Category: Asteroids!

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Tribeca Film Festival Teams With Time’s Up For Inaugural New York Event

The Tribeca Film Festival has announced a number of new additions to the 2018 line up to expand on the already exciting number of films, talks, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) showings.

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Tribeca Immersive will be adding the world premiere of Jack: Part One, from the Emmy Award-winning creators of INVASIONS!, ASTEROIDS! and Rainbow Crow comes this new VR film that invites viewers into the world of Jack, based on the classic fairytale. This immersive film will combine both VR technology and immersive theater in a show that must be seen to be believed.

One of the announcements is that Tribeca has teamed up with Time’s Up to host an inaugural New York event during the Tribeca Film Festival. This event will feature a number of conversations with activists, filmmakers, storytellers, lawyers and many more including early Time’s Up supporters such as Ashley Judd and Julianne Moore. The day will explore how events have lead up to today, the women who came before to make all this possible and what is next for the Time’s Up movement.

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Elsewhere Tribeca have revealed not one but three new world premieres for a number of different films. Steven Sebring’s documentary film capturing the final performance of Patti Smith’s iconic “Horses” will be premiering. Titled Horses: Patti Smith and her Band, it will be debuting at a special screening in the Beacon Theatre, where Smith and her band will perform a number of songs. Tickets will be available to purchase for this from Monday, 2nd April.

Finally is the world premiere of Enhanced, an EPSN docuseries from the Executive Producers Alex Gibney and Brad Hebert. This expands the Tribeca TV program, exploring the frontiers of sports training, technology and recovery, as boundary-pushing innovations propel human athletic achievement to its limits.

The 2018 Tribeca Film Festival is set to take place between 18th-29th April, 2018. Tickets are available to be purchased online now and as previously covered, the Virtual Arcade, Cinema360 screenings and Storyscapes tickets will also be available from the site as well, offering attendees more content to experience. Tickets for Time’s Up, Enhanced and Jack: Part One are available to purchase from the website now as well.

VRFocus will continue to bring you the latest on the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival

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Manifest 99, Asteroids!, Son of Jaguar Get Emmy Nominations

Manifest 99, Asteroids!, Son of Jaguar Get Emmy Nominations

Several of the best VR movies from the past year are in the running for an Emmy award.

Flight School Studio’s Manifest 99, Baobab’s Asteroids! and Son of Jaguar from Google Spotlight Stores are all up for the Outstanding Interactive Media – Original Daytime Program or Series category at the 2018 Daytime Emmy awards, set to take place on Sunday, April 29th.

Asteroids! is Baobab’s sequel to its original VR film, Invasion!, following two goofy aliens on their adventures in space. Son of Jaguar, meanwhile, was directed by Jorge Gutierrez, best known for his work on The Book of Life. Finally, Manifest 99 was the debut project from Flight School, telling an emotional journey that followed several characters.

“We’re happy that people have connected with Manifest 99 in a meaningful way,” Sulivan Parker, producer on the project, said in a prepared statement. “It has been an honor to work with such a talented team at Flight School Studio to bring the project to life. Receiving an Emmy® Award nomination for our first project is truly astounding.”

It’s far from the first time VR has been recognized at the Emmy awards. Oculus Story Studio’s VR short, Henry, took home an award several years ago while another Google Spotlight Story, the excellent Pearl, was a winner in 2017.

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Kortex Expands List Of Compatible Titles

Kortex, the device used in partnership with virtual reality (VR) experiences has announced a number of new titles and expereines that are compatible, offering users more options for immersive stress relief.

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The device uses electrodes which attach to the skin to provide gentle neurostimulation, which in some studies has been shown to stimulate the production of serotonin and lower cortisol. After a large number of beta testers gave feedback on how positive the combination of Kortex and Land’s End: A VR Adventure was, the company have now expanded the umber of titles that will be ideal for use within Kortex. The list is a taste of suggestions put forward by VR World Director of Content, Tommy Goodkin which is based on his six weeks of using Kortex.

For Samsung Gear VR users there are now two additional titles that will work with Kortex. This includes the 2017 Emmy winner title Invasion! from the director of Madagascar, featuring the voice of Ethan Hawke. The second title being Asteroids! which is once again from the director of Madagascar and will take users on an 11-minute immersive cinematic experience through space as part of the crew. Both of these are available via the Oculus Store and are free to download.

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For Oculus Rift and HTC Vive users there are even more titles which are now able to be enjoyed along with Kortex. The Climb (Oculus exclusive) will see users climbing up huge heights, feeling the exhilaration of extreme free solo climbing like never before. Take your time and enjoy the views or complete for the fastest time to the top, the choice is up to you. Just make sure you are not afraid of heights.

Google Earth VR is also now supported, allowing users to take a stroll through the streets of their local town or famous cities, soar over the Grand Canyon, or walk around key landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower.

If the ocean is more your thing than TheBlu is for you. Explore the wonder and majesty of the ocean from the comfort of your own home. Visit a range of different habitats and come face to face with some of the most interesting and largest species on the planet. Fantastic Contraption will let users engage in a surreal building title as they build life-sized contraptions that fill the skies, and use them to sure puzzles on the other side of a floating island. No solution is right or wrong, so let your creativity run wild.

Real-time strategy (RTS) title Tethered awaits for users t o lend their guiding hands in a beautiful series of islands that will offer an experience unlike anything a user has seen before. Lastly, Dear Angelica (Oculus exclusive) is a journey through a magical and dreamlike world by the Emmy Award winning Oculus Story Studio. Featuring artwork painted entirely in VR, Dear Angelica is an immersive short story starring Geena Davis and Mae Whitman.

Kortex are continuing their work to develop the neurostimulation solution further and expand the library of suitable content as well. It is currently available to order direct from their website and is compatible with most VR units.

For more on Kortex in the future, keep reading VRFocus.

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Baobabs’ Asteroids Crash into VR Today

Baobab Studios has today debuted the highly anticipated virtual reality (VR) animated film, Asteroids!, available for Google Daydream, Samsung Gear VR, Google Cardboard and Windows MR head-mounted displays (HMDs). Featuring Ingrid Nilsen as the voice of Peas, Asteroids! marks Nilsen’s first foray into VR work alongside Elizabeth Banks. 

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The follow-up to Baobab Studios’ well received Invasion!, Asteroids! follows the journey of Mac, Cheez (Elizabeth Banks) and their sidekick Peas (Ingrid Nilsen) as they traverse the challenges of space. Cheez is a loyal robot pet with a playful streak who is always ready for a game of fetch or daring rescue mission, while Peas is the loveable goofball with a heart of gold who just wants her best friends to be happy.

From the director of Madagascar, Asteroids! is an 11-minute interactive cinematic experience in which viewers are taken by Mac, Cheez and Peas on a deep space mission where they come face-to-face with teeth-gnashing space-bugs and careening asteroids.

“I’ve never seen anything quite like Asteroids!,” said YouTube and lifestyle personality Ingrid Nilsen. “Asteroids! is completely social and interactive. From the second the film starts, you are immediately immersed in a world where virtual animated characters become your friends and together, you experience emotions like humour, excitement and compassion, just as you would in real life.”

Asteroids! is now available for free via YouTube 360, Facebook 360, Baobab VR app for iOS and Android, Samsung Gear VR, Google Daydream, and Windows MR HMDs. The film can also be directly downloaded for Samsung Gear VR, Google Daydream, and both iOS and Android editions of Google Cardboard.

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Baobab Studios’ executive team is led by Maureen Fan, Eric Darnell and Larry Cutler, combining experiences from cinema, animation and gaming as leaders formerly of Pixar, Zynga and DreamWorks Animation. In 2015 Baobab Studios announced a first funding round of $6,000,000 USD, lead by Comcast Ventures. This was followed by a second round of $25,000,000 from the likes of 20th Century Fox, HTC Corp., Youku Global Media Fund and Horizons Ventures. There’ll be plenty more to come from Baobab Studios in the future, and VRFocus will keep you updated with all the latest details.

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Watch Baobab’s Asteroids! Now On Any Platform

Watch Baobab’s Asteroids! Now On Any Platform

Baobab Studios’ second VR creation, Asteroids!, is now available across all platforms.

The company’s debut project (Invasion!) brought visitors to an ice-covered lake where a cute little bunny encountered some bumbling aliens. This follow up episode takes visitors inside the alien ship for a more intimate look at these creatures as they deal with various problems in outer space. The project includes the voice work of Elizabeth Banks, who directed Pitch Perfect 2 and played Effie in the Hunger Games films.

The 7-minute 360-degree video version of the experience can be seen right here but there are links to a longer interactive version you can download below.

You can also check out Asteroids! here:

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VR Short Film ‘Asteroids!’ from Baobab Studios Now Available

Interactive VR short film Asteroids!, the follow-up to Emmy award-winning VR short Invasion! (2016) is now available for Gear VR, Daydream, and Windows MR headsets. From the director of the Madagascar franchise, the full 11-minute cut continues the journey of aliens Mac and Cheez (and robot sidekick Peas) on their deep space mission.

Baobab Studios announced Asteroids! at Oculus Connect 3 in 2016, and has since made an interactive preview of the animation available on Gear VR and Daydream platforms. A 360 video ‘sneak peek’ has also been available in various forms, including the iOS and Android Baobab app.

Today, the full version of Asteroids! is available for free across several platforms. The best experience can be found on Gear VR, Daydream, and Windows Mixed Reality devices, where the animation is rendered in real-time 3D. Sadly, unlike their first short, Asteroids! is not currently available on PSVR, HTC Vive, or Oculus Rift, despite its considerably more interactive design.

Invasion! was the team’s first foray into VR animation, and was a polished experience, but ended all too quickly. It was later slightly extended with an intro narrated by Ethan Hawke, but this felt like an afterthought, and didn’t offer the viewer what was really needed—more time with the characters. Asteroids! is a major improvement, being longer, with more complex animation and now interactivity.

“Different storytelling mediums all have a common goal—to tell great stories through characters that audiences connect with, care about, and maybe even come to love,” Baobab writes on their official site. “The great challenge and great potential for VR storytelling is not simply to achieve this goal, but also, to do it in a way that actually lets the viewer become a part of the story. With Asteroids!, this is a step towards achieving this goal.”

Follow these links to download the Gear VR, Daydream, and Windows Mixed Reality real-time versions. The non-interactive 360 video version of the full short can be viewed via YouTube 360 and Facebook 360, or via the Baobab app for iOS and Android (which also supports the Cardboard VR viewer), but for the reasons above, it is strongly recommended to experience one of the real-time versions first.

Baobab Studios is one of the largest independent VR film studios, having raised a total of $31 million in funding to date, most notably a $25 million Series B funding round in 2016 which also welcomed Larry Cutler (ex Dreamworks and Pixar) as CTO. Their current project, Rainbow Crow, an adaptation of a Lenape Native American tale, is their most ambitious, presented in several chapters, and features musician John Legend.

The post VR Short Film ‘Asteroids!’ from Baobab Studios Now Available appeared first on Road to VR.

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Baobab Studios’ ASTEROIDS! Launching this December, new Trailer Available

Baobab Studios has announced today that its highly anticipated followup to virtual reality (VR) animation INVASION! will be launching in December. And the mark the occasion the studio has released a new trailer for ASTEROIDS!

Originally debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January, ASTEROIDS! continues the story of quirky aliens Mac and Cheez. Joined by their other robot sidekick, Peas, viewers take on the role of a helper-bot waiting for a chance to prove their worth on a dangerous mission in deep outer space. The chance finally comes when the spaceship is endangered by teeth-gnashing space-bugs and careening asteroids. With the others up to their alien eyeballs in trouble, it’s the viewers job to save the day!

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The new trailer below showcases more of the VR animation than ever before, with the full story of ASTEROIDS! available on Google Daydream and Samsung Gear VR in December.

For further updates, keep reading VRFocus.

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Life In 360°: From Bunnies To Space

A sneak peak from a familiar face on Wednesday’s visit to Life In 360° and that familiar face is Baobab Studios.

If you’ve followed VRFocus for sometime you’ll know we’ve charted Baobab Studios’s adventures involving their property INVASION! Which began life as a smaller presentation before the company received a lot of funding and it was also announced that a big screen adaptation of the adventure was to occur.

It’s bunny star was quite the draw, as VRFocus described it in an preview: “Within the first few minutes you’ll meet your new friend, who curiously bounds up towards the camera, set upon a frozen lake, to meet you. Baobab Studios wants you to connect with this cutesy critter through proximity over anything else, and it’s not hard to form a bond with the Pixar-esque creation when you feel like it’s really in front of you.”

The sequel ASTEROIDS! was announced back in December and debuted at the The Sundance Film Festival. Thankfully for those not at the event Baobab Studios have now released a 360 degree “sneak peak” as to what further adventures await.

VRFocus will return on Friday with another 360 degree video, and of course check bac throughout today for more news and features relating to the world of virtual reality technologies and entertainment.

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Emotional Branching VR Stories: Combining Empathy & Interactivity for Compassion Acts

eric-darnellLast year, Baobab Studios’ Eric Darnell was skeptical about adding interactivity to virtual reality stories because he felt like there was a tradeoff between empathy and interactivity. But after watching people experience their first VR short Invasion!, he saw that people were much more engaged with the story and wanted to get more involved. He came to that realization that it is possible to combine empathy and interactivity in the form of compassion acts, and so he started to construct Baobab’s next VR experience Asteroids! around the idea of allowing the user to participate in an act of compassion. I had a chance to catch up with Darnell at Sundance where we talked about his latest thoughts about storytelling in VR, and explored his insights from their first explorations of what he calls “emotional branching.”

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Darnell says that one of the key ingredients of a story is “character being revealed by the choices that they make under pressure.” Rather than make you the central protagonist as a video game might, in Asteroids! you’re more of a sidekick who can choose whether or not to help out the main characters. This allows an authored story to be told though the main characters that are ultimately independent of your actions, but your “local agency” choices still flavor your experience in the sense that there are different “emotional branches” of the story for how the main protagonists react to you based upon your decisions.

Unpacking the nuances of these emotional branches showed me that Asteroids! was doing some of the most interesting explorations of interactive narrative at Sundance this year, and I would’ve completely missed them had I not had this conversation with him. We explore some of the more subtle nuances of the story, and so I’d recommend holding off on this interview if you don’t want to get too many spoilers (it should be released sometime in the first half of 2017). But Darnell is a master storyteller, and he’s got a lot of really fascinating thoughts about how stories might work in VR that are worth sharing out to the storytellers in the wider VR community.

They’re also doing some interesting experiments of adding in body language mirroring behaviors into the other sidekick characters that are based upon social science research in order to create subtle cues of connecting to the characters and story. There is another dog-like robot the experience that is in the same sidekick class as you where you can play fetch with it and interact with in subtle ways.

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Storytelling is a time-based art form that has a physical impact of releasing chemicals in our bodies including cortisol at moments of dramatic tension, oxytocin with character interactions, and dopamine at the resolution of that dramatic tension. Given these chemical reactions, Darnell believes that the classic three-act structure of a story is something that is encoded within our DNA. Storytelling is something that has helped humans evolve, and it’s part of what makes us human. He cites Kenneth Burke saying that “stories are equipment for living.” Stories help us learn about the world by watching other people making choices under pressure.

There’s still a long ways to go before we achieve the Holy Grail of completely plausible interactive stories that provide full global agency while preserving the integrity of a good dramatic arc. It’s likely that artificial intelligence will eventually have a much larger role in accomplishing this, but Asteroids! is making some small and important steps with Darnell’s sidekick insights and “emotional branching” concept. It was one of the more significant interactive narrative experiments at Sundance this year, and showed that it’s possible to combine empathy and interactivity to make a compassionate story.

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The post Emotional Branching VR Stories: Combining Empathy & Interactivity for Compassion Acts appeared first on Road to VR.

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Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier Pushes Forward In 2017

Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier Pushes Forward In 2017

The Sundance Film Festival is this weekend and next in Utah, giving new mixed reality projects a moment in the spotlight.

New VR productions at the festival show an enormous leap in quality from its first real appearance there in 2012. That’s when Sundance became the pioneering event to host Nonny de la Peña from USC showing her VR project Hunger In Los Angeles. She was accompanied at the event by none other than Palmer Luckey, who worked at USC before formally founding Oculus.

Now VR projects are spread across multiple venues at Sundance on different consumer headsets, with a wide range of content competing for eyeballs, and ultimately dollars, with varying artistic and technical approaches attempting to push the new medium forward.

I spoke by phone with Shari Frilot, Director and Curator of the New Frontier portion of the festival about what’s different compared to previous years. Among the experiences she explained the festival this year might enable, is the ability for people at two different venues to meet one another for the first time in a shared virtual experience — then to follow up and meet in real life.

“This is technology that affects storytelling in a really profound way,” Frilot said. “It is one thing to meet people in real life…it is also something to meet someone in text, but is is a…another thing to meet someone in VR.”

Life of Us from Chris Milk is a shared VR journey that “tells the complete story of the evolution of life on Earth.” It is one of several premieres from groundbreaking VR creators at the event. Another is Miyubi, a 40-minute endearing comedy project from Felix & Paul, the talented studio behind a variety of VR work including those showcasing Cirque Du Soleil performances. Miyubi lets you look into the life of a family from the 1980s from the perspective of a Japanese toy robot. There have been some previous attempts at lengthier VR projects before, Frilot said, but “they’ve all failed miserably.”

“Except for this one,” she said. “They’ve managed to create something that has….breadth and emotional gravity that maintains your interest for 40 minutes…it’s an important effort.”

The New Frontier portion of the festival includes 20 VR experiences and 11 installations across three venues. Tear-jerking project Dear Angelica from Oculus Story Studio had its premiere there, and ASTEROIDS! from Baobab is being shown too, which continues the story of the aliens we saw in the startup’s initial project INVASION!. Meta is showing Journey to the Center of the Natural Machine on its Meta 2 mixed reality glasses and the Synesthesia Suit which lets you feel the game is there too. Acting and motion capture app Mindshow is there at the event as well showcasing its intuitive method of creating animated projects in VR. That’s just a sampling of some of the VR projects available at Sundance this year. Much of the content being shown and talked about there is likely to make it to headsets in the next few years, though some projects might fail to resonate and disappear from the public eye.

“The one thing I can say is nobody knows” what will catch on, Frilot said. “You just have to sit and watch it unfold.”

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