Photo by Bill Ledbetter, Jr. / Imageclectic.com
In the world of immersive entertainment, high-end activations like HBO’s sprawling, real-world re-creation of Westworld or Disney’s upcoming Star Wars expansion lands get most of the attention. But at this year’s South by Southwest, one of the most exciting and forward-thinking pieces of immersive work wasn’t there to promote a movie or TV show. It was an interactive story experience called OpenMind, which played out in hotel rooms, office buildings, and public locations across Austin, Texas, over a period of four days.
OpenMind told the story of a protagonist — in this case, me — leaping between two parallel dimensions, tasked with stopping a nefarious tech genius from overtaking both worlds with an insidious thought-reading technology. It was an example of what its creators, the creative lab Interactive Deep Dive, call a “SimuLife” — an experience that uses live actors and real locations to blur the lines between fantasy and reality, mapping a fictional narrative onto the real world.
In David Fincher’s 1997 movie The Game, Michael Douglas plays a wealthy banker who enrolls in a real-world game that’s so realistic, he rapidly loses track of what’s real and what’s fantasy. That film is regularly cited as a model for immersive entertainment, and it’s an open inspiration for the SimuLife experience. OpenMind was a tailored immersive narrative — and just one possible application for Interactive Deep Dive’s new wave of groundbreaking, interactive storytelling.
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Interactive Deep Dive director Jeff Wirth. Photo by Kate Russell / Meow Wolf
“The reason Interactive Deep Dive happened was because I wanted there to be a group of next-generation leaders in the field of applied interactive performance,” Deep Dive director Jeff Wirth tells me. Wirth is an innovator in the field. He’s been working in interactive performance — where actors can engage directly with their audience — since the 1970s, and he brought the work into an academic context for nearly a decade at the University of Central Florida. While training performers in New York, he decided to put together a pop-up creative workshop that would give a small team the ability to go heads down and study all aspects of immersive work, from virtual reality and simulations to educational applications and pure entertainment.
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Photo: Interactive Deep Dive
THE SIMULIFE DIARIES: A FOUR-DAY IMMERSIVE STORY ADVENTURE
“As you can imagine, this skill set is not one you acquire quickly, so if you’re truly going to cultivate leaders, you need a substantial amount of time,” he tells me, with the nine-month project — dubbed the Interactive Deep Dive — kicking off in Austin last August. “The Deep Dive came out of a desire for more people who have this skill set and understanding in their bones, so they can apply it in different ways.”
The group is composed of eight artists and performers with backgrounds in a variety of disciplines: VR, education simulation, dance, traditional theater, and improv. The Deep Dive program itself calls on its members to merge those disciplines through public shows and interactive experiments where audience members are able to jump in, play, and co-create a story alongside the performers. The training for that last kind of work — the engine that makes something like my SimuLife experience possible — begins with what they call a “StoryBox.”
STORYBOX, SIMULIFE, AND THE GAME
“I had been doing stage interactives, like an interactive musical where the two romantic leads are played by members of the audience, or an interactive adaptation of A Christmas Carol,” Wirth says. “And one of the things I really noticed is how self-conscious people were when they were playing on the stage. You could get them past it, but it was definitely a hiccup.”
As a response, he created the StoryBox: a 14-foot square with fabric walls, outfitted with lights, cameras, and microphones. By removing the anxiety of being up on a stage in front of a watching audience, it allows participants — or “spectactors,” a portmanteau of spectator and actor — to be less self-conscious when they walk into the space and improvise a scene alongside the trained interactive actors (“interactors”). Lighting cues and sound design can be generated in real time in conjunction with the performances, while the cameras and microphones allow the whole thing to be monitored live.
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Source: The Verge