Riferimento: https://immerse.news/revealing-reality-in-imaginary-worlds-part-1-7fa0409d8257
At the intersection of these fields, new languages and grammars are bubbling up. Using real time 3D game engines, stories move forward with techniques such as treasure hunts, live actors and virtual scenes mapped onto physical sets that participants wander through, sometimes revealing what is real along the way. The scene changes depending on where the participant moves their hands and eyes.
“Fight Back” by Celine Tricart
Celine Tricart is no stranger to Virtual Reality having created the award-winning project “The Key” (2019) which won the Grand Jury Prize at Venice in 2019.
Celine Tricart: “I think I understand the difference between film and VR, and a lot of people coming from film struggle with that difference, of being a first-person medium and having no in between, no transformation of your perception between you and the story. And so the way you tell the story, it’s completely different in film than it is in virtual reality. And it’s also very different in video games. So you just have to adapt.”
You have to do the movement correctly (measured through hand tracking) in order to advance. Tricart shares, “They are very basic. They are like stage one of self-defense, but it’s a first, very important step.”
We realized that hand tracking was not exactly ready at this moment in time. There’s a couple of things it’s very good at and there’s a lot of things that it is not very good at, for example, fast movement. Fast movement is really bad for hand tracking, and it’s kind of difficult when you do a game where you are actually fighting to not get too excited and move really fast. So we have to constantly remind people to stay relaxed, stay calm, and make slow and precise gestures at the right timing.
“I’m trying to see everything through the eyes of my future players or participants. I use participants in the case of experiences and players if it’s games. It’s very important not to think from the position of the director or the storyteller. That’d be like, ‘Okay, people know nothing about my world and my story. They will put a VR headset on. What will they see first, and how are we going to guide them through the experience?’”
The genesis of the project comes from her experience filming Yazidi women of Iraq, also known as Sun Ladies, fighting at the frontlines against ISIS. There was something empowering about the physical activity, holding a safe space, and practicing boundary setting. Tricart began to wonder, “How can we rewire our brain to understand that we deserve to be here? We deserve to hold our space, that we are physical beings, and we can say no.”
Tricart hoped that people emerge transformed not only by the story but by the moves they have learned. Perhaps, they would walk a little differently, a little more forcefully, out of the virtual world and into the real one. “ Just having that moment when you punch and you have that POW and seeing how powerful you are. That’s profound.”
Da vedere: Fight Back, The Key
Riferimento: https://immerse.news/revealing-reality-in-imaginary-3d-worlds-part-2-fef5212a62cd
One of her experiments, All Unsaved Progress Will Be Lost, premiered at Venice Immersive in September 2022. Melanie Courtinat created the virtual reality project in a few weeks by herself with no funds. The project tells the story of an unknown narrator who refuses to evacuate their hometown after an environmental catastrophe. The story unfolds through text that appears around you as the experience propels you forward through a landscape that is at once beautiful and stark. Haunting music plays in the background, and the world that she creates is a ghost town. The few animals you see are silent. Based on a true event, all of the text is taken from an archive of interviews with people who experienced an environmental disaster in their village and presented as one narrator’s story.
The story is based on real-life events, but I imagined this character. There’s no information about their gender in the story, but for me it’s an old woman. She’s made of thousands of pieces of text, of different testimonies… I didn’t want it to have actual characters. I think it was interesting for me, for the spectator, to be able to project…
The stark landscape and simple texts makes the experience feel eerie and ominous. Behind you, you see the trail of texts that you read, hanging on in the heavy air like the player character hangs on to her home knowing that all will be eventually lost — her home, her village, her life.
The emotion is one of fear and loss. I imagined what it would be like if someone knocked on my door and told me to leave immediately — how I would feel abandoning my home. Or how I would feel if I stayed knowing that toxins surrounded me and eventually would kill everything in their wake. I felt for this woman who refused to go, the pain of loss too great to bear, the anger keeping her there.
I don’t think in terms of frames, like, you have a little character here and then something big on the left. I don’t know much about it. My personal background is in video games, so I’ve always created worlds thinking in 360 degrees. So when you use a game engine to create, it’s like doing little models. You’re going to do the terrain first, make it uneven and then you’re going to paint your rock or grass textures. And then you’re going to put a little tree here and place everything you want. Then you’re going to light it and perhaps add fog, I personally like it heavy. And only in the end, … I will go to first person mode and wander in this world I just created and find the perfect point of view. And I will place the camera here. And that’s the way of creating that I really like. It’s super fun, to be honest.
You really had to go to some specific place, manually save it, and then you had this kind of message, “Are you sure you want to quit? All unsaved progress would be lost.” It’s such a weird sentence if you think about it. It’s so bizarrely grave and intense in a misplaced moment.
Da vedere: I Never Promised You a Garden (2017), Trouble (2020), All Unsaved Progress Will Be Lost