Voices of VR

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 continuation of two previous conversations that I also participated in during Venice Immersive 2019 (I hope to air the recordings of those here soon), and the major conclusion back then was that the challenges of the limited distribution of immersive stories makes it difficult to cultivate a broader audience for reviews and critiques. Fast forward to 2022, and many of these distribution challenges by and large still exist, although it is slightly better given more immersive stories showing up on the Meta platform and Viveport has the most robust selection of immersive stories, even though Steam still is largely games only. But the challenge for immersive festivals is that they’re still having many challenges trying to attract the mainstream film critics to pay more attention to the selection of immersive stories. It’s under this context that there was another gathering of mostly film critics who occasionally write about immersive work and myself who is solely dedicated to covering immersive stories, immersive art, and immersive entertainment. Moderated by Michel Reilhac & Liz Rosenthal (co-curators of Venice Immersive) Federica Polidoro (Contributor, Repubblica, L’Espresso, Vanity Fair, Il Foglio Quotidiano) Kent Bye (Philosopher and Founder, Voices of VR Podcast) Róisín Tapponi (Contributor, Frieze Magazine, Sight & Sound, The Guardian, & Founder of Habibi Collective and Shasha Movies) Xan Brooks (Film writer & novelist, former associate editor at The Guardian) A big takeaway for me is that the editors...

AmazeVR is a VR Concert Platform that premiered part of an experience at SXSW that they will be taking on a 10-city concert tour called Megan Thee Stallion: Enter Thee Hottieverse. I had a chance to speak with AmazeVR's Head of Creative Eric J. Krueger about the social VR and interactive aspects as well as their unique volumetric compositing of different techniques that gives a really high-fidelity resolution within the Quest. Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality and entertainment within the experience, and the social dynamics of watching this with 100 other people in a movie theater will no doubt provide a visceral first-time VR experience for a lot of people. Their tour will be starting in Los Angeles on April 5th, and then headed to San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Miami, Charlotte, Washington DC, and ending in New York City with the last show on July 3rd.

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 tells a broader mythical story contrasting the different symbolic phases of Yathay's mind and heart as he searches for his son that he had to abandon. It has some light interaction mechanics to gate the linear experience, created a number of exquisite and immaculate environments, and also includes some volumetric captures that are memory flashbacks that help tell the story of how he came to decide to leave his family behind during the genocide. I had a chance to catch up with Bousis at Venice Immersive to talk about her storytelling design process, but also how the invasion of Ukraine impacted their production and Ukrainian developers working on this project.

Grant Maxwell’s book Integration and Difference: Constructing a Mythical Dialectic looks at the problem of the opposites through the lens of 13 philosophers who mostly fit within a constructivist stream of pragmatist, speculative, or process thought. This Voices of VR podcast episode is a 2.5-hour, philosophical deep dive providing an overview of each of these thinkers and how their ideas fit into the broader context of experiential design, perception, embodied experience, consciousness, and the metaphysical assumptions about the nature of reality itself. The 13 philosophers included within Maxwell’s book and this discussion include: Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) F.W.J. Schelling (1775-1834) Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) William James (1842-1910) Henri Bergson (1859-1941) Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) C.G. Jung (1875-1961) Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) James Hillman (1926-2011) Isabelle Stengers (1949-)

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 dilemma at the end of the experience that requires half of the participants to come to some level of consensus, and there's a number of different endings based up what the group decides. I had a chance to talk with director Thomas Villepoux about the process of cultivating the social dynamics of this piece as well as collaborating with Beijing-based Sandman Studios on their Vast social VR platform.