Inspired 04/2017
This month is heavy on inspiration from the world of digital storytelling — VR, and more.
Columbia University’s Digital Storytelling Lab hosted a great meetup at the Lincoln Centre to share their ‘Digital Dozen’ — twelve projects that show the most innovative approaches to narrative from the previous year, 2016. Included were some of my favorites, such as Field Trip To Mars, an immersive group VR project that takes kids on a bus trip to the red planet without leaving Washington D.C.
Another quirky favorite — The Swedish Number, a project conceived to celebrate Freedom of Speech, making Sweden the first country to officially have its own phone number. With just one dial from a cell, you can talk to a random Swede, or ‘telephone ambassador’ about, pretty much anything you want to talk about. There’s no script, no actors, just real conversations with real people. You could connect to a truck driver, or the Prime Minister.
Creators of Tree, the second installment in a VR trilogy about the harm that humans do to each other, and to nature and Karen Palmer from Riot, were on hand for an interesting discussion that touched on areas in VR that are still evolving such as real-time facial recognition to determine a user’s emotional state of being, and the integrations of haptics such as bass transducers, bursts of scent, and heating/cooling to extend into the 4D experience.
Check out all of the amazing projects shortlisted:
This month also had me attending talks, films and VR as part of the Tribeca Film Festival in NYC. This year’s selection of VR works at the Immersive at Spring Studios was just as inspiring as last year, and seemed bigger. It was a crazy rush to get on the waitlist to experience a lot of the works and there were many I simply didn’t have time or mental capacity to view within the allocated 3-hour slot given.
Some of my favorites:
Blackout, where you step into a subway carriage, and roam around listening in to the inner thoughts of New Yorkers. Real New Yorkers are being 3D scanned and their stories recorded, so crowdsourced stories are the foundation of this experience.
Talking With Ghosts, a completely native to VR illustrative story all hand drawn in 3D using Quill by Oculus Story Studio. Fairground, a melancholy story about two old friends pursuing separate future paths, by artist Sophia Foster Dimino, was absolutely precious.
Perhaps the most fun experience of the bunch goes to Life Of Us, where you experience evolution, starting as a single-celled amoeba, and progressing through various stages of development, you get to fly as a dinosaur, run through the grassy plains, be a salaryman in a modern megapolis and dance as a robot on a futuristic disco floor. Most importantly, you get to do all of this with a friend, whose avatar you can interact with in the virtual world all the way through. It is SO joyous, I was giggling and ‘wow’-ing like a little kid pretty much all the way through it.
See the full lineup for this year’s Immersive because there are too many amazing projects to mention here.
April is also a key month for folks working at the intersection of museums and digital with the Museums & The Web Conference rolling around for another year. Having been to the previous two, I decided to sit this one out, but followed along with some of the Twitter discussion and intend to read some of the papers that are published online. This is a good blog post from the Museu d‘Art de Nacional Catalunya rounding up the key focus of discussion and linking to some interesting projects and case studies:
Share your recent finds from around the world/internet in the comments!
