The living room was black and white, like a roughly sketched cartoon, and I was waiting for my “mother” to come home. Soon enough, the sketch of a woman walked in the front door. The black- and-white line drawing came over to hug me, and simultaneously, a real person hugged me, too.
I’d been told I would be touched, but nothing prepared me for the jarring experience. It was like my mind was torn between two worlds: The one that my eyes could see, and the one my body inhabited. And it only got worse. I sat on the floor with the woman, played by an actress, and we colored using real-life pens that triggered real colors in the virtual world. Then it was bedtime. The cartoon guided me to a bed–a real life bed!–and tucked me in. All I could think about were the germs of countless people who’d been in this bed before me.
I was at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival, inside a virtual reality experience called Draw Me Close by the playwright and filmmaker Jordan Tannahill. The piece is meant to let you experience a moment in Tannahill’s life as a five-year-old. It’s billed as part theater, part VR experience, a piece of art that pushes the boundaries of storytelling. And it was definitely boundary pushing–if you’re talking about my personal boundaries.
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Draw Me Close. [Photo: Ron Antonelli for NFB and National Theatre]
While you might be able to do quite a lot inside a VR headset, from flying to living as a giant redwood, there’s still a dissonance between what your brain experiences virtually and what your body experiences physically. How do you make a virtual world feel truly immersive, when it only deals with two of your senses?
But an emerging field of VR set design is trying to bridge that gap. Designers are making “sets” that you experience before and after you don your headset–and in some cases, they’re trying to create physical spaces and sensations that correspond to the virtual experience simultaneously. As new haptic technology like electric muscle stimulation brings the virtual closer to the physical, VR companies are looking to the world of immersive theater to create more realistic experiences.
At Tribeca Film Festival’s VR showcase, this merging of theater and technology was on full display in multiple projects. But as Draw Me Close demonstrated, it wasn’t always a seamless transition.
There’s a significant design challenge in creating a physical space in which to situate a virtual story, especially when that story is particularly harrowing. Take the design of the space meant to hold the VR film The Last Goodbye, which follows a Holocaust survivor as he returns to the concentration camp where he lost his family. It’s a devastating and tragic story–something that David Korins, who has designed sets for the musicals Hamilton, Dear Evan Hansen, and Fox’s Grease Live, took into account when he was creating the “set” for The Last Goodbye.
“I wanted to give the sense that the viewer wasn’t exposed or out in the open. I really wanted to create a safe emotional landscape to have any kind of an experience,” he says. “I’m not going to presume what people’s response would be to that incredible testimony. If you wanted to laugh or cry or have a moment of catharsis or contemplation, we could create a space you could do that it in.”
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The Last Goodbye [Photo: David Korins Design]
Korins ultimately designed a large, mirrored cube that’s large enough for you to stand and walk around in. You enter the space from the back of the cube, where a serene-faced attendant asks you to remove your shoes and walks you through what you’re about to experience. Surrounding the pod is a ring of dirt–which Korins says is meant to look like it’s been taken from the concentration camp–that makes the cube appear to float. It wasn’t what I expected from the set for a Holocaust VR experience; the interior is lit with blue light that wouldn’t be out of place in a futuristic science lab or a clubby bar. The interior has a shallow bench with simple square divots in the walls.
Korins has some very compelling, philosophical reasons for the futuristic design. The mirrors let it fit into any place the experience may travel, whether it’s the Holocaust Museum, the UN, or Tribeca, while helping people “come face-to-face with yourself and face-to-face with humanity.” The blue light, which changes to pink after the experience is over, is meant to give a sense of openness, while the pink is supposed to indicate emotional catharsis.
“It’s not like you’re walking into something that’s recreating a Nazi concentration camp of 1942,” he says. “I wanted it to be more abstract so that the real profundity of the world and piece inside could be very specific.”
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Source: CO.DESIGN