culture – Page 2 – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

August 9, 2023

‘Even closing my eyes is an intense movement’: the VR experience that simulates a serious neurological condition

Ben Joseph Andrews’ chronic vestibular condition leaves him with migraines and dizziness – which he’s transformed into a VR experience. Luke Buckmaster gives it a go

Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email

You would’ve heard of déjà vu: the surreal sensation of having previously experienced the present, or something like it. You may not have heard of jamais vu: the sensation of being unfamiliar with things that should be recognisable. Like your house, your desk, even your hands.

Guy Pearce’s protagonist in Christopher Nolan’s 2000 thriller Memento, who can’t create new memories, has a version of it. But the kind I got a taste of, in a fascinating “world-first mixed reality” experience featured at this year’s Melbourne international film festival, is jamais vu of a very different variety.

July 11, 2023

Melbourne international film festival 2023: 10 things to see and do, from BlackBerry to new Kelly Reichardt

Plus Josh O’Connor as a grumpy archaeologist, Hugo Weaving as a scabby hermit, and a queer noir – all part of Miff’s 71st edition

Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email

Australia’s cinephiles have been well served by this year’s Melbourne international film festival, with a program that – as usual – sources an eclectic range of productions from around the globe. Announced on Tuesday, the festival’s 71st iteration runs in Melbourne cinemas from 3-20 August – and in regional cinemas from 11-13 and 18-20 August. An additional online version will run from 18-27 August.

Many of this year’s highlights have already played at Sydney film festival – so click here to read more about No Bears, Hello Dankness, Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, 20,000 Species of Bees and How to Blow up a Pipeline.

May 9, 2023

The next Tamagotchi? Meet Peridot, the AR pet app from the makers of Pokémon Go

While kids will love throwing themselves into caring for their new virtual pet, older players looking for a next-gen AR-led Pokémon Go may be disappointed

From the unlikely return of Gladiators to the resurgence of the layered blowout hairstyle beloved of Rachel from Friends, 90s nostalgia is in rude health. It was only a matter of time, then, until we witnessed the return of the era’s most baffling toy – the Tamagotchi.

Created by Akihiro Yokoi and Aki Maita in 1996, these keychain-sized gaming devices became an instant playground phenomenon, seeing millions of children neglect their real-life pets in favour of cleaning pixelated poop. Then, just as quickly as they arrived, these pocket playthings disappeared. While Nintendo channelled the Tamagotchi spirit into the hugely successful Nintendogs series, the rise of increasingly complex life sims, such as … well, The Sims, saw the pet and play genre die an untimely death – until now.

April 8, 2023

The 7 most powerful characters in The Super Mario Bros. Movie, ranked

The Super Mario Bros. Movie had Donkey Kong and Bowser battle Mario and Peach, so fans can now read the ranked list of the most powerful characters in the film.

February 22, 2023

Pushing Buttons: The PlayStation VR 2 might be the next big thing, if you can handle the nausea – and the cost

In this week’s newsletter: Though costly, the PSVR2 is the most usable virtual gaming device yet – even for sceptics like me

Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here

In 2016, when the first wave of virtual reality headsets hit the market after years of hype, I was sceptical. I was totally sold on VR, having had my mind blown playing a space dogfighting sim the previous year at internet-spaceship convention Eve Fanfest. But the original Oculus Rift and HTC Vive were just so unwieldy. They needed too many cables and so much space to operate that you had to dedicate a small room to them (which some of my more techy friends happily did). They were expensive, as were the PCs that you needed to run them. And having already played with VR several times at trade shows, the novelty was wearing off fast. Cool, sure, but the future of gaming? Nah.

The original PlayStation VR headset was the least technically powerful of that first wave of home VR tech, and also the least annoying to use. I was obsessed with Tetris Effect, which is a transcendental experience in VR, and its music-game cousin Rez. I played Moss, a charming storybook-style adventure about a mouse. But then PSVR went back in my Bottomless Drawer of Video Game Peripherals, and I never felt the urge to get it out again.

Crazy Taxi fans will be charmed by this solo developer’s quest to create his dream tribute to the game, entirely on his own.

Some of the American games sites interviewed the world’s most famous game designer Shigeru Miyamoto at the opening of Universal Studios’ Super Nintendo World theme park in LA. I’m not jealous at all. IGN’s interview has lots of lovely details about the park and Miyamoto’s influence on it.

Microsoft has signed a “binding” 10-year contract with Nintendo to bring Call of Duty to its consoles, which strikes me as a very odd thing to do with a series of games that you do not yet actually own. (Activision-Blizzard and Microsoft’s merger is still pending, and presumably the company will be hoping that this helps sweeten the regulators who’ve put the brakes on the deal.)

Saudi Arabia’s wealth fund keeps on upping its stake in Nintendo. It now owns over 8% of the company. It also owns close to 6% of EA, and nearly 7% of Take-Two.

February 10, 2023

Regional theatres are on their knees – support your local one | Tim Crouch

Covid cut off the communal experience of live performance and venues have taken a battering. Let’s return and reconnect

Imagine a man at the end of his rope. Imagine someone says to him: “Here, put this virtual reality headset on; it will help you.” The software in the headset transports the man to the edge of a cliff. Near Dover maybe. The immaculately rendered landscape overwhelms his senses: the surge of the sea far below him, a boat in the distance, the vertigo. Imagine that some part of the man is healed by this immersion. He takes the headset off and returns to reality with renewed resilience and hope.

Shakespeare pulls a version of this trick on the Earl of Gloucester in King Lear. Not with VR but with words. The blinded Gloucester is made to think he’s a footstep away from oblivion – rocks beneath him, birds wheeling below. He’s taken over the edge of despair and back again. And the lesson he learns from the experience is to endure. And yes, the lesson we all learn from watching him is also to endure. But we also learn a thousand other things about ourselves, there in that audience, watching that play, at that moment.

December 7, 2022

‘The metaverse will be our slow death!’ Is Facebook losing its $100bn gamble on virtual reality?

The company now known as Meta has spent staggering amounts on creating an immersive successor to the traditional 2D internet. But what has it got to show for it, apart from 11,000 job losses?

What a difference a year makes. Last October, Facebook supremo Mark Zuckerberg could barely wait to show the world what he was up to. “Today, we’re going to talk about the metaverse,” he enthused in a slick video presentation. “I want to share what we imagine is possible.” Transitioning almost seamlessly from his real self into a computer-generated avatar, Zuckerberg guided us through his vision for the virtual-reality future: playing poker in space with your buddies; sharing cool stuff; having work meetings and birthday parties with people on the other side of the world; customising your avatar (the avatars had no legs, which was weird). Zuckerberg was so all-in on the metaverse, he even rechristened his company Meta.

This month, we saw a more subdued Zuckerberg on display: “I wanna say upfront that I take full responsibility for this decision,” he told employees morosely. “This was ultimately my call and it was one of the hardest calls that I’ve had to make in the 18 years of running the company.” Meta was laying off 11,000 people – 13% of its workforce. Poor third-quarter results had seen Meta’s share price drop by 25%, wiping $80bn off the company’s value. Reality Labs, Meta’s metaverse division, had lost $3.7bn in the past three months, with worse expected to come. It wasn’t all bad news, though: Zuckerberg announced last month that Meta avatars would at last be getting legs.

September 12, 2022

Talking cats, magic brooms and robot bar staff – welcome to the future of storytelling

The Venice film festival section Venice Immersive is dedicated to ‘extended reality’, where visitors can explore new narrative worlds. Our intrepid correspondent gets lost

I’m at the Venice film festival, in a hyper-real city square, surrounded by lapping blue water and tourists who move in mysterious ways. There is a ginger cat here called Dorian who walks on his hind legs and speaks with a French accent. Dorian is showing us how to walk and turn and jump and crouch. He’s concerned by the tourist who can’t get herself off the ground. Dorian explains that if we ever get lost we should press the “respawn” button which will put us right back where we began. He sighs heavily and says: “Sooner or later everybody gets lost.”

It is the fear of getting lost – this terror of the unknown – that scares many punters away from Venice Immersive, which sits behind the big Mussolini-era casino that hosts the film festival proper. That and the boat ride, the headsets, the schedule, the stress. The movies on the main programme: they’re largely a known quantity. Whereas the “extended reality” exhibits out on VI island are almost too much to process; we lack even the grammar and the language to frame them. To misquote Bob Dylan, something is happening here – but no one, it seems, can definitively say what it is.

August 17, 2022

100 years in 48 hours: the ‘epic’ VR film Gondwana is set in the world’s oldest tropical rainforest

The Melbourne international film festival installation transports viewers to the Daintree Rainforest. Its creators share how they built an entire ecosystem

Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email

Ben Joseph Andrews and Emma Roberts stopped all the clocks the moment they arrived in the Daintree Rainforest to start a five month research trip for their epic, 48-hour, virtual reality film Gondwana. Arriving in the wet season of 2019, “we scrambled our phones, our computers. We embraced the cycles of time that occur in the forest,” says Andrews, the film’s director. “That letting go and surrendering gave us time to listen, and gain a deep appreciation of the multi-layered nature of that environment.”

Their experience in the 180m-year-old rainforest, which literally re-shaped their sense of time, has never left them. Now, the pair hope to immerse audiences in a similarly perspective-altering experience with the installation of Gondwana at ACMI as part of Melbourne’s international film festival, which will screen over 48 hours from Thursday to Saturday.

August 12, 2022

Tim Crouch: Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel review – virtual King Lear

Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh
Using a VR headset and an empty stage, Tim Crouch puts his audience at one remove from the Shakespeare play to comment on the world and theatre itself

On the back wall there is a notice saying: “Please rinse and sanitise.” Over to the right a poster from Equity, the union for performers and creative practitioners, talks about “creating safe spaces”. It includes the number for a harassment helpline. There is no decor and the house lights are up. “It’s just this,” says Tim Crouch on his empty stage. “It’s just us.”

Or just us and the virtual reality headset the writer and actor insists on wearing. The gizmo is his portal to another theatre, one grander and more ornate than our own, where a production of King Lear is at its midway point.

At the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, until 28 August.

All our Edinburgh festival reviews.