There’s an invisible cyber war that’s happening between major nation states, and Zero Days VR takes you inside of it in a completely new way using virtual reality. You go on a journey into a hyper-stylized cyberspace world where you embody the Stuxnet computer worm as it navigates programmable logic controllers, changes code, and destroys Iranian nuclear centrifuges.
Zero Days VR is one of the most powerful VR documentaries that I’ve seen so far since it uses the unique affordances of VR to visualize what’s at stake for weaponizing security vulnerabilities, and it uses these volumetric affordances to innovate what’s possible in immersive storytelling. The end result is a visceral and embodied experience of an otherwise complex and abstract topic of cyber warfare that is probably one of the most important stories in our world today.
Zero Days VR is based upon the journalistic work of Alex Gibney’s Zero Days documentary, but it’s not a promotional experience for the movie but rather a self-contained experience that uses VR to tell aspects of the story that didn’t work as well in the 2D version. The VR experience tells the story as if the main character is code, and they created different immersive environments that reflected testimony from a range of computer experts as well as a number of official government denials.
At Sundance, I had a chance to talk with Scatter’s Creative Director Yasmin Elayat about directing Zero Days VR, and how this project came about through the use of their Depthkit technology in Gibney’s documentary. We also talked about their failed experiments to make this into a non-linear and interactive experience. It turned out that too much journalistic integrity and overall context was lost when they surrendered control over the linear release of evidence, and so they had to abandon the more interactive components of the experience that they were building off from their previous experience on interactive VR doc CLOUDS created by James George and Jonathan Minard.
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Zero Days VR was released on June 8th on Oculus Home for both the Oculus Rift and Gear VR, and it also won an award for Narrative Achievement at Unity’s Vision VR/AR Awards.
Here’s the trailer for Alex Gibney’s original documentary of Zero Days
Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at Zero Days VR from Unity’s 2017 VR/AR Vision Summit
Donate to the Voices of VR Podcast Patreon
Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. My name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. So on today's episode, I have Yasmin Alayat, who is the director of Zero Days VR, which is being released today on the Oculus Rift and Gear VR. So Zero Days VR is the best immersive documentary that I've seen in VR. They're just doing a lot of really interesting things of using the spatial metaphors that are possible within virtual reality to talk about a very abstract topic of cyber warfare. Their challenge was how do you tell a story where the main character is code? And I think they do a brilliant job of doing that within the different visualizations that take place in Zero Days VR. So Zero Days VR premiered back at Sundance of 2017, and it won the Narrative Achievement Award at the Vision Summit that was put on by Unity. So I had a chance to talk to Yasmin about the process of creating this project, but also, you know, why did they decide to make it into a linear narrative experience rather than an interactive experience, given that they come from an interactive and nonlinear background? So we'll be covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. But first, a quick word from our sponsor. Today's episode is brought to you by the Voices of VR Patreon campaign. The Voices of VR is a gift to you and the rest of the VR community. It's part of my superpower to go to all of these different events, to have all the different experiences and talk to all the different people, to capture the latest and greatest innovations that's happening in the VR community and to share it with you so that you can be inspired to build the future that we all want to have with these new immersive technologies. So you can support me on this journey of capturing and sharing all this knowledge by providing your own gift. You can donate today at patreon.com slash voices of VR. So this interview with Yasmeen happened at the Sundance Film Festival on Saturday, January 21st, 2017 in Park City, Utah. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:11.855] Yasmin Elayat: So my name is Yasmina Lyatt. I am a partner at Scatter Immersive Media Studio and also creative director there. I'm here at Sundance with our project called Zero Days VR, which I directed. And Zero Days is a adaptation of the Alex Gibney feature documentary, the participant media documentary of the same name. And our version of it is taking you on from the perspective of code and the Stuxnet virus and learning about cyber warfare and the discovery of one of the first cyber weapons in history, or at least known in history, that could affect and attack critical infrastructure in our physical world.
[00:02:47.289] Kent Bye: Yeah, so this is about the Stuxnet, right? And so this is a virus that someone from some state actor was able to get into the infrastructure of Iran and actually destroy physical infrastructure of their nuclear weapons. And so it sounds like there was a whistleblower that came forth in this documentary by Alex Gibney. So maybe you could tell me a little bit about, you know, some of the information that you're getting and then constructing this narrative of the VR experience.
[00:03:11.050] Yasmin Elayat: Yes, of course. So we are very fortunate obviously to be working with participants and with Alex himself and Jigsaw Productions so we can rely on a lot of the heavy rigorous journalism that they've done and the feature itself was featuring different nation-state representatives from the United States, U.S. government officials from the CIA and NSA and Mossad and also there was a NSA informant featured in the film and We used a lot of these original interviews and especially also interviews from the cyber experts who which actually are featured more heavily in our piece the cyber expert and cyber detective point of view and the NSA informant and the NSA informant what's interesting about it is kind of the or maybe the origin story of the piece which is an I think a nice background story of how even got involved with Gibney and this project but The informant in the feature film, Alex basically was looking for a way to anonymize this informant and protect the source and feature this person throughout the film that isn't just like a blacked out face or digitized type of voice. He wanted to figure out a way that was native to the topic of code in these digital worlds. He had found out about Depthkit, which is a volumetric filmmaking tool invented by my partners, James George and Alexander Porter. And he asked Scatter to work with him on the film to create the VFX for the informant. And so she was captured using Depthkit and stylized in a way that made her look anonymous and look of, you know, a very interesting digital type of form. And so she was already captured volumetrically. It's kind of, we've been pitching him the idea of creating a VR experience around a topic that it's made for VR, you know, cyber weapons and computer viruses. And so we did a quick demo over the summer and showed him what the informant could look like in a gear VR actually. And so Gibney was like, you know, this is exciting and was excited to see where we could take it. And so that's kind of the origin story of Zero Days VR.
[00:05:05.951] Kent Bye: So it sounds like you have an actress that's really acting out this part of the informant. Is she also in the Zero Days film?
[00:05:12.353] Yasmin Elayat: Yes. So, spoiler alert, in the film there is this informant and she actually is an amalgamation of a bunch of different sources that have come out to Gibney and the team when they were making the feature. And so she represents a lot of the voices in People who are essentially frustrated with the fact that we are not openly talking about our involvement or what our involvement in the development of something like Sucks It or the larger operation out there or just cyber intelligence and cyber attacks in general. And so she is an amalgamate character. In our piece, we do not reveal that to the audiences. We chose that from a creative point of view. However, in the film, she actually does come out in the end and claim that she is an actress playing the role. But again, spoiler alert.
[00:05:58.952] Kent Bye: Well, I think it was one of the things where it's a documentary piece. It's actually probably the best VR documentary that I've seen because it really uses the unique affordances of VR to be able to actually give almost a physical architectural representation of something that is invisible. So this cyber realm we're able to really go through this world and as you are having these cyber experts talk about their process of investigating Stuxnet and trying to figure out who created this, how they created this almost like flawlessly executed piece of code that would go out and self-replicate and do all these crazy dangerous things and so they're really baffled and trying to figure it out but as you're hearing these voices you're seeing these representations of that in the VR experience, so maybe you could talk about that translation of something that is very abstract and invisible and being able to actually make it real.
[00:06:50.877] Yasmin Elayat: Yeah, of course. I mean, the inspiration creatively started, I think, when we started working on this project. There's a line in the film, Alex Gimny actually says, how can you tell the story where the lead characters code? And that was what we ran with, because from the beginning, it just felt like such a, you know, talking about underground nuclear facilities, which obviously could go to the tons or Iran to visit these very, you know, highly protected areas talking about a virus or cyber weapon that is so sophisticated it's almost, you know, from our perspective this is a soldier and we were trying to represent it as a soldier going through enemy terrain. And so the whole creative approach was how to represent two main threads here. One of the main themes we were trying to showcase in the Zero Days VR piece is how do you make something that feels like it's happening far away in the Middle East actually feel close to home and actually have people have a visceral reaction to what is this new dimension of warfare. It's something, you know, in the United States we're one of the most vulnerable nations in the country because we're Internet of Things and we have so many connected devices. We actually are very vulnerable and it's not something that just happens in nuclear facilities in Iran. It's something that can happen to us. And I think we were, it was, the most important thing was not to just go through a matrix of, you know, kind of style of code, but actually have people feel like they're implicated in the story somehow. And so we really wanted them to embody Stuxnet and go on this journey and actually see what it's doing to the physical infrastructure and then kind of bring it back home. And the other side of the story that we wanted to represent was the fact that there is a lack of transparency and conversation around this in the United States. And unlike other types of, you know, when finally we have talking about nuclear power or talking about other things, we're able to actually acknowledge it. Up till now, to date, no nation state has acknowledged any involvement in Stuxnet or how much money we're actually throwing into cyber intelligence or cyber weapons in general. And the nature of this type of warfare, the reason it's dangerous is because you don't know if you're attacked, right? You have a good cyber weapon if the enemy doesn't know you've actually attacked them. And so it's just making sure that we're representing, in a critical way, the censorship around this conversation and should citizens be aware of it. And hopefully we can have more of an open conversation.
[00:08:52.258] Kent Bye: Yeah, we're here at Sundance and, you know, I saw Zero Days this morning and then walked out and heard that there was actually a cyber attack here on Sundance with kind of shutting down the internet all in Park City and throwing the box office all in disarray. A lot of the VR experiences that were lying on the internet were down. So it was like a real-life manifestation of attacking of some part of the critical infrastructure here in Park City during Sundance. And so I just felt like it was like a little bit of a canny, you know, going through and seeing what is essentially these whistleblowers coming out and saying, hey, there's like implications of using these types of weapons. you know one of the things that likely motivated some of these whistleblowers was that security is something that you can have a zero-day exploit and you can use it offensively but it's also making you vulnerable to someone else figuring it out and using it against you and so I think that's part of the crux is that there's some of these bugs and these code that are discovered but then they're weaponized rather than secured and closed up and to protect everybody.
[00:09:53.163] Yasmin Elayat: Yes, so speaking of the Sundance experience, what we're showing at Sundance here is that it's actually a very unique aspect or installation of the project, a version that is actually will not be what is distributed, unfortunately, because it's impossible to recreate. But we are showing here three chapters of a five chapter experience, actually. So there's parts of the story that we weren't showing which is that what you're talking about which is the retaliation and what happens when something like Sasa get into the hands of our enemies or into the hands of anyone essentially what happens then to the world and what's at stake and what we're showing here is more of a you know subsection of the piece and the way we were approaching it was we want to make sure besides communicating obviously from all the key points of the story right from a journalistic perspective and also from like historical and you know what the information that we are we know currently But we also wanted, as I said, a way to make people actually feel implicated in the story, not only as understanding what is a cyber weapon and what is Stuxnet, but also from what does it mean if it actually happens to the United States. And so one of the way we kind of close is we actually talk about what happens when you shut the power grid, what happens when something like, from an economic perspective, from, you know, power, it's not very easy to get something like a New York City back up and running. And when people are watching this and hearing the informant speaking to what can happen when this gets in the hands of the enemy and anything we've done, you know, so if we can attack a critical infrastructure somewhere else, anything we've done to someone they can do to us, we reveal that she's actually talking to someone across the table and it's you. You are captured in 3D using DepthKit and Intel RealSense cameras and we are streaming you into the VR experience. That was our way of really bringing it home that, you know, you are part of the story and hopefully she's sending a message to you and hopefully you can keep partaking in this conversation and continuing this conversation with others after the VR experience ends.
[00:11:45.057] Kent Bye: So what is the big takeaway for people who see this VR experience? I mean, what can they do?
[00:11:49.173] Yasmin Elayat: Well that's a good question. I think for us it's mainly just awareness. I think for me that was the biggest thing where I'm actually a computer scientist and I understand how all of this, I'm obviously not a hacker but I can understand the sophistication of something like Suxnet and yet that blew me away and I understood like it was very complicated. It's a very complicated tool, it's a very complicated weapon, it's also very complicated how it did its different attack vectors and it was something that operated for years and For me what's most important was just that raising awareness of what is this new dimension to war and what is the potential of cyber weapons and cyber warfare. But also really that, so it's not a joke anymore when we hear that Russia might have been involved in our elections, there might have been an attack there. that actually we take it seriously because, as I said, we're a very vulnerable nation and hopefully people understand what's at stake and how close to home it can be. Hopefully this is actually something that would raise awareness and people would want to compel our government also to have a more transparent approach to the conversation as well.
[00:12:47.809] Kent Bye: I think that's the thing that's kind of left out of the discussion of the potential hacking of the election by Russia through a number of different vectors is that a lot of those vulnerabilities could have been known by the NSA and used as attack vectors from their own sense and so just the weaponization of the internet I feel like is Something that was really brought home to me in this experience of that moment when you're in the nuclear reactor and you see it exploding, it's a visceral experience of actually saying, oh wow, this is going beyond maybe getting people's credit card information or stealing identities, but it's actually getting to the point where it could actually destroy and change the resonant frequency of different mechanical devices that create explosions to release toxic nuclear energy. That message was really brought home to me in the experience. The question that I have is, you know, as you were trying to translate this into a VR experience, you know, there's a film that's being created and what were you seeing as kind of the unique affordances of VR that you were able to do in your experience that you weren't getting necessarily in the narrative film?
[00:13:44.280] Yasmin Elayat: Well, I think the main thing regarding approaching the VR experience is that being able to play with the different types of tools to create an experience for the audience. So while we may not have as much control over the delivery of a certain narrative or where someone is looking, for me what was really interesting is we can play with very interesting camera moves and creating certain types of mood and tone. So it's really environmental factors and experiential factors. to help fill in some of the other parts of the story that you wouldn't be able to tell in another way. So actually, when you're talking about this feeling of visceral reaction that was the goal, whether it's through placing you in this situation and environment and having the story end and seeing this explosion around you, to actually when you're taking the perspective of Stuxnet and there is a we are using camera moves that are a little aggressive you know sometimes in VR people tell you you shouldn't do that but we did it on purpose because we want people to have a little bit of a jolt and it's intentional and playing with all these different tools and bending some of them and hopefully they work to our advantage of making you feel on multiple from many different senses what we're trying to communicate you know that this is very serious that this is a something that's aggressive something we should be worried about but also hopefully translating very intangible concepts in a way that's still, it may be translated in a way that's metaphorical, but hopefully that they still are communicating effectively what we're trying to, the story and effectively communicating sort of the very difficult, I think, concepts around how stocks have actually operated and kind of how it, how the zero-day exploits and the different types of zero-day exploits and what it was intending to do and how it did it. So it was more about, yeah, I think I would like to call it story designing or experiential designing in support of the story to really hit it at home. The other aspect which you had already touched upon was we can actually take you into this world that we imagined that's this digital world. We represent three different worlds in Zero Days VR. One is this digital world where you are Stuxnet and you are going into this enemy terrain which is representing the digital computer world but it doesn't look like Tron, it doesn't look like circuits, it's more metaphorical. because we're trying to communicate more how this thing operated, more than this is a computer and code. And a chapter that wasn't in the Sundance premiere, but is also part of the story, we approach it the same way, which is Iran attacks back and the retaliation of Iran on U.S. soil and Iran's cyber army. So we treated these two chapters, which are two digital chapters dealing with digital attacks in a very metaphorical way. And that's how we represented our digital worlds. And the other side of it was obviously representing the physical worlds, places that you cannot actually go to, obviously like the nuclear facility or NSA headquarters in Fort Meade to meet our whistleblower. And in between, the way we were representing kind of the bridge between these digital and the physical worlds is we have this transient transitional world in between where It's where you're being bombarded with all the censorship and the public, whatever is available in the public realm. So you're getting all this archival press conferences and news of what actually people are being told about this story and through this transitional world we actually take you into our insider story or the leaks or we reveal to you the actual story behind the story. And so, you know, obviously that's not something we can do in a linear film. This was something because we can create different worlds and have them live cohesively together and you can travel between them and they can kind of interact together. That was our way of like, you know, representing this kind of bridge between the digital and physical and how interconnected they are. But also introduce this idea of like there's two sides to this story as well. So really playing spatially and experientially. And narratively. Yes.
[00:17:17.847] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think the thing that was really striking to me was that it was a self-contained story. You know, a lot of times when you see a VR experience that's associated with a film, it's sort of like an advertisement for the film in some way that doesn't have a meaningful kind of beginning, middle, and end. But this, you're really having that self-contained story. And I know that I've done an interview with James George and their documentary VR experience that premiered here a couple years ago with Clouds, you know, trying to really explore this idea of interactive narrative and allowing the user to explore with their agency and actually change the trajectory of the narrative that's unfolding. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the future of where you see this documentary medium going, because you're doing a very linear experience where you're giving people agency to look around, but I'm just curious if you've thought about, since you're working with Alexander and James, how to include potentially more agency and interactivity within these types of experiences.
[00:18:10.088] Yasmin Elayat: That's a very good question. I should caveat a little bit of context about my background. I actually come from an experience design and creative technologist. And my background is in building interactive installations. My first documentary was a participatory crowdsourced documentary on the Egyptian revolution. So everything I believe in is about actually participatory storytelling, community-based storytelling, or involving the audience in the creation or giving the audience full agency. That being said, approaching this as the director and having this kind of background, this was from the beginning we had actually designed it as a very non-linear piece and actually very interactive. And through the creative process and while I was working on the script and working on some of the early storyboarding, I realized that this actually, I couldn't just do interactivity here for interactivity's sake, even though I do believe in it wholeheartedly. The challenge here was we could make, because it's a very sensitive topic and it actually is relying on a body of work, the journalistic work of Jigsaw and Alex Gibney, We couldn't just have two chapters as this non-branching narratives just appear in certain orders because we could be making the wrong kind of connections. And so we actually found that one of the biggest challenges is how do you actually maintain the journalistic integrity of the story. And so we actually had to sacrifice the branching narratives there in this context. There's other ways we could have done it. We had played with the idea of adding kind of like a Stuxnet POV where you're normally seeing the physical world and then there's like the interactivity through gaze or through the controllers. you see the Stuxnet x-ray vision. But for me, it felt a little superfluous with such a topic that was so serious that I actually, I chose that for this piece, it just felt like it just didn't make sense. And that for this one, this is the way we need to, it's already a complicated story and there's other ways to, as I said, we can play with senses in different ways, we can play with camera movements, we can think of different ways of designing the story that doesn't need to be as interactive as, you know, other pieces that really need to be or participate as other pieces that really need to call on it.
[00:20:05.200] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's really interesting because I found that you did have a really elegant way of unfolding the evidence because you kind of present the official word of what people are saying at the beginning and then you hear from the experts and they are basically saying, yeah, this has got to be a state actor and there's only a handful of countries that would be really interested in doing this, so they can really eliminate it. And then all the public statements, you could start to see that they weren't actually being completely authentic in their ability to be able to deny it or to even say anything about it. You see in your are able to read between the lines of the tonality. So it starts to feel like as we're moving from the information age to the experiential age, it's that ability to discern that authenticity and to be able to call bullshit when you hear it. You can tell as the evidence is being unfolded and they're denying it, but it's not even a full denial. They're actually not fully denying it. It's that ability to get to the truth of what may actually be happening. And I feel like that's a skill that we're cultivating, is that being able to discern that level of authentically speaking about something. But in this case, the interactivity had to take a backseat to that linearity of being able to actually uphold to that journalistic truth. So I think that's a really canny insight. And so moving forward, though, I'm curious, what are the things that you're really taking away?
[00:21:22.254] Yasmin Elayat: Yeah, I mean, I'm very excited about, you know, obviously, since I've joined Scatter, I've joined about in June of last year, and we all have a shared vision about what the future of VR and volumetric filmmaking should be, which is we believe in diversity of voices, diversity of representation of characters, and accessibility of the tools, and accessibility of of the stories and how I see this when I talk about interactivity or participation is like I want to be working on more participatory type of projects in VR or in general in immersive media. We're not just a VR studio, we obviously also are interested in emerging technology that lets us tell stories that we can't tell in any other way. We're also focused on non-fiction narratives, all of us, and so it's very important for us that if we're moving forward that there is a, we are thinking very critically about how people are represented in our pieces, if it's their own voice and their own image. Obviously because of Deaf Kit we have the flexibility of representing people as they are in real stories and I think what's important for me is, and I think Blackout is the next kind of expression of that, it's evolving into this beautiful idea of a crowdsource or participatory documentary that is like where you can have a revolving class of New Yorkers join the story and they are also contributing their voice and their image to the documentary. I know you already had talked to Alexandra about Blackout previously, but I think that's kind of the idea. There's always every piece we're going to be taking on is about how do we push it a little more in one way or another. Whether it's like playing with different, when we talk about volumetric filmmaking, it doesn't mean just a person looking and the world looking one-to-one, a translation. It's actually we want to have a whole visual range and a design aesthetic and we think that that's actually kind of what's exciting about the tools we're using and we will build the tools if something doesn't exist to give us that like style range and also give us like the ability to have a way to be more participatory and interactive with and I'm not just talking about within the experience I'm talking about outside also involving creators and our audience to be part of the creation process. How that will unfold I'm not so sure but these are the conversations we have as four partners at Scatter.
[00:23:24.547] Kent Bye: Awesome. And finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality, and what am I able to enable?
[00:23:30.678] Yasmin Elayat: Oh, that's a very good loaded question, the potential of VR. I mean, for me... There's so many, I can answer this in so many ways. I mean, from a studio that is, you know, in startup mode, we just see a huge, huge potential in kind of just changing what it means to tell stories or the, you know, there's, I guess, taking a step back, like there's like our modern age, just because of our behavior as people, we're storytellers and we're story creators and we obviously crave audience agency and being able to play with something so immersive as VR and a medium that allows our audience even more agency if we as creators give them that agency. I think what I'm very just super excited about is like kind of removing I guess the middle people the opportunity that provides from a distribution as creators to a variety of you know our audiences and different people to the idea that also I don't know like I think it's just like a completely nascent unexplored medium and I think that's what's exciting to me especially as a technologist like The idea that it's still so nascent that you can keep playing and keep pushing and you can keep breaking rules and that's the beauty of it. We're not standing on a whole design practice of anything. We're the ones building that practice right now. And I think that's the most exciting part for me and the kind of the biggest opportunity is like that ability and the space to play right now.
[00:24:47.180] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thank you so much.
[00:24:48.381] Yasmin Elayat: Thank you so much. It's so nice to be on this podcast. Thank you.
[00:24:52.365] Kent Bye: So that was Yasmin Alayat. She works at Scatter and she's the director of Zero Days VR, which premiered at Sundance. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, to me, it is super interesting that they actually tried to do a nonlinear approach to this documentary and found that it just didn't work based upon the story that they needed to tell, because there's a certain amount of context that's given in the linear telling of the journalism that they were doing. So if you put things in different order, then it's communicating a different message, which I think is super fascinating to think about the overall context under which a story is being told, and that the non-linearity of that kind of breaks the integrity of the message that they're trying to tell. One of the points that you have is you're going through these transitory places where there's different media clips and news clips that are coming up, and that's your opportunity to hear the official story, which is what amounts to a denial from everybody and all different levels of government claiming any level of responsibility for Stuxnet and not even willing to say anything about it on the record. You get this impression that they're just trying to deny it and not give any explicit confirmation or denial. So it's kind of unknown. It's at this point an allegation that the United States government was involved in any official capacity. But it's clear from the experts that are interviewed within this piece that their judgment is that it's pretty clear that the United States was involved in this because there's not very many people who would have the technical capabilities to be able to pull off such a cyber attack, but also the desire and the will and motivation to be able to actually pull it off. So I think that the actual VR piece does an amazing job of connecting the dots of some of these decisions that are being made within the intelligence agencies to take what are essentially these bugs and security vulnerabilities and to exploit them into their offensive efforts to be able to do these type of cyber attacks. So I spent about eight years within the Drupal open source community, and it's a content management system where there would be different security vulnerabilities that would get discovered. And there's a certain process of security that is advocated, which is to do this private disclosure to the coders of that software such that they could try to come up with a patch and a fix. And then as soon as they have a fix for it, then they announce that, hey, there is this vulnerability you should patch immediately. So there's a certain level of urgency to be able to patch the vulnerabilities that are out there. So that is sort of the best practices for security, but that's not the process that the state actors are engaging in. Whether it's the United States government, or Russia, or Iran, or China, you know, there's all these huge countries that are deciding to weaponize these security vulnerabilities rather than patch them. But also just the overall potential to have our critical infrastructure be vulnerable to these types of attacks to either turn off the power or attack banks or turn off the water supply, any number of things that could result in people actually dying. So even though it's like an invisible cyber warfare, it's very abstract and it's hard to really kind of wrap your head around. I think that Zero Days VR actually does a brilliant job of showing and demonstrating what's at stake here when we talk about cyber warfare. and some of the larger ethical questions as to whether or not we should be engaging in weaponizing the internet in this fashion. I think the fact that there are whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden or other people who have explicitly leaked some of these cyber weapons or who have come forth in this documentary of Zero Days but also as an amalgamation of different characters within the Zero Days VR experience, these whistleblowers are trying to raise awareness that this is happening and that it's actually very concerning that there's this weaponization process that's been happening. So to me, it was super interesting and surprising to hear that They tried to do this as a nonlinear interactive experience, but that it just wasn't working, given the sort of delicate nature of the kind of he said, she said parts of the story, and that in order for them to convey the message that they wanted to, it had to be a little bit like a time-based medium where you were being presented different information at different points that would help shape your own sense of what is actually happening. And the question they were asking is, how can you embody Stuxnet as an entity, something that is completely abstract and very complicated, but part of the reason of what makes Zero Days VR so powerful is that I think they did a brilliant job of embodying something that is completely abstract. And it's kind of like the perfect topic to talk about when you talk about virtual reality, just because it's got all of these kind of cyberpunk aesthetics of being able to actually visualize what's happening at this imaginal realm of cyberspace. but you give it direct experience of that and after you have that experience you start to see what's at stake here when we're talking about cyber weapons and this invisible battle that's happening. So definitely go check out Zero Days VR if you've listened up to this point and you haven't watched it yet then you should definitely go watch it but hopefully you had a chance to see it before listening to all this because I think it's an important piece and it's also really pushing forward what's possible in terms of narrative and storytelling within virtual reality. So that's all that I have for today. I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and become a donor. Just a few dollars a month makes a huge difference. So you can donate today at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
