I’m featuring a trilogy of interviews with Kiira Benz (formerly known as Kiira Benzing) with this first part covering her Runnin’ music video piece that showed at Sundance 2019 and won the top prize at SXSW 2019. I’ll follow up with an interview about her immersive theatre piece that won a prize at Venice Immersive 2019 called Finding Pandora X. And the final I did with her at Meta Connect 2025 doing a bit of a career retrospective, including some work she did in Horizon Worlds and her latest piece focusing on accessibility and dance performance. Also be sure to check out the second recorded interview that I did in 2019 about her hybrid theater and VR piece Love Seat, which showed at Venice 2019. See more context in the rough transcript below.
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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 voices of VR. So I'm going to be diving into a trilogy of interviews that I've done with Kira Benz over the years. She is a director, creator, writer, been working in the realm of immersive storytelling for a number of years. And so there's a number of unpolished interviews that I have with Kira. She's been on the cutting edge of pushing forward what's happening in immersive theater and XR. Also, she's been on the cutting edge of what she's been doing with some of these different immersive experiences at Sundance that then went on to win at South by Southwest, a piece called Running, which we'll be covering in this conversation, but then also had a chance to catch up with some of these other accessibility features that she was doing while I was at MetaConnect 2025. And so we had just watched the keynote at MetaConnect 2025 when I did the third interview with her in the series, where Mark Zuckerberg said that there is going to be a shift towards more Immersive storytelling and 3D storytelling is going to be one of the more exciting developments in the coming years. I think it's going to drive a new wave of adoption of virtual reality and glasses. And so immersive storytelling is something that I've been covering very closely over a number of years. And so I'll be diving into an older interview I did around the realm of immersive storytelling in this conversation I did with Kyra Binns at Sundance 2019. So, yeah, I think, you know, generally Meta is looking at how people are using these extra devices as a form of media consumption. And some of those forms of media that they're really consuming are cinematic 2D films that they're doing a variety of different things to add more immersive qualities to it, but also adding things like Dolby Atmos vision, Dolby Atmos sound, and just have more features are going to be using the VR headset as sort of a replacement for a whole home entertainment system system. but more from a single user but it seems like now meta is starting to move towards having more and more of these partnerships there was a number of different mixed reality demos that was at metaconnect i'll be elaborating more of that in some of these other conversations i had with kira just to kind of flesh out some of the mentions of some of the different demos that i saw at metaconnect but I'm going to go back into my backlog from 2019. This was at Sundance. And this was before Kira had shortened her name from Kira Binzing to Kira Binz. And so she's talking around this piece called Run-In, which was a collaboration with Reggie Watts, where she was using the Intel Capture Studio, which was essentially like a really large scale photogrammetry type of volumetric capture where there'd be like a ton of cameras taking You have a lot of people being able to synchronously be captured at the same time. Most of the motion capture is like happening 1% of the time. So there was for a short time before they went out of business, the meta Intel capture studio that allowed like groups of people, like a dozen or so at the same time to be captured. So you have like this synchronous movement. So she was able to essentially create this kind of dance party. within the context of vr which after this interview the whole kind of rave scene within vr chat during the pandemic like exploded and so there was a bit of a look at where things could be going here in the future of this really compelling use case of dancing and having this kind of music experience within vr where everybody is transformed into these voxels and then on top of those voxels they start to throw on shaders and then you can start to dance on the walls it was like a a pretty mind-blowing experience at the time. And then it went on to South by Southwest and won the top prize at South by Southwest. And so, yeah, this was just a conversation around that piece of running. And then we'll be diving into finding Pandora X in the next conversation and then some of her work after that in the final conversation in astrology. So overcoming all that and more on today's episode of Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Kira Benz happened on Wednesday, January 30th, 2019 at the Sundance Film Festival in the New Frontier section in Park City, Utah. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:04:00.632] Kiira Benz: Hey, my name is Kira Benzing and I'm a director and a creator and a writer and I'm working in VR, mostly in the interactive side. I've done a lot of 360 video, but my focus is always to give the audience a role. I consider them a player and put them inside a story and let them interact with the story.
[00:04:18.637] Kent Bye: Great. Can you tell me a little bit about your journey into virtual reality?
[00:04:23.291] Kiira Benz: Journey into VR, sure. I began in theater. I trained all over the world. I performed in London. I trained in Paris. I worked in New York for a bit. And then I actually sort of fell like Alice down the rabbit hole into filmmaking. I never trained in filmmaking. I never took a film course. And I think that my approach to filmmaking was also from a theatrical perspective. I'd work with space. I like to blend time. I didn't ever look at things in a kind of linear way. I work in a pretty nonlinear way. I would say that my documentaries that I've been making, they blend in fiction and animation, and those things kind of take what I would call a hybrid form. And one documentary I was working on in particular needed a three-dimensional aspect to it. I kept thinking it would be three-dimensional animation, but it felt like a 90-minute format would be too constrained for it. So I started writing a treatment for it back in about 2011, 2012, and that treatment was going outside of the typical movie screen and needed a different type of format, and I couldn't figure out what the format would be. It felt like an iPad that people might carry around. I also wanted to put them inside glasses, and I'd be writing that... I want to put them inside this perspective of this scientist and have them see the world from his perspective. And I saw them like carrying iPads around. I couldn't figure out what that medium was. And then when I finally put a DK2 at Tribeca Storiescapes on my head, that was like an instantaneous light bulb that that's what I'd been writing for. It just took me about three, four years to find it. And the minute I did that, I was like, what do I need to learn? Unity, how to communicate with developers. I knew I wanted it to be interactive. I knew I wanted the audience to have a role inside the story. And that was just the tipping point for me that I needed to move entirely into VR.
[00:06:08.857] Kent Bye: Right. So, yeah, it sounds like you have that theater background, which I see that there's so many more parallels to the medium of theater being like a spatial medium in some sense that gets translated over to virtual reality and augmented reality. Maybe you could talk a bit about how you see theater being similar to VR and maybe different than how film is versus theater.
[00:06:31.266] Kiira Benz: Absolutely. I think in theater, there's a couple of things that come into play, especially if you've worked on the acting side. You're using your imagination. You're building a world, sometimes with very little. I mean, I would do entire Shakespearean plays where we just were all black and have a chair. So simple, but still imagining what the war would look like, and you're creating that kind of collective space of what that world looks like with your ensemble and your fellow company members inside that piece so there's a lot about how we build other story worlds as any kind of creative with having a great you know exercising your imagination like invoking your imagination The other thing that I think you pull in from theater, besides exercising your imagination, is working with space, working three-dimensionally. You know, you're constantly, I would, especially when I was studying in London at Lambda, you're constantly engaging with an audience across the space. We'd be working in a thrust stage or working in a galley setup, working in the round. So the audience would be all around us. I would just always be thinking about characters within the audience and talking to the audience and using that space. And I think that definitely has helped me in VR translate pretty quickly because I'm used to communicating in a 3D format.
[00:07:45.659] Kent Bye: Yeah, and you have a piece here at Sundance New Frontier called Runnin'. So maybe you could tell me a bit about Runnin' and how this project came about.
[00:07:52.611] Kiira Benz: Run-In is an interactive dance party in VR. It features Reggie Watts and John Tejada's music. They formed a duo called Wahata, and they wrote this album called Casual High Technology. And within that, I started to develop a piece for Reggie's album. I thought it could be the entire album. That was a dream. We ended up centering just on one track, which is Run-In, which always felt like the climax for the piece for me, which would take the player into this retro future dance party, a pretty surreal space where the dance floor wouldn't be quite what you expect a dance floor to be, but it actually turns into this Rubik's Cube. The dance floor becomes all around you and you can interact with all of these different surfaces and go to different places and experience the song and the world and the volumetric dancers from different points of view. So that perspective change is something that's a mechanic that I'd really wanted to work with for the last few years and we finally got to build it in this piece and it felt like the right piece to test that out.
[00:08:50.623] Kent Bye: Well, I have to say that Runnin' is definitely the best virtual reality dance party that I've been to, bar none. I mean, I like the wave, but the wave, you don't get a sense of full embodiment of people moving around. And I've had other dance experiences, but nothing that felt like it had the same level of synchrony of everybody kind of moving with the same rhythm. And I'm wondering if there was something about how you captured it with the Intel capture stage. Maybe you could talk a bit about your capture process for how you're able to get so many people within VR dancing all at the same time.
[00:09:22.247] Kiira Benz: We were fortunate that the space that Intel Studios has is a very large space. It's a 10,000 square foot stage. So I had a lot of ability to capture multiple dancers at once. I do feel that being able to capture a dance party, that vibe, there is something that, again, pulling from my theater background, that having those dancers collectively imagine what this 3D space would feel like. giving them the same intention that was to welcome the player that would be coming inside the experience. I talked to them a lot about the player, there would be a player inside this world and that they were meant to invite them and emit this kind of expression across their face, across their body, extend this welcoming presence through their body and movement to the player. And I think that between the high intensity choreography combined with that intention of expression, that mixture I do think is coming across and making people feel really welcome inside the space. So we captured a cast of 12 dancers, this incredible ensemble, really diverse group of people, different points of view, different types of performance and dancing abilities. They came together with their passion and incredible professionalism, and combined with our choreographers, they were able to convey this atmosphere. And I think that because we captured them all at once, there is something about a synchrony of movement and a high energy that we got in the space that you might not have if each dancer had been captured individually. At the same time, because I'm placing them all over the space three-dimensionally, I constructed these concentric circles that I blocked them in and worked through many meetings with the Intel engineers to see if we could actually if this would work. This blocking technique is something that nobody had ever tried on the stage before. It was a new setup for me as well, so it was an experiment for a lot of us. And what was great was that the Intel engineers wrote an algorithm to isolate the dancers from the point cloud so that we could take these dancers and place them all over the space. So in some places they are connecting with each other there you know their bodies are connecting their dancing together there flipping each other in the air and not you know we keep unified in another place for separating them so we can put them on the ceiling or put them on a floating wall or special object the way that the space continues to transform is like a stage that builds so I wanted to be able to take this surreal space and take these dancers and put them anywhere and there's also some unique movements I would say sequences that the choreographers put together there's a line dance that they built and we have the cast of all 12 dancers plus Reggie and that's also a really huge asset to bring into Unity and that was an interesting challenge as well like well can the program actually handle this ginormous asset of 13 dancers combined and it did.
[00:12:08.886] Kent Bye: Oh, interesting. Yeah. So it sounds like that the Intel studios has this 10,000 square foot capture space, quite a lot of space. I mean, if you look at Windows Mixed Reality, it's just, I don't know, like maybe a diameter of 10 or 15, 20 feet. It's not as big as 10,000 square feet, but it sounds like the way it was originally set up would be that they would be capturing everybody all at once and be like this one entity. It'd be like one file that would be all of the 13 dancers and that you had the Intel engineers write an algorithm to break that up so that then you could start to capture everybody at the same time to capture that vibe. But if you wanted to break someone out and put them on the side of the wall or dance on the ceiling, you could do that.
[00:12:45.626] Kiira Benz: That's exactly right. Yes. So there was an expectation in the beginning that we would shoot this in a more traditional format, which would be a kind of room scale setup, which would go, you know, OK, measure out the floor like this is what the experience will be. This is what the player will dance inside when we're here at Sundance. So we'll build exactly to those constraints, you know, block these dancers exactly in that space. And that's it. One file, one clean asset. A lot of simpler pipeline work for dance. the development process, but instead, because I really imagined this surreal space coming to life all around the player that would continue to transform, we needed to create something really special, and that was this, you know, to take the dancers out and place them everywhere.
[00:13:25.865] Kent Bye: Right, and so maybe you could talk a bit about the capture process. Is it similar to something like the Windows Mixed Reality Capture, where it's actually using digital SLRs and this kind of array of cameras that are in this big dome-like structure that then you have the performers act, and then it's basically taking all this footage and then juxtaposing it all together, or is it using some other technique?
[00:13:47.481] Kiira Benz: So the Intel engineers can definitely go into more detail than this and some of this is public information that people could certainly look up. There's some imagery in the Meet the Artist video that Reggie and I talk in where you can see the dome behind us and I think that's also a useful visual reference point. So the way that the stage is set up, it's a dome of cameras. There are over 75 cameras. They are 2D cameras and they are collectively, based on the way that the software has been written, they are generating a point cloud. And then those dancers are comprised of voxels. I think of them as like a three-dimensional pixel. And then what's great about that information is that that gives us a kind of data set, like a raw, structure I feel like of the movement that we can work with and then we put magical shaders on top and everything transforms even more. So the way that the costume designers and I work together, costume designer rather, Sharip is not, we work together to find over 50 costumes for all of the dancers and do a lot of this in camera as a starting point to have the dancers transform and have this cast of 12 actually represent what might feel like in a club like 50 dancers. And then on top of that you get this flow from the costumes and the voxels are capturing all of this like fringe and this blousey, silky fabrics, swinging jackets. We like took overall straps and hung them down so we had like extra elements of flow and movement. We get all of that data from the voxels and then we can add these shaders on top and like transform that even further and push that even more.
[00:15:14.318] Kent Bye: I've seen the Windows Mixed Reality Capture, and to me it seems like it's some of the highest fidelity capture that I've seen. Given that you have 75 cameras and like 10,000 square feet, I would imagine that the resolution might be lower on that vast of a scale. And I understand in running, you're adding the shaders as an artistic and stylistic choice, and I think it makes perfect sense, but... I guess the question I have is whether or not if you wanted to go for a photo realistic vibe, if you feel like it would still have that, I guess, pixelated feel, or if it has more of a smoothing of the voxels that looks more like realistic.
[00:15:47.438] Kiira Benz: Definitely the style is different, I think, from what other volumetric capture techniques are that are out there right now. I look at this as a kind of cubic format, like we're dealing with a volume, we're dealing with a mass. And one of the things, because we have so much space on that stage, we get a lot of movement. So that's what we wanted. And on top of that, I feel like my work falls into more of an abstract experimental place. that we're not looking for that kind of photorealistic performance. So this was like the perfect type of volumetric technology for this piece, I felt, and to represent at this moment the kind of art that I wanted to make with this, which fell into that kind of experimental, really artistic place.
[00:16:27.766] Kent Bye: Can you talk about, if you have to take this point cloud, does it have to get turned into a mesh, or how do you add a shader to a point cloud?
[00:16:34.622] Kiira Benz: So this is not built on a mesh sequence. This is totally point cloud data, and then we're just working with that format. We can change the points in different ways. There's places where they turn into different types of geometric shapes. Our shader artist, Sagar, was transforming those things throughout and also playing with an audio-reactive element to it as well. And then they would respond to the music.
[00:16:59.540] Kent Bye: Yeah, so maybe talk a bit about that costuming process because, I mean, part of the reason why this is the best VR dance party, maybe the best dance party I've ever been to because it was so mind-blowing just to be dancing next to people who had this really trippy and psychedelic vibe to them. They were just like these glowing orb-like ethereal beings and, you know, constantly dynamically changing and teleporting around and it was just really quite magical. But yeah, maybe you could talk a bit about that process of creating that sense of awe and wonder and magic on the dance floor.
[00:17:29.892] Kiira Benz: Those were all the feelings that I wanted to invoke in the player, and that's really great that you were feeling those things. I mean, every creative decision that I made was meant to, I would go back to what is a player supposed to feel? So every time I would decide, okay, what does the space feel like? What is the color palette for this piece? How does this transform? How do these pieces move? Hard edges or round edges? All of those things were meant to make the player feel welcome and give them that sense of, can they have this sense of discovery? Could we maybe reach awe? That was the pinnacle of my narrative journey arc that I built for the player. So the costumes, I mean, every single decision would go back to that. So I knew I wanted bright colors and I worked a lot with a costume designer on a color palette. And then we ran around and shopped together and just felt, you know, what are the kinds of colors that make someone feel warm and welcomed and happy and joyous? We just kept going back to that. And the same thing with the types of shaders that were put on them and the way that the colors and the color palette, there are these... saturation shifts that happened in the piece, all of those things were meant to continue to create that sense of joy and welcoming energy, a happy energy, a place you feel safe in, a place that perhaps we could do some kind of demographic accessibility that a 50 year old man might feel safe in as well as a 14 year old girl.
[00:18:48.920] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, The first time that I went through it, I saw people dancing on the sides as well as on the ceiling. And I didn't go there. Maybe it's because I didn't realize that you could. But I think there's also an element where I think there was just enough interesting things going on where I didn't get bored. I had so many things to explore and look at. And then it was so dynamic and changing. And there's new dancers. I feel like it's an experience you could go through and just spend time with one of the dancers and do a whole dance with just that one dancer or stay in one quadrant. But there's just a lot that's going on. But after I was talking to you, you said, well, you can actually dance on the side and dance on the ceiling. So then I actually went through and did it again and dance on the side and dance on the ceiling. And it did feel like a little bit of this whole perspective shift. I don't know, it's like taking the whole world and rotating it. And it sounds simple. It's like, okay, why would that be a big deal? But it's something that I don't think our brains are used to that. I don't think that we're... We're used to like, oh, let's like all of a sudden look at the world by standing on the side of the wall or standing on the ceiling. That's just not something that we can have an experience for. So it's such a new experience. It's like, oh, this is weird. Like part of it was making a prediction. Like I was like, okay, what's this going to look like? And I think every time I was wrong. Because it was like, oh, I'm going to go and teleport and try to imagine what this world is. And I think in some ways what I think that is doing is that it's almost training us to have this global awareness and maybe imagining, oh, what would this look like if I was on the side of the wall? And the more you do that, the more you build up those muscles in your mind to get a map of the space in your mind. And then when you do that perspective shift, then you could see how it plays out. But because I was so off and I was so beyond what I even expected, I feel like, oh, that's a sign to me that this is just something that I've never experienced before. And it's just so new.
[00:20:42.182] Kiira Benz: That perspective shift was something that I really wasn't sure would work. I sketched it, you know, I had this concept about doing something interactive with Reggie and with portals. And then I kept thinking about, well, if we could be playing with scale and playing with perspective, how do I get the player through those things? How do I make that happen? And to not force that to happen, but to have that be motivated by the player. I really believe that if the player motivates the choice, it will feel more organic to them. It will feel like that was their intention. That's where they wanted to go. It will feel... still like a sense of discovery and perhaps awe, but also like it was their choice. They initiated it. They should feel more comfortable, a little more comfortable when they get there. And from our first playtest, you know, again, I think for everyone in the team, it was like, is this going to work? Do we have to force cuts? And I was like, I really feel intrinsically in my gut that the player has to motivate the choices. the player has to motivate that perspective change. And after our first playtest, we found that everyone had this, we were like riding this very fine line between the sense of disorientation that they didn't expect, but also the sense of, wow, that was really exciting. I want to do it again. And I know that when you're playtesting and people want to do something again, you just keep doing that. Once you've struck that balance, you've hit that chord, like then you do more of that. So I knew from that point on, like, great, we can keep this. And this thing that I dreamed of actually works. And now I want to continue to put this mechanic in other work.
[00:22:08.193] Kent Bye: Yeah, it reminds me, I think Ali Alsami was saying that he was doing that as well, doing the perspective shift and finding something very similar that it was like very compelling in that way. One of the other things that I noticed of the experience was that I've done enough social VR to know that there's a bit of an etiquette to not violate someone's personal space. And I think in this experience, you're kind of inviting people to violate someone's personal space, like to actually get up against the bodies and start, you know, kind of melding with their bodies in different ways. And so I was actually talking to someone last night who was a dancer who organically discovered that as they are interfacing with these bodies, they were able to have even these more dynamic reactions. And so they were kind of able to stumble upon that and step into those avatars. So just curious to hear that thought process, because there's a bit of like a social taboo that's being cultivated within the best practices of how you become a good citizen within social VR. But then within the context of this experience, you're kind of inviting people to violate those taboos or norms or to do something that's different.
[00:23:06.823] Kiira Benz: This was an ethical question for me throughout. I'm always thinking about taking care of the player and making sure that they feel comfortable. So if they're going to step close to someone's personal space or inside someone's personal space, how does that make the player feel? And then what does that actually mean for the character or person that they're stepping inside or right up against? And because we're working in a land of voxels, our language is a little bit different here. We are in a slightly more abstract space. And I talked a lot about this kind of glowing energy that would fill the dancers and that your glow sticks, if you get close enough with your glow sticks that you can move these voxels around and you're also affecting this kind of voxel volumetric dancer. And you're also able to see into that kind of glowing energy that is inside the dancer. And I think because of that combination of your ability to kind of move the voxels around and shift a little, like a little space-time shift that's happening there. And also by filling them with this glowing light, it kind of feels like that's okay. There's just like an energy exchange going on here as opposed to feeling like you're taking up their personal space. That movement from our first playtest, that glowing energy wasn't there in the very beginning. And so people definitely felt like, wow, I can see like right through the dancer, right into their pants. That felt, I was like, oh no, I don't want that feeling. That's got to go away. Once we added that glowing energy and we got that other touch element going on with the glow sticks, I think that started to shift us in a place where it could feel more artistic. And like you were just flowing with the energy and the other dancers in the space that didn't feel like you were actually taking up their space or imposing on them.
[00:24:42.805] Kent Bye: I'm wondering if you ran into any specific limitations for putting this into a real-time game engine and trying to render all these things at the same time.
[00:24:50.888] Kiira Benz: Oh, definitely. I think our dev team had an enormous challenge there and they were very lucky. Their combination also with the Intel engineers that wrote some special compression techniques. I mean, getting these assets to run on these machines is no small feat. I remember going back to pre-production. I was looking at my shot list with the Intel team and we were going over and I said, right, so then these 12 dancers are going to appear here and then they appear here on the ceiling. And they were like, wait a second, it's just 12 assets, right? And I'm like, no, it's... it's like 50, it has to feel like a dance party. We have to have as many assets in there as we can. And they were like, hold on, wait a second. We've only put a handful of volumetric assets in a VR experience before. This was in a VR demo that they'd done. This was the first full VR experience. It's a six-minute track. It's a lot to fill and a lot for the game engine to handle. And we'd gone through some meetings with my shot list and my blocking maps. I thought everything was, like, a-okay. We were ready to go. And then it was like, hold on, wait, 50 assets? What? And I said, okay, guys, just tell me, what do I need to do? Do I need to reconfigure my blocking maps? Do I need to... redo my shot list, like, no problem, I'll go back to the drawing board, I'm sure I can come up with a solution. And they said, just hang tight, we're gonna take a look at it, see what we can do. And they were able to come up with a technique that would enable us to fit all of these massive assets inside this experience.
[00:26:13.369] Kent Bye: So you ended up with an amazing dance party with a really awesome track. It's a lot of fun. And maybe you could go backwards and tell me a bit about the process of collaborating with Reggie and John to be able to create and form this common vision and actually execute on this.
[00:26:28.732] Kiira Benz: So Reggie and John had actually already written this music. I didn't even know about it. And when I first met Reggie here at Sundance, this story is really a Sundance story, like the birthplace of this project. And now we're coming full circle here to premiere it. Reggie had written this music, I said, interactive dance piece with this very cool dance ensemble, the Dance Cartel, which is a New York based company. helmed by Anitaj, who's a choreographer that I really admire and a friend of mine. And Reggie was just like, cool, let's do it. Little did I know Reggie had written this amazing track and album with John Tejada and they hadn't released it yet. And it just so happened that he had this great dance track on this album. So it was like the perfect synchrony of all of these things coming together. On top of it, he really wanted to shoot at Intel and shoot volumetrically to do a music video. So it was like the perfect blend of everything, all of these dreams coming together at once. And I mean, I've always wanted to shoot high quality volumetric capture. I didn't think that this opportunity would come this fast in my life. I really thought like, okay, I'll still be shooting stereoscopic 360 for a while and I'll stage... the dancers around this camera rig. But I finally had the opportunity to do something the way that I've always dreamed. And then I could take all of that and really work with it in a three-dimensional format, which is where this piece belongs.
[00:27:45.133] Kent Bye: So what happens to this piece next? Where does running go from here?
[00:27:49.693] Kiira Benz: I think if everyone stays tuned for other announcements from the film festival circuit that they'll find that we will definitely will be on the festival circuit for some time. There's no doubt that we are running this piece off, we're running this piece off of some very serious machines right now. Probably not the type of machines that most people own. And we are also running wireless Vive Pros. And that's another, you know, we're at like the starting point with this wireless headset. It's great because it gives you full body freedom to move in the space, but it's also certainly has its additional technical challenges because we're running them all day long, which is great. And I think that what's special about it is I feel like we're testing out new things and we're getting to see how players respond to this all day long. And I just I look forward to continuing to work with this technology and bring this to as many people as we can. So I say stay tuned right now in the festival circuit and then we'll see from there.
[00:28:45.356] Kent Bye: Yeah, I did notice that the wireless transmitter and receiver gets a little hot. I mean, I have hair, so I'm okay, but definitely see that for some people it may cause some issues. But for me, it was really amazing just to have the freedom to be able to roam around and dance and to not have a tether. I think that's probably part of the reason why this is one of the best VR dance parties I've been to is because I feel like I was really not constrained by any of the technology. I didn't have any dropped frames. It was very performant. And it was also just to be on that floor with all those, crazy shader volumetric voxel dancers. It just was a lot of fun. But not having the tether allowed me, I think, even more freedom. I think there's something subconscious about having a tether that you feel that almost like it literally tethers you to this reality. But to be able to not have that, you're able to just immerse yourself. And I love it when you take off the headset and you have no idea which way you're facing. And I felt that coming out. I mean, you're teleporting around, which I think adds to the confusion. But there's enough of being immersed within the space such that when you come out, you just feel completely disoriented. And for me, that's a bit of a metric for success for how immersed you've just been.
[00:29:54.676] Kiira Benz: Definitely. I think for Reggie and I and Intel, having this be as free an experience as it could be and keeping the player untethered, that was high on our list. Like, this has to work. We have to figure this out somehow. And we have to make sure that the experience can perform while still being wireless. and it's great like it's working that's happening it is warm yes that piece is getting hot that piece of equipment and i think that's something that we're going to need to continue to figure out maybe that adds to a fourth dimension of the experience or just also like warming up your body for you on top of it a little sensory addition there that wasn't initially planned but is happening I think that all of those things together, also I think the language that you give someone when they get inside an experience, and I think a lot about whether we're going to location-based experiences, site-specific places, or we're doing something in the comfort of our own home, how is that experience different? And when you go to a site-specific space and someone gives you language and says, you know, reminds you you're free to dance, you're free to move, reminds you that this is a safe space, I'm going to shut the door here so you feel like this is your space, tells you again where the floor is. Those elements of the experience, I think, add to the story that the player will begin to embody and experience. And I think we can't treat them lightly. I think we have to really think about the entire story that we're telling. And I think that also happens if you do an experience at home, the minute you put the headset on, all of those elements that take us inside an experience, you know, what are those early story beats that are happening that are going to take them out of the world, the real world that they've been in and into an entirely new world. We have to be really thoughtful as storytellers.
[00:31:33.922] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'm wondering if you could expand on your conceptualization of storytelling in VR, especially with running. Because I can imagine if you took somebody from Sundance who was seeing all of the narrative pieces and they have the very fixed idea of what narrative and story is, and you put them into running, I'm not sure if they would even call it a story. And so I'm just curious how you think of storytelling relative to a piece like running.
[00:31:55.148] Kiira Benz: This is a loose story, definitely. I think it's more of an experience. I mean, there is a little three-act structure there. You start in the record store, you go to the dance world, you come back to a record store. There's a neat little improv scene that happens with some great actors, Kate Berland and Ben Schwartz, along with Reggie, also like the king of improv. So we've got, there's some story beats there, but for sure, I think the core element is the dance scene, which is meant to be you know that record store is really meant to be a portal and a hub initially it was my portal hub for a bunch of other scenes and so I just took us back there basically but I do think that as creators we have to think about how we start a player where we start them what information we give them not to overload them too soon to really like unfold the world bit by bit especially if you're doing something interactive and you're trying to teach them a mechanic like we've got a couple mechanics going on in this piece there's a couple things they have to learn and before they get into that dance world. I still feel like that's, like, if we had more time to playtest, we would get that even better. But I do think that the information and the elements that you're giving them, you're invoking so much. Like, we have to be really careful about sensory overload. So I knew that once they started to face these volumetric dancers, how many people have seen something made of voxels and been that close to it and can teleport around it and can maybe step through it and maybe Reggie dances through you, especially in the line dance sequence. that's a lot of information that you're getting as a player. So I was cautious to the team to keep being like, we need to keep testing this. We need to make sure that they feel safe. We need to make sure that like the colors are right, that we don't overload their senses too much to hit that place of excitement and they feel thrilled by things. And they could just watch. They don't even have to move through it like you did your first time. They could just be observant because there is so much going around them. But at the same time that they feel comfortable, that they also maybe want to explore, and they don't feel like they've just been slammed with so much information and so much data thrown at them.
[00:33:55.666] Kent Bye: Yeah, one of the ways that I've been thinking about what's happening with story is something that's similar to what's happening with these revolutions in learning and education. Specifically, I went to some math conferences and seeing how they're moving from like this more linear didactic teaching of the math teacher bestowing upon the students the math. And they're moving more towards an active learning model where the students are actually engaged and maybe there's a question that's being asked and so then the students have to answer and so there's more of the Socratic method, there's more of these active learning where they're participating and really actually engaged in the learning process and one of the math professors told me that you can tell how far a math classroom has transformed from the old way into this new active learning is to see where the math is happening. Is it happening from the teacher, or is it happening in the students? And I think there's something very similar that's happening with story, where it used to be like the story was being told by the storyteller, and you would watch the story. But now it feels like there's a context of an environment that's being created, and the story's actually happening inside of you. So you're having an experience, and then you're able to weave together your own experience and your own emotions and your own embodiments and your own story that you're coming out of it. So it's really creating that context for people to create their own stories.
[00:35:10.761] Kiira Benz: 100%. First of all, I think from an educational point of view, I wish I was a kid now because if I could go on a magic school bus and have these opportunities to learn and visit other cultures in VR and have Google Earth and experience all these things, experience math around me in a three dimensional format, that would be mind blowing. I think I would be closer to that context and the stories of these other cultures than ever before. I just don't think that a textbook on these like flipping pages is enough. I do think that there is a dynamic element that has to happen for real learning, at least from, you know, if I was a kid, I think that would have helped me in school a lot. The other thing I think that you're touching on here with storytelling and how the person inside the story is maybe writing the story, I think some of the great creators in our field have talked about that. Actually, the player is the writer of the story in VR. There's a little more than that. Certainly, you have to set up the environment for those things and you have to make... There's still an arc that you want to lay out and a world that you want to build. But then if you give them agency... those moments can happen where they write their own story within the story. And what's really interesting by the perspective shift that's working in our piece right now is that if they go to view the story from these different perspectives, they are having a completely different experience. I mean, you could just watch it, you know, from the ceiling the entire time once the ceiling gets there.
[00:36:37.812] Kent Bye: Great. And so for you, what do you personally want to experience in VR?
[00:36:42.774] Kiira Benz: Everything. I mean, I would love to learn. I would love to just take courses in VR. I would love to learn, you know, more about medicine in VR. I would love to learn more about other cultures. I love to travel and travel is still expensive. But I mean, if you can go to another world, enter a portal and be surrounded by the sounds and the three-dimensional nature, the stories of other people, like I think that that's completely beautiful and wonderful.
[00:37:09.059] Kent Bye: Great. And so for you, what are some of the either open problems you're trying to solve or open questions that you're trying to answer?
[00:37:16.374] Kiira Benz: I have an ongoing interest in what's going on with gentrification in our world. It's been the heart of a couple pieces that I've done, Cardboard City, and then I did this AR installation at Lincoln Center with Cardboard City, which combined VR, AR, and user-generated content. That piece has grown for me the seed of that story, which was about artists that were being pushed out of a neighborhood. That then grew into a bigger story about a whole class of people that were getting pushed out of a neighborhood. and what happens when the stories of those people leave and how we rewrite those stories and forget about them as a neighborhood, as a society. That's really important to me. And so I've started building a multiplayer game called Metropoles. It's multiplayer and people, you know, they have to collaborate together. They have to make tough decisions together. There's a storytelling element. They are also given some 360 video elements that give them like a real life perspective of what's going on in that neighborhood. But then they're given a lot of agency to make decisions inside this world that will affect that neighborhood. Those things are important to me, I think, to start this off as a conversation piece, bring more awareness to this issue. And then if I can take this from city to city and engage people directly in communities to try and do something about what's going on in these neighborhoods, make us more conscious as citizens. I think that's something that's important to me. I love cities and I love to see them be accessible for all.
[00:38:39.707] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality is and what it might be able to enable?
[00:38:48.032] Kiira Benz: There's a social connection, I think, that is really important in VR. I've been working a lot with live theater and social VR and putting the actors and avatars and performing to an audience of avatars. And the kinds of cues that we give each other, when you meet someone in VR, the exchange feels very real. It feels, you know, your brain, I believe there's something happening neurologically that we believe, like I've met this person. And then when I meet that person in real life after I've met them in VR, I feel like I already have a bond with them. There's something really interesting to me about that. And I think to see where this goes from a social perspective and a communal aspect, if we are, you know, we love to still go to cinema together as a society. We love to go see theater together and go to the opera together. These are sports games, right? Soccer, football. These are things that we like to experience collectively as a humanity. I think to see how that will then transcend in VR, where that takes us as a society will be very interesting, and I hope I can play a part in that.
[00:39:51.394] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the VR community?
[00:39:55.911] Kiira Benz: If there were more creators, I think that would just keep experimenting with things and continue to, you know, pick up 360 cameras and play and start messing around with Unity and finding other collaborators to work with. I mean, I just want to see this field grow and for us to inspire each other and form bigger and stronger communities and bring in all kinds of points of view and perspective. Like, I still want to see more women in the space. That would be really great.
[00:40:22.738] Kent Bye: Awesome. Great. Thank you so much.
[00:40:24.810] Kiira Benz: Thank you, Ken, for your time.
[00:40:26.812] Kent Bye: Thanks again for listening to this episode of the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
