Hollywood is doing its best to figure out virtual reality, often with less than compelling results.
But a small group of VR producers at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival have successfully innovated their way through experimental territory that big studios have not yet dared to tread, using physical objects and even live actors in their experiences.
Let’s start with the very cool and end with the absolutely mind-blowing.
Blackout is an attempt to give all big city commuters the super powers they’ve always wanted: the power to read the minds of your fellow riders. Using gaze-based tracking, the experience allows you to walk through the subway car and, when you stop and stare at a particular person (a real person who has been captured volumetrically), that person’s inner monologue begins playing in your ears, delivering a kind of telepathic eavesdropping effect.
,
,
However, instead of giving you a Vive headset and hoping you just “get it,” the creators actually constructed a life-sized subway car, complete with seats and handrails that accurately correspond to the the VR experience.
It’s incredibly weird to reach up to grab a handrail in VR and actually feel it. But that weirdness makes reading the minds of your fellow travelers that much more realistic, and visceral.
Treehugger lets you do exactly what its name suggests: wrap your arms around a massive, psychedelic tree that pulses with spectral energy in virtual reality. Using the Vive headset, a Subpac vest for haptic feedback, and a new kind of olfactory attachment that delivers the smell of a forest, you’re transported into the secret world of a tree’s life force.
But you don’t just see, hear, and smell the experience, you’re also given a giant foam-covered, tree-shaped construct that you can caress and even stick your head into to view the inner workings of the tree in VR. With one HTC Vive tracker puck attached to each hand, the strokes you make to touch the tree’s surface have real impact in the VR environment.
The experience is less narrative than meditative in the service of respecting the under-appreciated aspects of forest life. But with four Vive stations situated around the base of the physical tree construct, every person who completed the experience seemed almost spiritually refreshed when they removed their headsets.
Of all the rule-breaking approaches to Shakespeare executed over the years by theaters and filmmakers alike, To Be With Hamlet may be, hands down, the most cutting-edge of them all. Three audience members and I were brought into a large room and fitted with Vive headsets and controllers, after which we were plunged into a VR version of a castle ledge, surrounded by a roiling seascape.
But the two computer generated characters standing before us, delivering the immortal bard’s lines with emotion and impact aren’t preprogrammed characters—instead they’re controlled by two actors wearing motion capture suits many miles away in a downtown Brooklyn studio.
,
Source: Mashable