Articoli
https://immerse.news/worlding-game-environments-meet-climate-futures-b3a09c37ed0d
Revealing Reality in Imaginary 3D Worlds
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
Link to original
Unlocking the Potential of Immersive Technology for the Arts
Riferimento: https://immerse.news/unlocking-the-potential-of-immersive-technology-for-the-arts-1d7fd2e1ca71
While fits and starts in the consumer adoption of these tools have turned the gadget-obsessed tech press from bullish to bearish, the actual potential of immersive tech as a medium has only begun to be unlocked.
Carne Y Arena, which won a special Academy Award in 2017 after a tour that included stops in Cannes and Los Angeles, leveraged both VR and physical immersive design to bring attendees into a re-creation of a migrant border crossing in the American Southwest. Cutting-edge VR was used to deliver the primary experience, but the large-scale set framed the story in a way that brought patrons closer to the visceral details that defined the reality for those who lived it.
There they took off their shoes, placed them in a locker on the wall, and waited for a red light to signal that they could pass through an austere metal door. Beyond the door was a large, dimly lit sandbox with a looming border fence. Every step of this process happened before participants were helped into a mobile VR rig by two attendants, making the immersive tech only part of the immersive experience.
People donate things like time and resources to museums so… if [museums] are willing to be a little daring they could probably get a lot more than they think for their money.”
Yet the point of leveraging technology is to create a great experience for patrons, not just run down a checklist of the latest gadgets. For Pletcher the key is deploying the technology in context.
Santa Fe’s Meow Wolf, which has turned the art world on its ear with its immersive art installations, doesn’t shy away from the cutting edge of mixed reality tech. An app — the Anomaly Tracker — adds another layer to the already rich House of Eternal Return. The free phone app lets visitors tune into augmented reality extensions of installations inside the home, playing into the multiversal mythology the collective has built for their work.
In mixed reality the pieces reach titanic proportions, with the AR versions often hovering in the sky over the scene as if they were supernaturally charged storms.
Link to originalWhich brings us to the first — and last — principle of immersive design: know your audience, and know what relationship you’re looking to foster between them and the work. No matter the technology deployed, the principle remains.
Virtual Futures: A Manifesto
Riferimento: https://immerse.news/virtual-futures-a-manifesto-for-immersive-experiences-ffb9d3980f0f
Climate armageddon, the rise of the far right, the arrival of our machine overlords — it’s easy to imagine that the future is an unsalvageable hot mess. But what if I told you that an immersive experience such as VR might help us find a way out? Let me explain.
Why take a user out of the “here and now” and attempt to situate her somewhere else?
One reason is to take her somewhere she cannot otherwise go. Some creators use the technology to visit someone or something lost or past (see, for instance, Vestige VR, or historical pieces such as Immersive Histories: Dam Busters). Others use the technology to venture inside another’s mind (Manic VR). Some explore future worlds (Biidaaban: First Light), or visit remote places that demonstrate the impacts of the anthropocene (Sanctuaries of Silence). Many future narratives, though, across multiple screen media forms, tend to be dystopian in flavour. Instead, I’m interested in what might be termed “preferred” futures — what is a future we want to get to? What is the world we want to make?In September 2018 I was selected as one of 27 Immersion Fellows for the South West Creative Technologies Network project in the UK and given the task of exploring immersion. So, I developed a question:
Might there be possibilities within immersive media for creating shared experiences that imagine pathways towards a preferred future?*
Rapidly, I realised I had a manifesto on my hands!Most of the experiences that led me to this understanding enabled an encounter with another human being — but perhaps we could have an encounter with ourselves? Or possibly even an encounter with the natural world? Rob McLaughlin, Executive Producer of Digital Content and Strategy with the Canadian National Film Board, suggested to me also that we could have an encounter with the maker of the work, through the work itself.
Levinas noted that an ethical encounter with another recognises their infinity — that is, the complexity of that person, and an understanding that we will never fully know their entirety. He also noted that in representing others, we run the risk of instead totalising them — suggesting the incomplete picture we present is in fact all there is to them.Consider, for instance, stories of people with disabilities. It can often be the case that the story of their disability is presented as the only story they have, ignoring the individual’s great complexity of being and of experience. So by crafting an encounter with another, instead of attempting to represent another or to have the user “be” another, I hope that immersive experiences move us towards an opportunity to understand the infinity of whom we encounter.
The world is an amazing, complex, messy, and beautiful place, and people are all of these things and more. But the world, and its inhabitants, are also in fairly dire straits. There’s a case to be made that the climate change situation is so desperate that the only route is to shock people out of complacency, and anything less is not enough.
On the other hand, there is a risk that viewers will simply switch off from relentless difficult stories because it all just seems so overwhelming and intractable. Imagining the future is clearly a fraught business.I wonder, though, if the unique affordances of immersive media (the feeling of presence, for instance), might offer us a way forward. If we can see/touch/hear/interact with the things we love about the world now, are we better able to envisage a way to protect them in the future?
Bewilderment, in essence, means partaking in a state of being wild…a reminder of our animal state and our existence within a vast and complex system
Games designer Jane Friedhoff is onto something similar when she says she looks for catharsis over education in her games. Friedhoff, speaking at the Eyeo Festival last year, says she instead wants to create joy, while still pointing to a desired world. She defines joy as containing a number of elements: a capacity for action, a sense of feeling seen and heard, a feeling of being part of a larger whole, an ability to envision a new and better world, and something that can’t be fully explained or quantified. With this approach, she is advocating a move away from that extractive model of storytelling where we look from the outside and peer in at someone else. Instead, it’s about a joyful connection with a shared community — she says, “I can make mosh pits for my friends.” I think this sense of catharsis that Friedhoff is talking about is bewilderment by another name. We connect with others and are reminded of our position within a complex, majestic system.I’ve lost count of the number of (usually) nonfiction 360 degree film experiences in which I’ve wondered why I’m wearing a headset, and whether I’m gaining anything more than I would by seeing the same piece on a flat screen. The creation of a feeling of presence can be enough in certain stories, but, for many, there needs to be a next step of some level of interaction. It’s a fine balance though, as the interaction needs to have some meaningful purpose to it.
Interaction needs to have some meaningful purpose to it.
Homestay VR is an animated VR story by Paisley Smith and the Canadian National Film Board. In it, the user explores a CGI-rendered Japanese garden while listening to Smith’s voiceover tell the sad story of Taro, a home-stay student with her family. Sparkling red leaves flutter around you, and you can reach out and collect them. While I thought the leaves were lovely, I was initially uncertain how they related to the story, or, specifically, how my catching them was relevant. Later, I heard Smith speak about the work, and she said, “Sometimes giving you something to do helps you stay in the present.” Smith has neatly encapsulated here the problem I noted above with some VR work and identified an important first step to encouraging a feeling of connection.
How do we go from being in the present, though, to having an impact on it? I would suggest that interactivity can lead to a feeling of agency (some level of control) in the user only when the interaction has some meaning to the story. Janet H. Murray, in her seminal 1997 book Hamlet on the Holodeck, calls this participating in the “‘Active Creation of Belief.” We have to put in enough work to help continue the illusion, but not so much that the effort pulls us back out.
But, at 40 minutes long, it made me feel incredibly nauseous, and I was constantly aware of the heaviness of the headset and of what seemed like each tiny pixel in my view. I regularly had to close my eyes to attempt a self-reset. If I could have stood up from my chair and walked around, I might have been able to better ignore some of the distractions of the tech.
Manifesto point number four, around using embodiment, is closely linked to the previous point on agency. By being able to take some control — in a physical, bodily way — over the experience, perhaps the user invests in a more complete way, or in a substantively different way? Perhaps the key difference here is using the unique sense of presence and the consequent opportunity for embodiment as a conduit to a different kind of engagement. Or maybe it’s simpler than that — perhaps providing the opportunity to move or speak allows users to realise that they can move and speak.
Make Noise, by May Abdalla, is a wonderful example of curating this interaction in such a way that users knows precisely what is required of them. A VR piece about the suffrage movement, it gives suggestions for what kind and level of noise one should make, and later, particular words one should speak (or shout) as a specific act towards smashing barriers. This removes a lot of the self-consciousness often associated with audience participation, which can come from a fear of doing the “wrong” thing.
When done well, the embodied immersive experience can also create joy and catharsis. VVVR is a two person VR experience in which you sit on the floor, facing your partner, and make any sounds you like with your voice. The sounds are visualised in shapes and colours streaming from your mouth, and you can also see the results emanating from the person opposite you.
The joyfulness in VVVR comes from several things—the sharing of the experience with the other person (the encounter), the recognition of and connection with our animal nature (bewilderment), and the feeling of making ridiculous noises and speaking ourselves present (agency and embodiment).
By care, I mean care for the participant in two ways. Firstly, through respect for their privacy and data — as creators make yet more personalised experiences and collect ever more data on how each version unfolds (and think here beyond immersion about things like streaming service algorithms, for instance), it is vital that we maintain an ethical eye on how (and why) this data is stored and used.
Caring for participants means respecting both their privacy and their experience.
Secondly, I mean “care” through consideration of participant experience all the way from the introduction to and the exiting of and moments after the experience. For me, one very simple test of whether an experience has considered this is whether I have somewhere safe to put my bag. If I’m going to be experiencing a room scale VR piece, the sense of immersion is ruined if I have a constant urge to peek outside the headset and check that no one is nicking my stuff. “Care” in this sense also means considering the viewer’s response to the content. If the story is distressing or unsettling it can take some time for the viewer to decompress afterwards, and being thrust straight back into a busy festival hall might not be appropriate. Ensuring that participants have an opportunity to reorient themselves is important.
Link to originalThis manifesto is, purposefully, technology-agnostic. A project that enables encounter, bewilderment, agency, embodiment and care will lend itself to a range of forms, across AR, projection, installation, VR, a combination of these and more. My humble hope is that creators can use this manifesto to inform the development of amazing projects that will each connect us a little bit more with the way forward. Used together, perhaps they can help us illuminate those very necessary paths toward the future we want to create.
Video
https://www.meta.com/it-it/experiences/pcvr/crow-the-legend/1939359989460713/?utm_source=www.baobabstudios.com&utm_medium=oculusredirect
https://www.oculus.com/experiences/media/1221173041667611/