Quite frankly, nothing has the ‘wow’ factor like Virtual Reality. Not even the biggest IMAX screen, showing the latest Hollywood blockbuster, can compare to the total immersion, which VR can provide. The other night, Dan & I were transformed into little kids, when we descended into watery depths in a shark cage, courtesy of Playstation’s VR headset.
For the second year running, the Raindance Film Festival hosted a ‘Virtual Reality Arcade’, highlighting some of the best VR experiences of recent months. You only get a couple of hours to view your choices but here are some of the films, which I experienced:
Munduruku: The Fight to Defend the Heart of the Amazon (Greenpeace)
This film won ‘Best Social Impact VR Experience’ at the inaugural Raindance VR Awards and it was richly deserved. The Munduruku are an indigenous people of Brazil, living in the Amazon river basin. They face threats from, amongst other things, the dams of the Tapajos hydroelectric complex – the proposed Chacorao dam, for instance, would flood 46,000 acres of the Munduruku Indigenous Territory.
Treating the viewer as an honoured guest, we first glide towards the village jetty on a canoe and are greeted warmly by the village elder. We then stand close to the villagers as they go about their daily lives, preparing meals, hunting and singing. There is a breath-taking moment when the camera rises slowly up the trunk of a giant tree, to provide a view of the jungle floor, the tree canopy and, finally, a view out to the Amazon river. When the women of the village surround you, sing to you and dance around you, it is hard not to feel moved.
As your canoe pulls away from the riverbank for the final time and the villagers wave goodbye to you, it as if you have truly been amongst these people and you find that you care about them. The thought of their village being swept away by flood water just so Brazilians can power more hairdryers is just not acceptable. In this respect, Greenpeace’s aim for the film, to encourage empathy for endangered indigenous people, has clearly been achieved.
[I’ve written a bit more about this film’s creation in another blog entry, the link is here – Raindance Film Festival – Virtual Reality Summit]
Life of Us
This is a fun experience, particularly when played with a partner, whom you can gesture to and throw things at! In Life of Us you are constantly moving, constantly evolving set of animated creatures in a number of different landscapes. You get to breathe fire, swim underwater, survive the Ice Age, and soar over volcanoes as you evolve through different creatures and a billion years of evolution in this action packed, VR adventure. You get to experience new voices (that was a shock when I expressed surprise for the first time at what I was seeing and discovered that I now spoke like a Dalek with a sore throat!), bodies, and special abilities before joining a post-singularity intergalactic dance party set to original music by Pharrell Williams.
The highlight for me was when I had evolved into a gorilla in a suit in a city, whose briefcase spilled thousands of document pages into the faces of commuters I chose to target – there was something oddly satisfying about defying the rat race in this manner!
This film ably shows the benefits of using an animated world in VR – you can manipulate the space around you in a way that simply is not possible (yet!) in 360 film. However, there are possibilities for combining the two mediums, as the next VR experience, Ray, displayed (see below).
Ray
One night, Lucy wakes up to a strange light creature called Ray buzzing around her room. Ray is like a sentient firework, trailing sparks behind himself, as he plays and interacts with Lucy. While trying to understand each other through a whimsical dance of light, they find themselves trapped in a dilemma of trust. Should she keep Ray forever, trapped in a jar like a butterfly, or risk losing the strange creature by granting him his freedom?
Ray is not true 360 – turn too far behind you and you’ll be blocked by a gilded cage – but this serves to focus the audience upon the marvellous little Ray character. There are lovely little touches to notice – Lucy is always sleeping in her mirror, suggesting that we are observing what she is dreaming; the television plays an old black and white animation, which you could choose to watch in its entirety, should you wish; the CGI ceiling. In the final moments, Lucy looks straight into our eyes, acknowledging our presence in the room, something I rather liked – there’s that ’empathy’ which I keep banging on about in my reviews of VR!
When the film has concluded, you have the chance to play with and interact with Ray yourself, either by voice command or through your hands, which appear as ghostly apparition hands when you move the controllers into your field of vision. Ray is not wholly at your command, however, reflecting his mischievous nature in the film, but it is certainly possible to play with him and to fool yourself into believing that he has some sort of consciousness.
[I’ve written a bit more about this film’s creation in another blog entry, the link is here – Raindance Film Festival – Virtual Reality Summit]
Alteration
Alteration won ‘Best Cinematic Narrative Experience’ at the Raindance VR Awards. The story revolves around Alexandro (Bill Skarsgard, currently terrifying audiences as Pennywise, the clown, in the film of Stephen King’s IT), who volunteers for an experiment carried out to study dreams. In what turns out to be a poetic trip into the future, Alexandro is subjected to the intrusion of Elsa, a form of Artificial Intelligence, who desires to digitize his subconscious in order to feed off of it.
For me, this film really showed what was possible in the field of VR story-telling. I loved that the audience is acknowledged – there is, for instance, a shocking moment where Alexandro attempts to force us to wake up, which will have you jolting your head back to whiplash-inducing affect! The film looked beautiful, with stunning vistas in Alexandro’s dreams and incredible CGI in the moments the AI ‘invaded’, particularly the moment where Alexandro’s girlfriend’s paintings distort the room in the colours and styles of her paintings. In short, stunning!
[I’ve written a bit more about this film’s creation in another blog entry, the link is here – Raindance Film Festival – Virtual Reality Summit]
Beethoven’s Fifth
Beethoven’s Fifth was awarded ‘Best Music VR Experience’ at the Raindance VR awards. It begins as an apparently straightforward performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, First Movement by the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. As a viewer, I was a little disorientated finding myself jumping around the orchestra, so much so I almost fell off my stool when I was transported on top of a podium at one point. This slight relocation was, as nothing, however, to the unexpected moment when, suddenly, I was floating into interstellar space, the orchestra still playing but now at some distance.
I cannot make my mind up about this one. I generally enjoyed the experience but I wasn’t sure that the leaping around the orchestra was justified. It was interesting to sit amongst the players, rather than the traditional vantage point, but why not retain one position and allow the viewer to pick where they look? I liked the beautiful interstellar travel rather more than the jumping around. In my opinion, it would have been better to change the perspective within the orchestra only each after time we’d jumped into space but try it for yourself and make up your own mind.