I’ve just got back from the Venice Film Festival, which for the first time showcased an exciting programme of genre defining virtual reality (VR) film. I’m currently developing a VR project of my own and for the last two years have spent many an hour queuing up at film festivals and in art galleries to see how various directors from cinema, fine art and theatre have experimented with such a radical and shape shifting medium. I have seen many VR works, some good, some bad but enough to convince me that VR feels like the very early days of cinema, a time when filmmakers are learning the grammar, rather than writing the language, of VR.
One of the strongest works I experienced in Venice was Draw Me Close, a recent collaboration between the National Film Board of Canada and the UK’s National Theatre. This VR experience was created by playwright and filmmaker Jordan Tannahill and documents his relationship with his mother, both past and present, as the two of them deal with her terminal cancer diagnosis.
Draw Me Close is part of an evolving genre of “reactive theatre” in which the virtual journey is combined with a physical journey through a stage set in which real-life “reactive actors” (unseen by the user) interact with you throughout the experience. The sensory feedback you receive is a powerful part of the experience. When the virtual mum goes to hug you, you receive a real life hug from the “reactive actor” playing her.
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One of the other key works on show in Venice, Alice: The Virtual Reality Play was produced by a team of actors, animators and developers. The reactive actors in this piece wore full motion capture sensors on their bodies and faces. As Alice, I interacted with the reactive actors in the space. Their words are synced perfectly with the animated characters in my VR experience via motion capture headsets, giving me the impression I was having a real-time conversation with the White Rabbit.
VR is an exciting new tool for interactive experiences and immersion. It creates a space in which you, as an audience member, are participant, player and protagonist. A space in which you can participate in a story rather than simply being on the outside looking in. Frank Rose, author of The Art of Immersion, writes brilliantly about the ways in which our emotions and technology converge: “People have always wanted to in some way inhabit the stories that move them. The only real variable is whether technology gives them that opportunity.”
Now it does. With bells on.
Source: The Conversation