Three groups at Tribeca Film Festival incorporated smell into their VR films.
Virtual reality is either the future or totally dead, it just depends on who you ask. The aromas wafting through the Tribeca Film Festival’s VR Arcade, however, don’t smell like a decomposing industry—they smell like the grasslands of Africa, the Amazon rainforest, and California redwoods.
Three films incorporate smell into their virtual reality experience with surprising success: Kathryn Bigelow and Imraan Ismail’s The Protectors: Walk in the Ranger’s Shoes, Milica Zec and Winslow Porter’s Tree, and Marshmallow Laser Feast’s TREEHUGGER: WAWONA. Each used props and set pieces to get viewers in the mood, then deployed the smells to trigger a level of immersion you don’t see—or smell—in your average Google Cardboard or Oculus Rift experience.
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The Protectors. Courtesy Tribeca Film Festival
Bigelow and Ismail’s setup for The Protectors is the most elaborate, and the most passive. They seem to have transplanted an entire clearing from the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Garamba National Park, where the film was shot, directly into the festival’s Spring Studios headquarters. I take a deep breath in through my nose, and a PA working the booth tells me he sprayed the bushes with an odor designed evoke the landscape in the film.
I continue to notice the smell as I don the headset and find myself in an African savannah. A small team of filmmakers embedded with the drastically underfunded park rangers who protect the park’s less than 1,300 remaining elephants, down from 20,000 in the 1960s. Poachers hunt the massive mammals—whom research indicates are as smart as chimpanzees, capable of empathy, and posses a sense of self—to harvest their tusks and genitals.
The film is heartbreaking, particularly in moments that showcase evidence of what the poachers have done. In one scene, I walk into a room that is stacked with elephant tusks, each pair representing a death. Many are devastatingly small. In another I’m walking with the rangers through tall grass and we come upon the carcass of an elephant. A ranger named Tomasi leans down and gazes at the beast’s mutilated head, swarming with flies. Despite myself I’m grateful that scent technology isn’t too accurate—yet.
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National Geographic
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who has asserted that elephant poaching is linked to terrorism, crashed The Protectors panel on April 21 as a surprise guest. “We can provide support for the rangers, provide better equipment, work with organizations like African Parks, work with willing countries that take wildlife protections seriously, and you can make a little bit of progress,” she said. At the end of the VR film is a call to action advocating for donations to outfitaranger.org.
I visit the New York premiere of Milica Zec and Winslow Porter’s Tree and pivot from animal rights to climate change. I slip into the VR headset, phones, and a haptic backpack, which rumbles every time I—as the seed of a tree in the Amazon rainforest—stretch and grow upwards.
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Watch the video on Instagram here.
An attendant wafts a pressurized container of pure earthiness toward me as I wiggle through a hole in the soil and slowly creep toward the sky. I observe fluttering birds, scurrying insects, and monkey shenanigans before bursting through the canopy and gazing at a startlingly beautiful sunset. As I cope with vertigo, I notice smoke in the distance.
Darkness sets in, until a warm orange light begins leaking from the ground below. A recent study in Nature indicates that climate change, combined with eco-systems fragmented by logging, makes trees more likely to dry out and catch fire. From the tree’s perspective, I experience that process in action.
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Courtesy Tribeca Film Festival
Tree is Zec and Porter’s follow up to award-winning VR film Giant, in which you’re a fly on the wall as a family hides from a bombing in their basement. The film is based on Zec’s own experience growing up in Serbia—then Yugoslavia—during NATO’s military operations against the country. Similarly to Giant, Zec and Winslow flip the script in Tree, transforming the viewer from an aggressor in the systemic problem of climate change into the victim. Smell sets the stage for this mental shift, like noticing the smell of a new city after leaving the sanitized atmosphere of an airport.
“Virtual reality at its core is just a way to transform a person or place through a reappropriation of senses,” Porter tells Creators. “Tapping into other senses can unlock a whole new level of immersion. Part of us knows it’s not real and another part really wants to believe.”
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Source: Creators Vice