In an episode of the animated television series South Park, which aired in 2014, the very funny yet despicable Eric Cartman tricks poor Butters into believing that, by wearing a pair of clear plastic goggles and headphones, he will be able to immerse himself in virtual reality. He succeeds in making him behave embarrassingly in their elementary school halls. Butters soon starts to enjoy it, and in a rush of Grand Theft Auto-style madness ends up beating up his father, driving without a license, and even getting stabbed by a prostitute.
Towards the Metaverse: the finest 7 VR experiences you can have today
Despite being little known to the general public, we already have some must-see immersive contents between cinema and videogame, and featuring social media elements. Curator Liz Rosenthal, who has been working in this field for years, selected the finest for Domus.
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- Silvia Dal Dosso
- 23 April 2022
Deception and immersiveness are two recurring themes in the VR world. Deception, because while one is immersed in a new reality, the real world is hidden by the visor. But also because the staggering sums of money that have been spent on this industry have made it seem for many years that these investments were a costly washout, a promise of innovation that was being long in coming. “Nobody understands it but everyone wants in”, they said in 2017 on Silicon Valley, the cult series for geeks and digital enthusiasts. “Any idiot could walk into a fucking room, utter the letters ‘v’ and ‘r’, and VCs would hurl bricks of cash at them”.
We were so shielded from the criticism about VR that we didn’t realise that in the meantime something was actually happening, and that artistic and narrative experimentation linked to this new immersive medium was taking giant steps forward. In the last five years, thanks to the rapid implementation of 360-degree cameras, in the case of films and documentaries, and of graphics engines, in the case of videogames and 3D animation (cybersickness aside) VR has come close to becoming what we had long been promised - a place where everything that can be imagined becomes reality, or rather... fiction.
And even though conceptually we have not gone that far beyond the imaginative vision of the SimStim, that marvellous object invented by William Gibson almost forty years ago capable of immersing the person wearing it in someone else’s sensory and perceptive experience, it is also true that in reality, the dimension of the subjective point of view (POV) has yet to be explored. Works such as Goliath (2021), in which we experience the perception of reality from the subjective point of view of a person suffering from schizophrenia and re-entering society thanks to multiplayer games, or Samsara (2021), a karmic path that leads us into the body of various human and animal species through reincarnation, have taken this exploration to the extreme. In the field of art and film, VR today has established itself as an extremely varied narrative medium that is currently being defined, and therefore is - as we tend to say - liminal.
We might say it, but only few have actually experienced with their POV what is happening in this field. Liz Rosenthal is the permanent curator of Venice VR, which takes place during the Venice International Film Festival, and of Red Sea Immersive, the VR section of the International Red Sea Film Festival just held in Jeddah. She has long been in charge of selecting and presenting hundreds of VR works each year, which makes her one of the most qualified people to tell the story of the fate of a medium that is constantly evolving, being exposed to the revolutions of creativity, experimentation and, now more than ever, to the revolutions of the market.
Rosenthal, constantly exposed to the visor, talks about the huge variety of genres and formats of current VR works, which “range from single-viewer experiences to complex multiplayer installations, including lavish sets and actors, and performances set in fantastic participatory VR worlds”. Virtual reality, says Rosenthal, draws on “several existing media, incorporating cinematic visions and participatory aspects of immersive theatre, mixed with the interactivity of video games”, and therefore requires the collaboration of many professionals, including “animators, UX designers, visual and performing artists, musicians and sound engineers, architects and set designers, directors and more.”
To date, the works curated for Venice VR 2021 and Red Sea Immersive come from three different types of communities. There are those conceived by filmmakers or artists, “often made by a creative and production team working with the main artist”; those that come from the gaming industry and which often turn out to be “hybrids between gaming and storytelling”; and then there is the big news of the last two years - the artists working on VRChat, who create environments “that can be shared through plug-ins and a series of assets”, the so-called VR Chat Worlds.
While before the pandemic people were choosing more “location-based” experiences, and “cultural venues, tourist attractions, retail spaces, and festivals” were equipping themselves with VR stations, in the last two years, “as the desire for all things virtual grew” and we found ourselves locked inside our homes with only our screens, developers and creators have “responded to the crisis in ingenious ways” by focusing on interactive 3D environment rendering APIs - such as WebGL - and open source game engines - such as Unity - that allow users to experience VR environments directly from the browser, without necessarily having to wear a visor. Among the works she presented, which you can see in our image gallery, Pandora X (2020) is perhaps the clearest example, a virtual participatory performance that can be experienced on VRChat, in which during lockdown “a cast of professional actors performed live from their homes in the United States, dressed as their avatars”, guiding users through a series of challenges, in search of the hope laying at the bottom of Pandora’s box.
Venice VR is already looking at the Metaverse, but in a critical way. Liz Rosenthal recounts how she, too, has noticed the voracity with which the industry has tried to grab this new slice of the market, while commentators have been “prattling on about what it is, blabbering about XR, social media, multiplayer games, and streaming media” and often muddying the waters. Just like in Silicon Valley, the story is repeating itself today: “no one understands it but everyone wants in”. When it comes to what the Metaverse is currently offering, Rosenthal prefers to spend her time in VRChat, a meeting place from which the logic of investing in NFTs, land, avatar skins, and whatnot has been left out for now, while “the creativity and inventiveness - given the crowdedness of the artists, creatives, and developers - is amazing”.
And it was precisely on VRChat that, with Venice VR, she organised a virtual version of the festival and from this year also a new section, the “VRChat Worlds Gallery, a selection of 34 exceptional user-generated worlds, ranging from sumptuous and substantial sci-fi and adventure settings, to complete artworks and immersive music visualisations”. Eight of these worlds have since been brought to Red Sea Immersive. Liz invites us to visit them and support this young creative community.
To the Moon (2019) is a visual and aural symphony. To compose it, Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang were inspired by the legend of the ancient Chinese painter who for years had painted such a gigantic and detailed landscape that in the end, he managed to walk into it. Here, wearing the visor means becoming an astronaut exploring the moon - a moon reconstructed line by line, drawing on tropes from Greek mythology and space sci-fi movies, investigating literary, scientific and political imagery.
On the dark side of the Moon, black dust and mathematical symbol hinder but also guide the visitor; incomprehensible genetic codes create bird-like forms, dinosaurs and lost objects. It is a place to plunge into darkness and surrender to the complexity of the universe, feeling enraptured and helpless.
It only takes the first 30 seconds of the trailer to realise that Goliath (2021) is not just an immersive journey, but an adventure for the mind. Some people might find it a bit challenging, as the trigger warning at the start of the experience warns. May Abdalla and Barry Gene Murphy show us how fragile reality can be by simulating the vicissitudes of a man living with schizophrenia.
The images, which vary in alternating flashes, remind us that sometimes even the most basic points of reference can disappear at any moment. Accompanied by the voice of Tilda Swinton, Goliath goes through various stages of his life, from the loss of his parents, to the psychiatric institution, to the newfound social relations made possible by the protected environment of multiplayer video games.
Winner of the “Best Story” award at the Venice VR 2021, in End Of Night (2021), David Adler invites the viewer to sit on a boat with Josef as he rows away from occupied Denmark to the neutral territories of Sweden at the dawn of World War II. The trauma of guilt, of those who choose to flee the war, sometimes forced to leave their loved ones behind, is recounted in a whirlwind of memories and images that mingle with the water of the immense ocean to be crossed.
Adler, who has lived such an experience himself, uses VR as an intimate meeting place, bringing the audience face to face with the emotions of a refugee, asking for understanding but above all empathy. A past story that teaches us lessons about the present.
Throughout history, we humans have learned to manipulate matter through technology, but our spirituality “remains the same as it was thousands of years ago with Gautama Buddha”. In Samsara (2021), Hsin-Chien Huang uses VR technology and 3D animation to invite us to manipulate our spirituality through a process of Embodied Cognition - the act of learning through bodily sensations - in an extreme scenario.
The human species destroyed planet Earth, evolved artificially and has been travelling through space since time immemorial until as a stranger it finds Earth again and remembers lost human emotions. Here, Huang invites us to enter the bodies of humans and animals, to be victims and executioners, to rediscover joy and fear, and if the karmic cycle is not done, to start again.
Once Pandora’s box is uncovered, all the evils of the world are released and start to afflict humans, but at the bottom remains hope, which doesn’t make it out in time. Kiira Benzing and the many other actors in Finding Pandora X – one of the first performative and participatory works in the history of VR – invite viewers to meet on their platform at a specific time, and then accompany them on an adventure to help the only remaining Olympian gods, Zeus and Hera, in their search for the box.
The work, conceived before the pandemic, has become a meeting place for many people during the lockdown, and pursuing the various quests, guided by the actors, has acquired a metaphorical value for the participants - that of coming together in search of hope.
Sometimes, all it takes is a “simple” documentary to experience the immersive capabilities of VR... and Space Explorers: The ISS Experience, “the largest production ever filmed in space” with its 200 hours of real footage shot on board the International Space Station, reminds us of this. For this ambitious production, Félix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphaël had the good fortune to be among the very few astronauts living on the ISS, throughout their six-month mission, to tell the story of the life of a crew, from all the range of emotions they feel when they reach their destination, to the challenges and satisfactions of their daily work.
For this unprecedented collaboration with NASA, Felix & Paul Studios and TIME Studios have designed a special type of VR camera, engineered to operate in zero gravity.
Because of the pandemic, during the 2020 and 2021 editions of the Venice Film Biennale and the Red Sea Film Festival, Venice VR and Red Sea Immersive chose to do something more than the usual exhibition of VR works. The medium, thanks to the VR Chat platform, became a meeting place for visitors, who during the festivals could choose avatars designed by the artists and attend an extensive programme of events.
The scenarios were selected from a series of VR Chat Worlds, which can still be visited on VR Chat. In this gallery, you can see some of them, such as Cycle of Life, Lost It, The Hallwyl Museum, Uncanny Alley, Museum of VR Painting, Aquarius, and Moscow Trip 1952, while others are available in the Venice VR Expanded section at www.labiennale.org.