Bag of Worms is a live XR sketch comedy performance developed by Matt Romein in collaboration with Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey that showed as a part of the ONX + DocLab MoCap Stage at IDFA DocLab 2022. It’s difficult to fully describe the...
I was invited to give a keynote at the Capturing Reality in Motion session as a part of the ONX + DocLab MoCap Stage. I gave a 20-minute talk reflecting on how some of the different projects on the film festival circuit have been using motion...
In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats is a landmark immersive documentary that seamlessly integrates so many different immersive storytelling techniques and XR modalities earning it the IDFA DocLab Award for Immersive Non-Fiction. You’re transported back...
With These Hands is a VR installation that “shares challenging, complex and under discussed stories of sexual assault and recovery. It explores the role of listening in the recovery of both survivors and those responsible for sexual harm.” It was...
Ghana Airways by Hakeem Adam was shown at IDFA DocLab 2022 as an experimental, non-linear audio installation with accompanying visuals, but it is also available online on Bandcamp as a linear, one-hour, 3-part audio series. The piece is Adam’s...
New Update Available – Version 2.1 is a VR installation piece that blends contemporary audio documentary recordings of computer help sessions for the elderly, but then recreates these characters in VR within a speculative future where elders...
Taylor McCue’s He Fucked the Girl Out of Me (play for free on itch.io) won the IDFA DocLab Digital Storytelling Award at DocLab 2022. It is a deeply personal story and powerful exploration of shame and trauma that uses a unique blend of retro 2D...
Polymorf's Symbiosis is a multi-sensory VR experience that uses soft-body haptics, a bespoke, microdose smell dispersal system, and different tastes. The piece debuted at IDFA DocLab 2021 (see my previous interview here), and it has a sold out run...
Once a Glacier is a 360 video that visualizes the before and after a glacier melts over the course of a single human life time. Director Jiabao then expanded this piece as a part of a live motion capture dance performance that showed at The ONX +...
Horizon is a one-on-one immersive theater piece where an audience member is asked a series of questions by a 15-year old to imagine their future 30 years from now in 2052. It ends up being a world building exercise where the audience has to create...
This episode kicks off my 18-episode coverage from International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam (IDFA) DocLab, which features the latest innovations of immersive storytelling from the documentary community. Okawari VR is an immersive experience...
You Destroy. We Create: The War on Ukraine’s Culture is a 360-video documentary by NowHere Media & Meta’s VR for Good that was released on Meta Quest TV on November 30th. Shot over the course of 2 weeks and a distance of 4000 kilometers by co...
This is the 26th & last episode of my Venice Immersive 2022 coverage, and I wanted to end with this discussion amongst film and immersive critics about the various challenges for reviewing and critiquing immersive art and entertainment. This is a...
VRChat world builder Fins had 3 experiences in Venice Immersive 2022 with one in competition (Treasure Heist), and two in the Worlds Gallery (Magic Heist and District Roboto). Fins comes from an illustration and concept artist background, and so...
Kindred is a short and sweet experience that explores issues of non-binary, gender-questioning, and LGBTQ+ identities in the context of family. It’s an animated piece that manages to be both general and universal in it’s themes, but you learn at the...
Mike Salmon is the producer of the VRChat Worlds Gallery at Venice Immersive, which means that the scouts out potential worlds, helps track down potential events to feature, and coordinates all of the physical and virtual docents who helping to...
Fight Back is an interactive narrative that is aiming to help teach the broad movements of self-defense to women. There were five different levels showing at Venice Immersive where you learn a new hand motion that’s detected via hand tracking. The...
Paper Rock Scissors is an interactive story that uses hand-tracking to allow the audience member to play the game of Rock Paper Scissors in the context of a story of how a mother and daughters use the game to make a variety of different types of...
The Miracle Basket is the perfect example for why you shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover as it’s a really well-told story behind what director Abner Preis calls a DIY Punk aesthetic that he describes as looking like it may have been drawn by a...
Elele is an Venice Immersive experience that was selected as a part of the Biennale College Cinema selection, and it’s a quite compelling embodied experience exploring that transforms your hands via hand tracking into a spatialized living sculptures...
Reimagined Volume I: Nyssa uses Quill to tell the fairy tale story of a young woman on a mission to find her friend, and there’s a lot of stylized camera movements that adds a cinematic quality to a spatial story that’s otherwise pretty theatrically...
#1135: Combining Opera, Theatre, & Long-Distance Walking in VR for “Eurydice: Descent into Infinity”
Eurydice: Descent into Infinity sets out to combine theatrical staging with opera with walking incredibly long distances in VR to reimagine the myth of Eurydice and Orpheus. The take-away feeling that I had from this experience was a deep and...
All Unsaved Progress Will Be Lost is the type of experience that is better the less you know about it, but I really, really loved this piece as it efficiently packs in a lot of emotional punch in such a short time. The primary mode of storytelling...
Funique VR Supervisor Ming-Yuan CHUAN worked on three projects that all finished at the same time under deadline for the Venice Immersive 2022. Red Tail is an animation piece that uses photogrammetry on built figures, and The Man Who Couldn’t Leave...
Mandala: A Brief Moment in Time is an immersive theater experience for 3-6 people that uses group discussions to tell different stories from Buddhism around the themes of suffering, happiness, hungry ghosts, & living the good life. There's a moral...
Two of my favorite experiences at Venice Immersive this year were from Taiwan, All That Remains and The Man Who Couldn't Leave, which took the top jure prize this year. Red Tail was another animated piece from Taiwan that was selected for...
The Stay Alive, My Son VR experience is an adaptation of Pin Yathay's memoir of his survival of the Cambodian genocide under the Khmer Rouge. Attorney turned immersive storyteller Victoria Bousis translated this book into a spatial journey that...
XRMust is part online magazine covering the immersive storytelling industry through news and interviews, but it’s in process of aggregating thousands of immersive stories into a database that have been showing on the festival circuit (with a...
Mrs. Benz: Voyage of Discover combines escape room puzzle mechanics with environmental storytelling with exquisite attention to detail in order to tell the story of Bertha Benz, the the wife of the founder of Mercedes Benz, as she steals his car to...
Darkening is a personal memoir experience by Ondřej Moravec, who takes the viewer on an interactive journey through a variety of spatial metaphors of his experience of depression. There are a number of interactive opportunities to use your voice to...
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.