Virtual Cinema Program
Programming descriptions are generated by participants and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of SXSW.
Program Includes:
"Hypha" is an immersive virtual reality story that takes viewers on a journey to cleanse Earth from man-made disasters by becoming a mushroom. From spore to mushroom, the user can experience the life cycle of a mushroom to understand the importance of the Fungi Kingdom as the main bioremediation agent of Earth.
The application of traditional Artforms and techniques within the AR/VR space have never been more relevant. As Augmented Reality allows us to overlay our surroundings with added visuals and information creating content and experiences that blur boundaries between the physical and digital are critical. Australian XR Auteur, Artist and Animator, Marc-O-Matic presents a stunning collection that intersects between analogue illustrative artforms and Augmented Reality. Demonstrating the importance of traditonal practices in the immersive space. As a multidisciplinary army of one, Marc-O-Matic brings beautifully illustrated artworks to life, documenting everyday life in Melbourne, Australia.
"Hypha" is an immersive virtual reality story that takes viewers on a journey to cleanse Earth from man-made disasters by becoming a mushroom. From spore to mushroom, the user can experience the life cycle of a mushroom to understand the importance of the Fungi Kingdom as the main bioremediation agent of Earth.
Enter a smart living room that asks the question: are we in control of these machines or are they in control of us? The filmmakers of "The Great Hack" use mixed reality and surveillance technologies to bring to life the invisible world of data.
Enter a smart living room that asks the question: are we in control of these machines or are they in control of us? The filmmakers of "The Great Hack" use mixed reality and surveillance technologies to bring to life the invisible world of data.
At SXSW 2020, Capitol Records will present up-and-coming Capitol artists in the Capitol Records Spatial Audio Showcase. Capitol Records is driving the music industry into the future with innovative technology and unique artist experiences. Through Bose AR audio augmented reality Capitol artists and music come alive with spatial audio, branching narratives and hands free gestures.
In Pagan Peak VR multiplayer you will find yourself among a group of strangers in a mysterious alpine cabin, captured by the Krampus Killer. Your only chance to escape is to explore the cabin and solve the riddles laid out by the killer, emerging deeper and deeper into his psyche. You will have to work together as a team in order to get out alive. With intensely realistic graphics captured with photogrammetry and a wide range of interactions designed from the ground up for room scale virtual reality, Pagan Peak VR connects the narrative of a Sky Original series to an interactive VR experience by placing you right in the middle of the story.
On April 15, 2019, the world witnessed as Notre-Dame de Paris was nearly destroyed in a devastating fire. As the tragedy unfolded, people began sharing memories of the cathedral with photos and videos. Others were able to relive their memories virtually through Assassin’s Creed Unity, the video game. Ubisoft has been collaborating with historians for years, meticulously collecting data and testimonials to build Notre-Dame in-game. Based on this 3D model, Ubisoft created a VR tour of Notre-Dame so people can get back to the cathedral and discover point-of-views that were inaccessible to the public, or elements of architecture that were destroyed by the fire, including the famous spire!
The light was turned on. The elder, the art director, was running through in his full wing for the rehearsal. He was busy adjusting the head ornament of tribal clothes, carefully arranging the stagehands for property display, color, and timing of lighting, and fine-tuning the music so it is in harmony with the dancers’ movements. Before the rehearsal, The elder led all the dancers to pray to the ancestors, and told them the spirit of ritual dance and music of indigenous peoples, sincerely and earnestly: “Dance and music are the bridge between Vuvu (The spirits of ancestors) and us.
"Nine VR: Come See Me" is a Cinematic VR Experience that fuses social VR experience with cinematic narrative. Unaware of each other’s presence, two participants each assumes the role of ‘Me in the present’ and ‘Me in 1999’ and coexist in the same space but following two unique stories respectively. As ‘Me in the present’ starts to look for clues about why the present reality starts to fall apart, the two storylines cross and finally they encounter each other. "Nine VR" sets up the stage for the participants to explore and sense each other’s mysterious presence as they become invested in the world of two interwoven realities.
Corpus Misty is a soft journey through the private experiences of the femme at heart: women and gender queers with subjects spanning from faith, unity, race, body politics, and mortality. Our protagonists stories carry the weight of self-questioning, but ultimately tell the story of creating a new reality, so rather then work with the common trope of dark and mysterious aesthetics to enshroud secrecy, our creative team selected to contrast the statements with saturated, colourful, and slightly grotesque world design, brought to life by light animations and hand-sculpted landscapes, as an homage to each story. Our hope with this project was to promote wisdom and dignity over secrecy. Installation in Collaboration with Popticum
Ferenj is a pointcloud dreamscape generated using crowdsourced data and built using gaming technology. In this immersive graphic memoir, “home” is experienced as a post-spatial non-space of history, language, culture, music and time as you drift through reconstructed memories from Empress Taytu Ethiopian Restaurant in Cleveland to the streets of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. This afrosurrealist world is an experimental form of emancipatory thought and resistance to othering, reclaiming Ethiopian-American mixed-race identity, redefining boundaries between fragmented nostalgia and the digital imaginary, and contributing to the movement to change the reductive and stereotypical narrative of Africa.
"Fragments" is a multimedia documentary, inspired by the award-winning VR experience "Vestige." It fuses cinematic storytelling, Magic Leap spatial computing, interaction and projection mapping to take viewers on a journey into the mind of Lisa as she remembers her lost love, Erik. Within a fractured room, fragments of past memories appear of their life together. Over time the memories become entangled with a haunting vision and eventually gravitate to the shocking moment of Erik’s death.
While getting ready for a winter formal at Northwood, a senior living center in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Bill Mont - an 89-year-old self-made entrepreneur, reminisces about his life, including his most recent venture - sending people’s ashes to the moon. As he ruminates on love and loss, as well as his entrepreneurial projects and acquisitions, we experience what it’s like to live life to the fullest at 89.
70% of 20 million youth in SA have been victims or perpetrators of crime. Of every 100,000 youth, 37% have dropped out of school before matriculation. The documentary explores how these statistics can be changed by exposing youth to the opportunities of creative industries, which are sadly not known by most at-risk youth of South Africa. Ethan grew up in Muizenberg with his parents and siblings, due to tough economic times Ethan had to move to Grassy Park and live with his grandmother. Through Ethan's lens we want to take the user on a journey as they experience the relationship between the child and mentor grow as they explore art and creativity together in Cape Town.
"Odyssey 1.4.9" is a breathtaking VR exploration into the visual heart of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece “A Space Odyssey.” In addition to being a personal tribute, this film is a sensory immersion into the heart of Kubrick’s film, staging the famous dark monolith by building it into an incredible object with scrolling images. A genuine memory aid that will crystallize clear expression of the movie’s theme: absolute intelligence.
Eternal Return is a choreographed mixed reality exhibition interrogating the materiality of memory through replicas from earth’s deep past stretching into a speculative Post - Anthropocene future. Image libraries, previous thoughts and experiences are hyper-connected to the physical world. The analogue touch of an unseen performer is placed next to a 3.5 billion year old fossil and evolving digital code, whilst a voice inside headphones earns your trust in a process of negotiated agency and guidance. The work puts focus on the resonance between a system and its inhabitants, drawing attention to the connectivity and interdependence that exists within any given environment.
Secret Garden, presented by NEW INC and Nokia Bell Labs NEW INC, the New Museum’s cultural incubator based in New York, presents Secret Garden, an immersive storytelling installation that combines audio vignettes told by black women with dynamic, responsive visual feedback. The work is experienced as a non-linear episodic narrative of a multi-generational past, present, and future simultaneously. Conceived by artist Stephanie Dinkins, Secret Garden is inspired by autobiographical, ancestral, and futuristic experiences that highlight black female consciousness throughout history. Secret Garden is the culmination of the Nokia Bell Lab’s Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) residency program that engages NEW INC alumni and Nokia Bell Labs researchers for a year-long collaboration to produce new works of art that are enabled by Bell Labs technology. Dinkins collaborated with Emmy-award winning creative studio Scatter, using Depthkit — Scatter’s first ever product, which was incubated at NEW INC in its inaugural year.
Prepare for a journey through a collection of stories that convey timeless and universal themes. Episode 1: The Girl & The Crane In this virtual reality storybook experience an arrogant fashioner designer hits rock bottom, but meets an injured crane and his life is (almost) changed. Episode 2: The Answer A young prodigy invents the world’s most powerful computer system in a quest to find extraterrestrial life. Episode 3: Feverland A young boy gets a bacterial infection and falls into Feverland - a parallel dimension where the symptoms of his fever have manifested as living creatures.
Coda is a story-driven game utilizing players' blinks as the central mode of interaction, with each blink evolving the narrative. You begin on the ship of a mythical Ferryman, tasked with shepherding souls to the afterlife. For him to do so, you must tell the entire story of your life in a series of flashbacks. With each blink, time passes faster, but the Ferryman questions the truth of your account. He forces you deeper into your painfully repressed past, revealing a tragic truth about who you were, and weren’t. Coda tells a relatable story about the impossible expectations we place on ourselves, and the irrational regrets we carry with us when we feel we can't measure up.
A new first of its kind immersive experience using the latest mixed reality technology to bring dinosaurs to life. Audiences work together to become the heroes of this exciting interactive game. Dimension X, a special organisation, have been called in to investigate and are looking for volunteers to come and help them to return the ghost dinosaurs to their own dimension. Not only do you need to help contain this outbreak, but you also need to collect valuable paleontological evidence to help identify the time period the dinosaurs are from in order to prevent other portals from opening up. You need to put on your special Ghost Scanners in order to investigate. Are you up for the challenge?
Zhang, like everyone in the near future, is addicted to virtual world. He is also depressed because his girlfriend doesn’t look at him anymore during their date and, as a result, their sex life also suffers since his girlfriend seems to enjoy cybersex more. Poor Zhang has to find solace in VR chatting software where the girl in VR world actually looks at him when talking to him! A failed rendezvous with his girlfriend makes Zhang wanders in the city at night and discovers a club where everyone gives up virtual world for physical fighting to engage “real interactions” and where everyone actually looks at each other during conversation.
Come and be propelled into the world of Multi Dimensional artist Reggie Watts, in a Virtual Reality Volumetric journey where you get close up to real life action like never before. Performed live at Intel Studios in Los Angeles, you'll have a front row view to experience the genius that is Reggie Watts. Enjoy the exclusive premier of Episode-1 at SXSW! Be one of the first to be left in wonder as Watts improvises into his own mind and takes you to his multiverse with never before seen material, blurring the lines between avant-garde, comedy and music. An Intel Studios original. Written and Directed by Reggie Watts.
"Living Distance" is a fantasy and a mission, in which a wisdom tooth is sent to the outer space and back down to Earth again. Carried by a crystalline robotic sculpture, the tooth becomes a newborn entity in space and tells the inconsequential, but ever so unique story of a person in this universe. It unmasks and unmakes the alienated technological space programs and reimagine visceral, active, empathic and poetic forms of engagement. After the outer space performance, a multi-sensory VR experience will take the audience through the story, create a weightless world most of us have never been.
In December 2018, the EMMY-award winning producers Felix & Paul Studios and TIME Inc. launched the first professional VR cameras—built to operate in zero-gravity—to the International Space Station. Since then, astronauts from several countries have filmed their missions from over 250 miles above Earth. "Space Explorers: the ISS Experience" is the most ambitious film ever made in Space. Showing life in orbit as never seen before, it is an immersive journey that brings audiences on an intimate and astonishing odyssey to humanity’s space outpost. Share in the astronauts' journey of inspiration, learning, challenge, discovery, and together, dream about the future of humankind's space expansion.
This immersive AR experience brings futuristic K-pop superstars NCT 127 to Austin! Just press play to start your very own private performance of the group’s No. 1 hit single "Superhuman." A spaceship rises from the depths, bringing you the nine members of NCT 127 in all their heroic live glory. Using your tablet viewer, you can enjoy their iconic choreography from every angle. You'll even receive a take-home video of your own unique experience to remember and share with your friends. Mixing traditional video and volumetric capture, Superhuman AR is something out of this world! Produced by Intel Studios in collaboration with SM Entertainment.
After the Fallout is an immersive mosaic that takes us through surreal environments in the exclusion zone, relives the struggle of the heroes who worked to prevent the meltdown, and explores the lives of families as they navigate a new world which they have had to adapt to.
Enter a smart living room that asks the question: are we in control of these machines or are they in control of us? The filmmakers of "The Great Hack" use mixed reality and surveillance technologies to bring to life the invisible world of data.
At SXSW 2020, Capitol Records will present up-and-coming Capitol artists in the Capitol Records Spatial Audio Showcase. Capitol Records is driving the music industry into the future with innovative technology and unique artist experiences. Through Bose AR audio augmented reality Capitol artists and music come alive with spatial audio, branching narratives and hands free gestures.
In Pagan Peak VR multiplayer you will find yourself among a group of strangers in a mysterious alpine cabin, captured by the Krampus Killer. Your only chance to escape is to explore the cabin and solve the riddles laid out by the killer, emerging deeper and deeper into his psyche. You will have to work together as a team in order to get out alive. With intensely realistic graphics captured with photogrammetry and a wide range of interactions designed from the ground up for room scale virtual reality, Pagan Peak VR connects the narrative of a Sky Original series to an interactive VR experience by placing you right in the middle of the story.
On April 15, 2019, the world witnessed as Notre-Dame de Paris was nearly destroyed in a devastating fire. As the tragedy unfolded, people began sharing memories of the cathedral with photos and videos. Others were able to relive their memories virtually through Assassin’s Creed Unity, the video game. Ubisoft has been collaborating with historians for years, meticulously collecting data and testimonials to build Notre-Dame in-game. Based on this 3D model, Ubisoft created a VR tour of Notre-Dame so people can get back to the cathedral and discover point-of-views that were inaccessible to the public, or elements of architecture that were destroyed by the fire, including the famous spire!
The light was turned on. The elder, the art director, was running through in his full wing for the rehearsal. He was busy adjusting the head ornament of tribal clothes, carefully arranging the stagehands for property display, color, and timing of lighting, and fine-tuning the music so it is in harmony with the dancers’ movements. Before the rehearsal, The elder led all the dancers to pray to the ancestors, and told them the spirit of ritual dance and music of indigenous peoples, sincerely and earnestly: “Dance and music are the bridge between Vuvu (The spirits of ancestors) and us.
"Nine VR: Come See Me" is a Cinematic VR Experience that fuses social VR experience with cinematic narrative. Unaware of each other’s presence, two participants each assumes the role of ‘Me in the present’ and ‘Me in 1999’ and coexist in the same space but following two unique stories respectively. As ‘Me in the present’ starts to look for clues about why the present reality starts to fall apart, the two storylines cross and finally they encounter each other. "Nine VR" sets up the stage for the participants to explore and sense each other’s mysterious presence as they become invested in the world of two interwoven realities.
Corpus Misty is a soft journey through the private experiences of the femme at heart: women and gender queers with subjects spanning from faith, unity, race, body politics, and mortality. Our protagonists stories carry the weight of self-questioning, but ultimately tell the story of creating a new reality, so rather then work with the common trope of dark and mysterious aesthetics to enshroud secrecy, our creative team selected to contrast the statements with saturated, colourful, and slightly grotesque world design, brought to life by light animations and hand-sculpted landscapes, as an homage to each story. Our hope with this project was to promote wisdom and dignity over secrecy. Installation in Collaboration with Popticum
Ferenj is a pointcloud dreamscape generated using crowdsourced data and built using gaming technology. In this immersive graphic memoir, “home” is experienced as a post-spatial non-space of history, language, culture, music and time as you drift through reconstructed memories from Empress Taytu Ethiopian Restaurant in Cleveland to the streets of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. This afrosurrealist world is an experimental form of emancipatory thought and resistance to othering, reclaiming Ethiopian-American mixed-race identity, redefining boundaries between fragmented nostalgia and the digital imaginary, and contributing to the movement to change the reductive and stereotypical narrative of Africa.
"Fragments" is a multimedia documentary, inspired by the award-winning VR experience "Vestige." It fuses cinematic storytelling, Magic Leap spatial computing, interaction and projection mapping to take viewers on a journey into the mind of Lisa as she remembers her lost love, Erik. Within a fractured room, fragments of past memories appear of their life together. Over time the memories become entangled with a haunting vision and eventually gravitate to the shocking moment of Erik’s death.
While getting ready for a winter formal at Northwood, a senior living center in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Bill Mont - an 89-year-old self-made entrepreneur, reminisces about his life, including his most recent venture - sending people’s ashes to the moon. As he ruminates on love and loss, as well as his entrepreneurial projects and acquisitions, we experience what it’s like to live life to the fullest at 89.
70% of 20 million youth in SA have been victims or perpetrators of crime. Of every 100,000 youth, 37% have dropped out of school before matriculation. The documentary explores how these statistics can be changed by exposing youth to the opportunities of creative industries, which are sadly not known by most at-risk youth of South Africa. Ethan grew up in Muizenberg with his parents and siblings, due to tough economic times Ethan had to move to Grassy Park and live with his grandmother. Through Ethan's lens we want to take the user on a journey as they experience the relationship between the child and mentor grow as they explore art and creativity together in Cape Town.
"Odyssey 1.4.9" is a breathtaking VR exploration into the visual heart of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece “A Space Odyssey.” In addition to being a personal tribute, this film is a sensory immersion into the heart of Kubrick’s film, staging the famous dark monolith by building it into an incredible object with scrolling images. A genuine memory aid that will crystallize clear expression of the movie’s theme: absolute intelligence.
Eternal Return is a choreographed mixed reality exhibition interrogating the materiality of memory through replicas from earth’s deep past stretching into a speculative Post - Anthropocene future. Image libraries, previous thoughts and experiences are hyper-connected to the physical world. The analogue touch of an unseen performer is placed next to a 3.5 billion year old fossil and evolving digital code, whilst a voice inside headphones earns your trust in a process of negotiated agency and guidance. The work puts focus on the resonance between a system and its inhabitants, drawing attention to the connectivity and interdependence that exists within any given environment.
Secret Garden, presented by NEW INC and Nokia Bell Labs NEW INC, the New Museum’s cultural incubator based in New York, presents Secret Garden, an immersive storytelling installation that combines audio vignettes told by black women with dynamic, responsive visual feedback. The work is experienced as a non-linear episodic narrative of a multi-generational past, present, and future simultaneously. Conceived by artist Stephanie Dinkins, Secret Garden is inspired by autobiographical, ancestral, and futuristic experiences that highlight black female consciousness throughout history. Secret Garden is the culmination of the Nokia Bell Lab’s Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) residency program that engages NEW INC alumni and Nokia Bell Labs researchers for a year-long collaboration to produce new works of art that are enabled by Bell Labs technology. Dinkins collaborated with Emmy-award winning creative studio Scatter, using Depthkit — Scatter’s first ever product, which was incubated at NEW INC in its inaugural year.
Prepare for a journey through a collection of stories that convey timeless and universal themes. Episode 1: The Girl & The Crane In this virtual reality storybook experience an arrogant fashioner designer hits rock bottom, but meets an injured crane and his life is (almost) changed. Episode 2: The Answer A young prodigy invents the world’s most powerful computer system in a quest to find extraterrestrial life. Episode 3: Feverland A young boy gets a bacterial infection and falls into Feverland - a parallel dimension where the symptoms of his fever have manifested as living creatures.
Coda is a story-driven game utilizing players' blinks as the central mode of interaction, with each blink evolving the narrative. You begin on the ship of a mythical Ferryman, tasked with shepherding souls to the afterlife. For him to do so, you must tell the entire story of your life in a series of flashbacks. With each blink, time passes faster, but the Ferryman questions the truth of your account. He forces you deeper into your painfully repressed past, revealing a tragic truth about who you were, and weren’t. Coda tells a relatable story about the impossible expectations we place on ourselves, and the irrational regrets we carry with us when we feel we can't measure up.
A new first of its kind immersive experience using the latest mixed reality technology to bring dinosaurs to life. Audiences work together to become the heroes of this exciting interactive game. Dimension X, a special organisation, have been called in to investigate and are looking for volunteers to come and help them to return the ghost dinosaurs to their own dimension. Not only do you need to help contain this outbreak, but you also need to collect valuable paleontological evidence to help identify the time period the dinosaurs are from in order to prevent other portals from opening up. You need to put on your special Ghost Scanners in order to investigate. Are you up for the challenge?
Zhang, like everyone in the near future, is addicted to virtual world. He is also depressed because his girlfriend doesn’t look at him anymore during their date and, as a result, their sex life also suffers since his girlfriend seems to enjoy cybersex more. Poor Zhang has to find solace in VR chatting software where the girl in VR world actually looks at him when talking to him! A failed rendezvous with his girlfriend makes Zhang wanders in the city at night and discovers a club where everyone gives up virtual world for physical fighting to engage “real interactions” and where everyone actually looks at each other during conversation.
Come and be propelled into the world of Multi Dimensional artist Reggie Watts, in a Virtual Reality Volumetric journey where you get close up to real life action like never before. Performed live at Intel Studios in Los Angeles, you'll have a front row view to experience the genius that is Reggie Watts. Enjoy the exclusive premier of Episode-1 at SXSW! Be one of the first to be left in wonder as Watts improvises into his own mind and takes you to his multiverse with never before seen material, blurring the lines between avant-garde, comedy and music. An Intel Studios original. Written and Directed by Reggie Watts.
"Living Distance" is a fantasy and a mission, in which a wisdom tooth is sent to the outer space and back down to Earth again. Carried by a crystalline robotic sculpture, the tooth becomes a newborn entity in space and tells the inconsequential, but ever so unique story of a person in this universe. It unmasks and unmakes the alienated technological space programs and reimagine visceral, active, empathic and poetic forms of engagement. After the outer space performance, a multi-sensory VR experience will take the audience through the story, create a weightless world most of us have never been.
In December 2018, the EMMY-award winning producers Felix & Paul Studios and TIME Inc. launched the first professional VR cameras—built to operate in zero-gravity—to the International Space Station. Since then, astronauts from several countries have filmed their missions from over 250 miles above Earth. "Space Explorers: the ISS Experience" is the most ambitious film ever made in Space. Showing life in orbit as never seen before, it is an immersive journey that brings audiences on an intimate and astonishing odyssey to humanity’s space outpost. Share in the astronauts' journey of inspiration, learning, challenge, discovery, and together, dream about the future of humankind's space expansion.
This immersive AR experience brings futuristic K-pop superstars NCT 127 to Austin! Just press play to start your very own private performance of the group’s No. 1 hit single "Superhuman." A spaceship rises from the depths, bringing you the nine members of NCT 127 in all their heroic live glory. Using your tablet viewer, you can enjoy their iconic choreography from every angle. You'll even receive a take-home video of your own unique experience to remember and share with your friends. Mixing traditional video and volumetric capture, Superhuman AR is something out of this world! Produced by Intel Studios in collaboration with SM Entertainment.
After the Fallout is an immersive mosaic that takes us through surreal environments in the exclusion zone, relives the struggle of the heroes who worked to prevent the meltdown, and explores the lives of families as they navigate a new world which they have had to adapt to.
At SXSW 2020, Capitol Records will present up-and-coming Capitol artists in the Capitol Records Spatial Audio Showcase. Capitol Records is driving the music industry into the future with innovative technology and unique artist experiences. Through Bose AR audio augmented reality Capitol artists and music come alive with spatial audio, branching narratives and hands free gestures.
In Pagan Peak VR multiplayer you will find yourself among a group of strangers in a mysterious alpine cabin, captured by the Krampus Killer. Your only chance to escape is to explore the cabin and solve the riddles laid out by the killer, emerging deeper and deeper into his psyche. You will have to work together as a team in order to get out alive. With intensely realistic graphics captured with photogrammetry and a wide range of interactions designed from the ground up for room scale virtual reality, Pagan Peak VR connects the narrative of a Sky Original series to an interactive VR experience by placing you right in the middle of the story.
On April 15, 2019, the world witnessed as Notre-Dame de Paris was nearly destroyed in a devastating fire. As the tragedy unfolded, people began sharing memories of the cathedral with photos and videos. Others were able to relive their memories virtually through Assassin’s Creed Unity, the video game. Ubisoft has been collaborating with historians for years, meticulously collecting data and testimonials to build Notre-Dame in-game. Based on this 3D model, Ubisoft created a VR tour of Notre-Dame so people can get back to the cathedral and discover point-of-views that were inaccessible to the public, or elements of architecture that were destroyed by the fire, including the famous spire!
The light was turned on. The elder, the art director, was running through in his full wing for the rehearsal. He was busy adjusting the head ornament of tribal clothes, carefully arranging the stagehands for property display, color, and timing of lighting, and fine-tuning the music so it is in harmony with the dancers’ movements. Before the rehearsal, The elder led all the dancers to pray to the ancestors, and told them the spirit of ritual dance and music of indigenous peoples, sincerely and earnestly: “Dance and music are the bridge between Vuvu (The spirits of ancestors) and us.
"Nine VR: Come See Me" is a Cinematic VR Experience that fuses social VR experience with cinematic narrative. Unaware of each other’s presence, two participants each assumes the role of ‘Me in the present’ and ‘Me in 1999’ and coexist in the same space but following two unique stories respectively. As ‘Me in the present’ starts to look for clues about why the present reality starts to fall apart, the two storylines cross and finally they encounter each other. "Nine VR" sets up the stage for the participants to explore and sense each other’s mysterious presence as they become invested in the world of two interwoven realities.
Corpus Misty is a soft journey through the private experiences of the femme at heart: women and gender queers with subjects spanning from faith, unity, race, body politics, and mortality. Our protagonists stories carry the weight of self-questioning, but ultimately tell the story of creating a new reality, so rather then work with the common trope of dark and mysterious aesthetics to enshroud secrecy, our creative team selected to contrast the statements with saturated, colourful, and slightly grotesque world design, brought to life by light animations and hand-sculpted landscapes, as an homage to each story. Our hope with this project was to promote wisdom and dignity over secrecy. Installation in Collaboration with Popticum
Ferenj is a pointcloud dreamscape generated using crowdsourced data and built using gaming technology. In this immersive graphic memoir, “home” is experienced as a post-spatial non-space of history, language, culture, music and time as you drift through reconstructed memories from Empress Taytu Ethiopian Restaurant in Cleveland to the streets of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. This afrosurrealist world is an experimental form of emancipatory thought and resistance to othering, reclaiming Ethiopian-American mixed-race identity, redefining boundaries between fragmented nostalgia and the digital imaginary, and contributing to the movement to change the reductive and stereotypical narrative of Africa.
"Fragments" is a multimedia documentary, inspired by the award-winning VR experience "Vestige." It fuses cinematic storytelling, Magic Leap spatial computing, interaction and projection mapping to take viewers on a journey into the mind of Lisa as she remembers her lost love, Erik. Within a fractured room, fragments of past memories appear of their life together. Over time the memories become entangled with a haunting vision and eventually gravitate to the shocking moment of Erik’s death.
While getting ready for a winter formal at Northwood, a senior living center in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Bill Mont - an 89-year-old self-made entrepreneur, reminisces about his life, including his most recent venture - sending people’s ashes to the moon. As he ruminates on love and loss, as well as his entrepreneurial projects and acquisitions, we experience what it’s like to live life to the fullest at 89.
70% of 20 million youth in SA have been victims or perpetrators of crime. Of every 100,000 youth, 37% have dropped out of school before matriculation. The documentary explores how these statistics can be changed by exposing youth to the opportunities of creative industries, which are sadly not known by most at-risk youth of South Africa. Ethan grew up in Muizenberg with his parents and siblings, due to tough economic times Ethan had to move to Grassy Park and live with his grandmother. Through Ethan's lens we want to take the user on a journey as they experience the relationship between the child and mentor grow as they explore art and creativity together in Cape Town.
"Odyssey 1.4.9" is a breathtaking VR exploration into the visual heart of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece “A Space Odyssey.” In addition to being a personal tribute, this film is a sensory immersion into the heart of Kubrick’s film, staging the famous dark monolith by building it into an incredible object with scrolling images. A genuine memory aid that will crystallize clear expression of the movie’s theme: absolute intelligence.
Eternal Return is a choreographed mixed reality exhibition interrogating the materiality of memory through replicas from earth’s deep past stretching into a speculative Post - Anthropocene future. Image libraries, previous thoughts and experiences are hyper-connected to the physical world. The analogue touch of an unseen performer is placed next to a 3.5 billion year old fossil and evolving digital code, whilst a voice inside headphones earns your trust in a process of negotiated agency and guidance. The work puts focus on the resonance between a system and its inhabitants, drawing attention to the connectivity and interdependence that exists within any given environment.
Secret Garden, presented by NEW INC and Nokia Bell Labs NEW INC, the New Museum’s cultural incubator based in New York, presents Secret Garden, an immersive storytelling installation that combines audio vignettes told by black women with dynamic, responsive visual feedback. The work is experienced as a non-linear episodic narrative of a multi-generational past, present, and future simultaneously. Conceived by artist Stephanie Dinkins, Secret Garden is inspired by autobiographical, ancestral, and futuristic experiences that highlight black female consciousness throughout history. Secret Garden is the culmination of the Nokia Bell Lab’s Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) residency program that engages NEW INC alumni and Nokia Bell Labs researchers for a year-long collaboration to produce new works of art that are enabled by Bell Labs technology. Dinkins collaborated with Emmy-award winning creative studio Scatter, using Depthkit — Scatter’s first ever product, which was incubated at NEW INC in its inaugural year.
Prepare for a journey through a collection of stories that convey timeless and universal themes. Episode 1: The Girl & The Crane In this virtual reality storybook experience an arrogant fashioner designer hits rock bottom, but meets an injured crane and his life is (almost) changed. Episode 2: The Answer A young prodigy invents the world’s most powerful computer system in a quest to find extraterrestrial life. Episode 3: Feverland A young boy gets a bacterial infection and falls into Feverland - a parallel dimension where the symptoms of his fever have manifested as living creatures.
Coda is a story-driven game utilizing players' blinks as the central mode of interaction, with each blink evolving the narrative. You begin on the ship of a mythical Ferryman, tasked with shepherding souls to the afterlife. For him to do so, you must tell the entire story of your life in a series of flashbacks. With each blink, time passes faster, but the Ferryman questions the truth of your account. He forces you deeper into your painfully repressed past, revealing a tragic truth about who you were, and weren’t. Coda tells a relatable story about the impossible expectations we place on ourselves, and the irrational regrets we carry with us when we feel we can't measure up.
A new first of its kind immersive experience using the latest mixed reality technology to bring dinosaurs to life. Audiences work together to become the heroes of this exciting interactive game. Dimension X, a special organisation, have been called in to investigate and are looking for volunteers to come and help them to return the ghost dinosaurs to their own dimension. Not only do you need to help contain this outbreak, but you also need to collect valuable paleontological evidence to help identify the time period the dinosaurs are from in order to prevent other portals from opening up. You need to put on your special Ghost Scanners in order to investigate. Are you up for the challenge?
Zhang, like everyone in the near future, is addicted to virtual world. He is also depressed because his girlfriend doesn’t look at him anymore during their date and, as a result, their sex life also suffers since his girlfriend seems to enjoy cybersex more. Poor Zhang has to find solace in VR chatting software where the girl in VR world actually looks at him when talking to him! A failed rendezvous with his girlfriend makes Zhang wanders in the city at night and discovers a club where everyone gives up virtual world for physical fighting to engage “real interactions” and where everyone actually looks at each other during conversation.
Come and be propelled into the world of Multi Dimensional artist Reggie Watts, in a Virtual Reality Volumetric journey where you get close up to real life action like never before. Performed live at Intel Studios in Los Angeles, you'll have a front row view to experience the genius that is Reggie Watts. Enjoy the exclusive premier of Episode-1 at SXSW! Be one of the first to be left in wonder as Watts improvises into his own mind and takes you to his multiverse with never before seen material, blurring the lines between avant-garde, comedy and music. An Intel Studios original. Written and Directed by Reggie Watts.
"Living Distance" is a fantasy and a mission, in which a wisdom tooth is sent to the outer space and back down to Earth again. Carried by a crystalline robotic sculpture, the tooth becomes a newborn entity in space and tells the inconsequential, but ever so unique story of a person in this universe. It unmasks and unmakes the alienated technological space programs and reimagine visceral, active, empathic and poetic forms of engagement. After the outer space performance, a multi-sensory VR experience will take the audience through the story, create a weightless world most of us have never been.
In December 2018, the EMMY-award winning producers Felix & Paul Studios and TIME Inc. launched the first professional VR cameras—built to operate in zero-gravity—to the International Space Station. Since then, astronauts from several countries have filmed their missions from over 250 miles above Earth. "Space Explorers: the ISS Experience" is the most ambitious film ever made in Space. Showing life in orbit as never seen before, it is an immersive journey that brings audiences on an intimate and astonishing odyssey to humanity’s space outpost. Share in the astronauts' journey of inspiration, learning, challenge, discovery, and together, dream about the future of humankind's space expansion.
This immersive AR experience brings futuristic K-pop superstars NCT 127 to Austin! Just press play to start your very own private performance of the group’s No. 1 hit single "Superhuman." A spaceship rises from the depths, bringing you the nine members of NCT 127 in all their heroic live glory. Using your tablet viewer, you can enjoy their iconic choreography from every angle. You'll even receive a take-home video of your own unique experience to remember and share with your friends. Mixing traditional video and volumetric capture, Superhuman AR is something out of this world! Produced by Intel Studios in collaboration with SM Entertainment.
After the Fallout is an immersive mosaic that takes us through surreal environments in the exclusion zone, relives the struggle of the heroes who worked to prevent the meltdown, and explores the lives of families as they navigate a new world which they have had to adapt to.
"Hypha" is an immersive virtual reality story that takes viewers on a journey to cleanse Earth from man-made disasters by becoming a mushroom. From spore to mushroom, the user can experience the life cycle of a mushroom to understand the importance of the Fungi Kingdom as the main bioremediation agent of Earth.
The application of traditional Artforms and techniques within the AR/VR space have never been more relevant. As Augmented Reality allows us to overlay our surroundings with added visuals and information creating content and experiences that blur boundaries between the physical and digital are critical. Australian XR Auteur, Artist and Animator, Marc-O-Matic presents a stunning collection that intersects between analogue illustrative artforms and Augmented Reality. Demonstrating the importance of traditonal practices in the immersive space. As a multidisciplinary army of one, Marc-O-Matic brings beautifully illustrated artworks to life, documenting everyday life in Melbourne, Australia.
The application of traditional Artforms and techniques within the AR/VR space have never been more relevant. As Augmented Reality allows us to overlay our surroundings with added visuals and information creating content and experiences that blur boundaries between the physical and digital are critical. Australian XR Auteur, Artist and Animator, Marc-O-Matic presents a stunning collection that intersects between analogue illustrative artforms and Augmented Reality. Demonstrating the importance of traditonal practices in the immersive space. As a multidisciplinary army of one, Marc-O-Matic brings beautifully illustrated artworks to life, documenting everyday life in Melbourne, Australia.