside of these secret worlds, but also the interaction designs that you have once you get into the world. So maybe talk around how you started to develop both the puzzles and the other interaction design that are in this project.
[00:24:03.792] Emile Arragon: Sure. I don't think that it was such a thought of way of doing this. It came out more or less naturally because the thing is we wanted something that was accessible to both children who are accustomed to VR and their parents who are usually not as accustomed to it. So the puzzles were there sort of as a way to create gamification elements to it, to make the story richer, the gameplay richer. But it was always meant to be simple, to be like just, you know, you look for stuff, you find them, you punch them in and then you teleport themself. It was sort of the easiest answer to a problem we were trying to solve. There are still things that we believe could be more complicated. We could make rooms that are more difficult to travel, that had more intrinsic gameplay elements. But just from the feedback we've had so far at South by Southwest, I think it shows that to go with something that is simple was the correct way to go. As in any form of ticketed experience or things that is time-based, specifically in multiplayer, nobody wants to feel stupid. So everybody likes to feel like, OK, I get the hang of this. I know where I'm going. And maybe once people have done those interactive adventures 10 or 15 times, we will all be ready for more complexity. But for now, I believe that keeping the puzzle element rather simple and simply as a mean to move forward in the story was definitely the correct choice for our piece.
[00:25:31.073] JP Desjardins: We would feel like the kinetic element, like the physical set is really important for us. We feel that having physical elements really elevate the experience by making it more tangible to people. Like when you do full VR at some point, and I'm a big consumer of VR, it can feel kind of disconnected while being able to interact with physical elements of the set really makes it feel more real in a way. And the next step for that and that probably with like the next generation of headset will be to have stuff where you could maybe more easily like climb where you can move your body even more in order to interact with elements. And we think that when you put your body on the line, either by like doing stuff that's physically hard or just moving your body in different position, it really elevates the level of engagement while doing the experience.
[00:26:26.018] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I heard you had a bit of a scare where your physical set almost didn't make it here.
[00:26:31.182] JP Desjardins: Oh, yes, we did. But that's just due to, you know, one day there's tariff, the other day there's none. So warehouses in Canada were like in full panic mode where people were holding shipments and so on. So we had to have one guy, a hero, drove like 27 hours to... to get it on time and then we were able to really work really hard to have it all set and I think we're ready like one hour in advance so all thanks to the awesome effort of our team.
[00:26:59.881] Kent Bye: Wow, quite a scare there. So there's also some look and find mechanics where once you get into these worlds you're trying to scan but you're also trying to find these other objects and it kind of gives this way of engaging with the world rather than just being there and looking and I had this experience of being in this total panic, flooded state when I first started the experience. And so I actually missed all of the verbal instructions. And I felt like when I got into the experience, I wasn't able to get into the code because I was getting the code wrong. And then from there, I was like, once I got into the scanning spot, then I started to walk around. But then I couldn't walk around. And I was like, oh, what am I supposed to do? So I feel like there's a certain amount of the interaction design that It's not tutorialized in the context in which the information needs to be delivered. And so I guess in terms of experiential design, that'd be one feedback is that providing some instructions once you get to that point, or maybe part of the puzzle is that you have to listen to the instructions. But for me, I was in such a flooded state that I missed all the instructions and then felt really lost. But you also don't want to make it so difficult that if you want to have people demoing it, that they're not able to get through. So I think probably most people are able to get through just fine. It's just I happen to be in an extremely panicked state. Love to hear any comments or reflections on that.
[00:28:13.335] Emile Arragon: Part of what you're saying is true. Part of what you're saying is something we experienced, and it was always something we were scared of. We need to give a certain amount of information in order for you to understand what you're supposed to do. But the more information you give, the less retention the user has onto the information, how it is given. And for sure, there is some refinement that we will try to do. The other thing that's particular is that a festival like that or a trade show is a peculiar space to do those activations. Because the mindset of the participant is not necessarily, hey, I'm going to do something cool and I'm in the mood for this. It's like you got all those things that you're trying to figure out, the schedules and the thing. And it's a particular type of crowd. But one thing for sure that we are going to do is... move the secondary objectives which are the objects that you need to find and remove them from the beginning of the experience so I'm only giving you one objective which is a lot simpler and if you do scan an object that you're like why is there a human boat sitting there then all of a sudden you trigger the secondary objectives and the scientists will tell you well that's interesting it seems like you found something from another world so to add some of the instruction to inputs from the user if they do ever go there in order to shorten the beginning and to only make it happen as you discover things. So this is something that we're already aware of and that we will be working on when we come back.
[00:29:34.835] JP Desjardins: One of the challenges that we had is because the timeline was so crunched, the physical set was done on the day it was put in crates and shipped, so we were never able to playtest the whole experience with the physical space. So when we arrived, like the puzzle, for example, we realized I was the first to kind of do the experience. And it took me like, you know, a minute to figure out the first puzzle. So there was a few elements that were just not design wise that we need to optimize. And also just we think the overall flow of the experience is really good. But there's like a ton of like fine details that we just need to tweak to make it perfect and even more streamlined.
[00:30:18.123] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. And I think part of my experience was having that sort of cognitive overload and not having that context based. Also, I think whenever I am at a film festival, escape room puzzle games are always like the most stressful because if you get stuck on a puzzle, then it's like the mental friction gets amplified because I want to simultaneously see all of the experience, but also like there's all these other pressures that have me. So I think you're you're right in the sense that like in a film festival context, where people are making schedules. They have to be at a certain place at a certain time. So they have to have all these other things that are also there. So anyway, I think that's kind of a unique exhibition context here at South By.
[00:30:55.720] Emile Arragon: And it's also why we help people and we tell them in advance. And after seeing how you went through it, we've been spending a little more time before telling people like, are you in a hurry or not? Let us explain. So we'll give you the first password so you see how it works and then you can sort of replicate how it goes. And it's been helping. But we'd be happy to test it more with also younger crowd because South by doesn't have a lot of youngsters, let's put it that way. to be able to see how they enjoy these elements. Because puzzles in gaming in general has always been a hit or miss thing. Some people love it, and I myself play games that are full of puzzles and things like that, and I'm like, this is so fun. Like The Witness and stuff like that, and a long time ago, Riven and Myst and things like that. And some people, they freak out at those games. They spend 30 minutes doing absolutely nothing, and they're like, I don't get this. I don't understand it. so it's not for everybody we understand that but hopefully this experience is also meant to there's always going to be a mediator that is there so it's also the meteor's job to sort of acclimate how he do things to what the public is and who the public are so there is clearly something that we'll work on but i think we're still comfortable that it's not necessarily for absolutely everybody
[00:32:12.247] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think I enjoy puzzles, but just not under a pressured time constraint context. So I guess I am less of an escape room enthusiast in that way. So yeah, I guess you're here at South By would have been some of the reactions that you've received so far.
[00:32:28.180] Emile Arragon: I think the most reaction we get is that it looks extremely good, that the VR portion of it is really out there. And it's something that we're really proud of because we're an indie studio. I mean, we're a really small team that worked on it. And the quality of what we've managed to push out of a standalone Quest 3 is very, very impressive, honestly.
[00:32:52.404] JP Desjardins: One thing that surprised me is that even though it's a very tech savvy crowd, you still have like, I mean, XR as a medium is a baby and you have like such a range of proficiency in VR. So having all of those people with that range of proficiency doing our experience. We had someone that had a panic attack when the MR transitioned to VR, and it was full immersion. It was the first time she was doing VR. But that was really interesting because she had a panic attack. It's kind of cool that it can cause a panic attack. When you look at experiential, This is like true emotion, you know? Then we had a lot of, I think a lot of people, once they experience the seamless transition, they see the potential of the medium as something that is like really good to tell stories, but also to mediate the information by transitioning between both. And it's something that I'm not seeing a lot this year at South by like really mixed reality. But I think like next year it's probably gonna be everywhere.
[00:33:54.906] Emile Arragon: There was one lady that came and she enjoyed her experience a lot, but I think we hit everything possible with her. She turned out she was scared of heights. She was afraid of spiders. She was scared of the unknown and scared of the dark. But everything managed to be just at the tip of what was enough for her without her panicking. But her reactions, they were visceral. It was every time she went something and she did there and every time he was Oh my God. And every time we went to him, he was like, are you okay? Barely. But this is great. But I'm scared. But this is great. To know that you can get those type of reactions through the story to the art of what you're doing is fantastic to watch.
[00:34:40.464] Kent Bye: Awesome. So what's next for this project? Do you hope to show it out and demo it and pursue the technology side? Or do you hope to continue to flesh this out for your original IP in a location-based entertainment context? Love to hear where you'd like to take it in the future.
[00:34:54.094] JP Desjardins: Well, we're looking at Alice in Wonderland. That would probably be the next theme that we'd like to explore, just with the notion of rabbit hole. And also, it has a potential for the creation of really amazing, mind-blowing visual content, which we know that we can do. And it's a known enough IP that we think it has a lot of potential to do like a family friendly ticketed experience. So that's one area that we're pursuing. We're also discussing with other established IP holders and also working with some of our clients to integrate this in brand activation as well for more museum type activations.
[00:35:33.803] Kent Bye: Yeah, and one follow-on question I have in terms of your setup, because you have three different portals and three different people going through at the same time. What happens when two people need to be going through the same portal when they're progressing? Like if they start on opposite sides and they both need in the middle, but someone's there, how are you able to continue to progress through the game to avoid those different types of conflicts?
[00:35:55.362] Emile Arragon: So in the context of South by, because we knew people were going to be late, we're not doing waves, but usually the game is made so that when you have three people that are starting at the same time, they only see one portal at a time. And it's made so that it's like a musical game chair. So we don't let you go wherever you want. Each headset has sort of its way it's going to go and everybody goes in circle and they don't bump into one another. We've sort of made it more open here to kitters so we can push as many people to go through. And that's also the job currently of the mediator to try to minimize those blockage points. And when it do happen, that's why we actually have a compendium in the game that maybe you didn't get to experience because you were alone, I believe. But everything that you scan and you log basically goes into your compendium, which you can open. And you can read about the history of all those monsters that you scan, their ecosystem, how they reproduce, and stuff like that. And also, every object that you do find have a little story that has a nod to various employees that have worked on the game.
[00:36:57.895] Kent Bye: OK. Yeah, I missed that part. So it's cool that you have a little mini game, or at least you're collecting all the things, and then you get to explore them after that. Cool. I'd love to hear what you think is kind of the ultimate potential of immersive storytelling and mixed reality and what you think it might be able to enable.
[00:37:17.654] JP Desjardins: I think mixed reality is just the future of how we will consume content. I don't know if you've seen the movie Anon where people have like contact lens that just augments everything that they see and all the architecture is just like flat gray surface because basically everyone sees different things on it. I don't think it's necessarily going to be as dark or deep as this but i think mixed reality as a medium as having like an overlay with information that's always on that can be turned off if you want it's just so efficient for us as human it's more efficient than you know looking at your phone right now we're always looking at our phone but as soon as we can get that information in front of us And we can get contextual information based on either what you look at or where you are. This will reduce the information noise that we're experiencing today. So I think it's just a matter of time that we're going there because it's just way more efficient. So as storytellers, I think the medium... of being able to have like short stories, like three minute, two minute VR segment, it makes so much sense with how busy we are. I think the long for medium like film will always be there because there are stories, but even film as a medium is in a weird place because in many ways, like the mini-series format that's like six hour, allows for a lot deeper stories while still being very palatable and being able to be consumed either in one day by binge watching or over time. So because our lives are a lot more fragmented in a certain way, the way that we work is not necessarily linear anymore, I think there's a lot of potential for either more short-form content, a bit like what we're doing, But at the same time, there's a lot of potential with long form content. But right now you can't do long form content in VR just because it fatigues you.
[00:39:14.179] Emile Arragon: I see MR as a way to stop the isolation that you get from VR. Maybe it's because of the space we're in and the brand activations we do and things like that. But we believe that we need to gather people together. And it's also why a lot of people are commenting, when will this be for home? And then we're like, we don't want to do this for home. We don't want you to experience this alone. We want you to experience this with people. We want it to be a destination thing that you go to, which you're your friends and your family and that you experience collectively. I want to take you out there somewhere else, but with your friends. And this is something we really believe in, and that's why we are crafting those experiences in the way we're crafting them. As for VR itself, I think if we ever manage to do VR that actually intercepts brain signals and that interprets you trying to move and having you move instead of using controllers, we might have a true VR revolution. But until then, I think it will still be a niche thing for the home that will have a hard time implementing solidly in every household.
[00:40:20.405] Kent Bye: Awesome. And is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:40:26.601] JP Desjardins: Come to South by Southwest. It's pretty much the place. I think this is the best way to kind of get everyone together and seeing what other people are doing. Even for us, having the chance to experience so much of what the community is doing really elevates our perspective and allows us to build a network of creators and continue building experiences, but by stealing the things from others that we think is really relevant to us.
[00:40:56.440] Emile Arragon: And I'd recommend everybody to try Amar. I mean, a lot of people have headsets and they haven't really tried Amar because there's not a lot of content for it out there. There was that sort of little alien experience where you get to shoot the stuff that came out with the Quest 3 that is great. There's a few games that came out recently that are really, really cool, but it's a medium that is worth learning more about and trying out more. Because it's by trying them that people know that it exists and see the potential and then are enticed to create for that medium. So I'd say try it out. It's really worth it.
[00:41:31.454] Kent Bye: Awesome. Yeah. And very much enjoyed having the chance to talk to both of you to get a little bit more information about this project and also the whole tracking system, which I think the first time that I went through it, I didn't notice it until when I came back and heard you talking about it. I was like, oh, wow. OK. So there's other things underneath the hood to make this as much of a seamless experience as it is. With all these emerging technologies, there's always kind of a fighting up against those boundaries. And so this is a project that I think shows like once you have everything being able to be seamlessly integrated, just kind of opens up all these possibilities for how you could start to see where this might go here in other contexts. So thanks so much for joining me here on the podcast to help break it all down.
[00:42:10.789] JP Desjardins: Thanks so much for having us. Yeah, it's really appreciated. Thank you.
[00:42:14.994] Kent Bye: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Voices of VR podcast. And there is a lot that's happening in the world today. And the one place that I find solace is in stories, whether that's a great movie, a documentary, or immersive storytelling. And I love going to these different conferences and festivals and seeing all the different work and talking to all the different artists And sharing that with the community, because I think there's just so much to be learned from listening to someone's process to hear about what they want to tell a story about. And even if you don't have a chance to see it, just to have the opportunity to hear about a project that you might have missed or to learn about it. And so this is a part of my own creative process of capturing these stories and sharing it with a larger community. And if you find that valuable and want to sustain this oral history project that I've been doing for the last decade, then please do consider supporting me on Patreon at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Every amount does indeed help sustain the work that I'm doing here, even if it's just $5 a month. That goes a long way for allowing me to continue to make these trips and to to ensure that I can see as much of the work as I can and to talk to as many of the artists as I can and to share that with the larger community. So you can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
