All That Remains is a surreal embodied adventure through liminal moments that is open-ended enough to leave a lot of room for the audience to project a wide range of associative meaning, memories, or emotions onto it. It is the closest that I've...
I speak with the four creators of Dazzle: A Re-Assembly of Bodies experience, which includes choreographer and dancer Ruth Gibson and visual artist Bruno Martelli of Gibson/Martelli, as well as Bine Roth & Alexa Pollmann of Peut-Porter. This dance...
The Man Who Couldn’t Leave is a emotionally-evocative 360 video and powerfully-told story about political prisoners during Taiwan’s White Terror trying to communicate with their families. It took home the top prize at Venice Immersive 2022 for it’s...
From the Main Square tells the story of a polarized city by placing you in the middle of a hand-drawn and animated city as it goes through different waves of conflict and evolution. There are many individual characters who you can trace throughout...
Venice Immersive 2022 featured 30 immersive stories in competition with some of the fiercest competition yet. I’m joined by Pola Weiß to break down, analyze, & critique each one of the 30 experiences in competition starting with the three winners:...
Kevin Mack is a virtual reality artist who creates abstract and surreal art, and his first VRChat world called NAMUANKI has been selected as one of the 30 projects in competition at Venice Immersive. You take a tour through some of his organic...
I get an overview of the Venice Immersive festival that's taking place from September 1st to 10th with co-curators Liz Rosenthal and Michel Reilhac. There are 75 total experiences with 30 experiences in competition, 10 project in Best Of Immersive...
I moderated a Tribeca Talks Panel discussion on 'Making a Difference with Immersive Non-Fiction Stories' that on Sunday, June 12, 2022 where we focused on the structure and forms of immersive storytelling, and then reflected on the challenges and...
ReachYou is an AR story that receives transmissions from the future in order to connect to the tenderness of the now. It's a slow media project aimed to create a portal into a story world that allows the audience to access emotion states of deep...
Liam Young is a director and speculative architect who is designing regenerative futures via provocative thought experiments. Planet City VR is the provocation of centralizing all 10 billion humans on the planet to a city the size of Texas so that...
The LGBTQ+ VR Museum won the inaugural Tribeca Immersive New Voices Award as it curated a number of really touching virtual objects, art, and stories from LGBTQ+ people. Antonia Forester started the project after discovering that there was not a...
Exhibition A is 'A love letter to women of color written in virtual reality... showcases talent from the POC, immigrant, non-binary, LGBTQ, and Black communities in Portland, Maine.' I had a chance to speak with project creator and producer Janay...
Zanzibar: Trouble in Paradise is a volumetric documentary that premiered at Tribeca Immersive 2022 on the Looking Glass Factory 65-inch Holographic Display that was announced on June 7, 2022 just before the festival. I was able to catch up with...
First-time VR artists Miri Chekhanovich & Édith Jorisch in collaboration with Dpt. and '>The NFB created some unique embodiment experiments within Plastisapians as they explored speculative futures about plastic permeating and changing our bodies...
Marshmallow Laser Feast's latest piece Evolver premiered at the Tribeca Immersive festival, and it takes you inside the human body in a transcendent journey into how the blood flows through our heart and throughout our body. They collaborating with...
Missing Pictures is a five-part episodic series that translates unmade films from famous directors from around the world into a spatialized VR story pitch and treatment. French Director Clément Deneux created a episode short film version called...
Black Movement Library: Movement Portraits is a motion capture database project and series of experiences across different media by multi-media artist LaJuné McMillian. She wanted to see more black dancers represented in motion capture data, but...
Iago: The Green Eyed Monster is an Animated AR, Rock Operetta, exploring the villain origin story of the character of Iago from Shakespeare Othello. There are links to the iOS and Android AR app linked on their website, and I'd recommend checking...
The Infinite is a location-based VR experience that allows you to freely roam around an architectural abstraction of the International Space Station with friends and family, and it has 360 video photospheres that transport you to nearly 60 excerpts...
I get a preview of Tribeca Immersive 2022 with curator Ana Brzezinska.
#1087: IndieWire Editor Eric Kohn on Deepening Critical Discourse within VR & Immersive Storytelling
Eric Kohn has been a professional film critic for 15 years, and he’s currently the Executive Editor at Indiewire, the Vice President of Editorial Strategy, as well as the co-host of IndieWire’s Screen Talk podcast. IndieWire first...
Radio Ghost is a 70-minute, interactive and immersive audio piece for three people that's site-specific to a mall. It's meant to unpack the unseen stories of unethical consumption and deconstruct the design patterns of shopping malls. It's has an...
Paradise is an immersive audio piece exploring themes of domestic violence that was an interdisciplinary collaboration between Darkfield, VR documentary filmmaker Gabo Arora of Lightshed.io and researcher and clinician Nancy Glass from the Johns...
Lustration is a 4-part episodic VR series illustrated within Quill that's in the fantasy, detective noir genre, and created by First Nation Creative Ryan Griffen. It allows you to change camera perspectives within Quill as it blends together aspects...
#1081: Using VR to Capture Memories of Home with Sunghwan Lee’s “Ihyangjeong: Carving with Memories”
Ihyangjeong: Carving with Memories is by Korean 2D animator Sunghwan Lee of Studio Shelter, who used Quill to tell a spatial story about the connections between home, objects, and memory. The piece tells a larger story of Lee's journey from a dingy...
Targo Stories has created a number of really well-produced and well-told immersive stories using the 360 VR video medium over the past three years. Their latest co-production with Meta is Surviving 9/11: 27 Hours Under the Rubble, which premiered in...
On January 10th, Ana Brzezińska was announced to be the new Immersive Curator of the Tribeca Film Festival, and I had a chance to speak to her before this announcement to do a retrospective of her time that she spent as Kaleidoscope VR's Head of...
Black Ice VR is a sci-fi horror immersive narrative that experiments between switching between 3rd person and 1st person POV, and it was produced as a part of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts' The Media + Emerging Technology Lab...
Future Rights was a prototype at SXSW that aimed to bring bringing Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring into VR. They were showing a short demo at SXSW, but they have plans for a sort of dance autotune and collaborative performance that uses AI to...
The Choice is an interactive documentary that explores the issue of reproductive rights in Texas. The team uses a special stereoscopic compositing pipeline that combines depth sensor information with a stereo camera capture, but creates a shader to...
Céline Tricart is an award-winning VR director who gave one of the main SXSW Keynotes about immersive storytelling, live action role play, and emotional bleed. She started as a writer, went to film school, made a cinematic VR documentary Sun Ladies...
Liminal Lands is an environmental VR piece commissioned by Luma Arles to document and volumetrically capture different objects and organisms within 'overlooked wetlands at the edge of the Mediterranean.' It's a piece where the sound design adapts to...
The Peabody Awards have expanded beyond the traditional categories of Entertainment, News, Podcast & Radio, Documentary, Arts, & Public Service, and into new formats of Digital and Interactive Storytelling that include Transmedia Storytelling...
On the Morning You Wake (To the End of the World) is now available for free on Oculus, and it's a must-watch immersive story that won the best XR Experience at SXSW. It's a three-part series that dives into the broader implications of a false...
Forensic Architecture is an innovative interdisciplinary, non-profit research group that uses the tools & techniques of architecture to tell spatial stories of state-sponsored violence and human rights. Their 79 investigations since 2010 have be...
The immersive story of Notes on Blindness: Into the Darkness (2016) VR experience (Quest, Rift) was awarded with a Legacy Peabody Award for Digital & Interactive Storytelling along with 15 other projects on Thursday, March 24th. This experience has...
Nonny de la Peña was one of the 16 Legacy Peabody Award recipients honoring historical work as a part of their new Digital & Interactive Storytelling Award. Specifically, de la Peña is receiving a Field Building honor for her body of work that has...
Ioulia Isserlis' Komez Alef O translates the story of her father's refugee journey of escaping the Nazis during the Holocaust. Isserlis collaborated with her father in distilling his journey down to a dozen moments that were spatially reconstructed...
(Hi)story of a Painting: The Light in the Shadow won a special jury prize at SXSW for Immersive Storytelling as it uses the medium of VR to take us back into history to explain the deeper historical context of the work of Artemisia Gentileschi, a...
On the Morning You Wake (To the End of the World) won the best XR Experience at SXSW, and is set to be released this week on March 24th, 2022. (UPDATE 3/24: It's now been released and can be found here.) It's an amazingly well-told story about how...
Weird Times is an 5-part, VR episodic series that explores issues of teenage mental health that's produced by the teach at Flight School and executive produced by Meta's VR for Good. The first two episodes premiered at SXSW, and focus on Depression...
Gumball Dreams is the latest immersive theatre production in VRChat by The Ferryman Collective, who previously produced Welcome to Respite: The Severance Theory. They just had their World Premiere last week participating in competition at SXSW, and...
I talk with the creators of Choctaw Code Talkers 1918, Kilma Lattin, Founder & CEO of OurWorlds as well as Catherine Eng, Co-founder & CTO of OurWorlds, who are bringing Native American Stories to VR with their platform. OurWorlds won the SXSW EDU...
There are nearly 40 XR experiences and special events programmed as a part of the physical SXSW festival in Austin, and I spoke with lead programmer Blake Kammerdiener to get the full run down of the 12 pieces in the XR Experience Competition, 21...
Virtual Virtual Reality 2 has so many innovations in immersive storytelling structure through a very unique experience of nested contexts allowing for character persistence while the feeling of open world exploration. I talk with the co-founders of...
Flat Earth VR started as a thought experiment by Lucas Rizzotto who was skewering the idea that VR is an empathy machine by creating an immersive experience that allowed you identify with delusional perspectives. After invoking some emotional...
The Child of Empire is an immersive story that tells the story of the India-Pakistan Partition of 1947, which is one of the largest forced migrations in human history. It uses puppet theatre-styled motion graphics in the beginning to provide a crash...
The State of Global Peace is an immersive experience that debuted at the Sundance Festival New Frontier 2022, which was produced by the Innovation Cell within the UN Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (UNDPPA) as a translation of a UN...
Suga': A Live Virtual Dance Performance was a live performance in Mozilla Hubs that premiered at SIGGRAPH 2021 and also screened at the Sundance New Frontier 2022. This project tells the story of rebellion, resistance, and resilience of the...
This is Not a Ceremony is a cinematic VR piece that asks us to 'collectively bear witness to tragic events in the lives of two Indigenous men — Adam North Peigan and Brian Sinclair — and entrusts us to share what we've seen and heard.' It uses 360...