In the Emmy-nominated virtual reality project, viewers are given an immersive historical experience on the depressingly topical dangers of being black in America
The theatre has luxurious red velvet upholstered seats, grand ceilings and gilded trimmings. The rows of chairs stretch back into the ostensible blackness, with light beaming from the projector room. Ahead, archival footage of stylish black travelers pack the screen as an unseen narrator discusses the hardships of mid-20th-century black travel. Enabled by modern technology but trapped by racist social convention, their trips were eventually greatly eased by the publication of the Green Book, which listed safe spaces for black people to sleep, eat and replenish.
Experience life as a blind person, play a customs officer or swim with sea otters. A new breed of VR film-making is making viewers engage in a deeper way with the issues they confront
Sitting on a stool opposite me is Ayesha, a young American I’ve been asked to interrogate about her recent trip to Pakistan. “Did you visit any areas controlled by the Taliban?” I ask. “No, I did not,” she responds.
Ayesha is a hologram, and I’m “playing” a US customs officer in an augmented reality experience called Terminal 3. I spend 15 minutes in my fictional airport, asking her questions based on choices that appear in writing in my field of vision. My voice triggers her responses – which start off clipped and defensive but become increasingly intimate – to the point where I feel like I’d really like to hang out with her.
Companies everywhere are finally honing in on the immersive power that virtual reality (VR) offers, including in the design, entertainment, education, and retail industries. VR heightens the customer experience, leading to greater engagement and ultimately, a deeper emotional connection with the brand. Taking this to the next level now, are non-profit organisations, who have begun using VR in effective and impactful ways to highlight their causes.
Imagine scrolling online and coming across a news video about a natural disaster that’s just occurred. Maybe a journalist is explaining what has taken place, detailing the devastation, and what is needed to restore the community. Now imagine going into VR to view the same aftermath, but this time standing on the front lawn in front of what used to be a family home. Houses are in ruins; cars have been tossed; trees ripped out by the roots. It’s a different experience, isn’t it?
VR takes you there. It gives you an insider’s perspective, and makes the experience your viewing, yours. This emotional bond to a story, this prompted empathy, that VR has the potential to forge makes it the ideal engagement tool for non-profit organisations. VR is raising awareness to causes often overlooked, and in turn, has become a new kind of revenue-generating tool for a new era.
Attendants at a 2016 fundraiser gala hosted by charity: water were shown a VR film entitled The Source which takes place around a rural Ethiopian village. The film follows Selam, a 13-year-old girl who’s tasked with going on the long trek to fetch water for her family’s use. The journey alone is memorable, due to its length and remoteness, but then we see up close the unhygienic state of the water source from which she’s fetching. VR ensures viewers get a very real sense of the conditions Selam’s family lives in, where she goes to school, and what her daily chores are. After a group of aid workers installs a clean-water well, we see the hope and enthusiasm this addition brings the community. We discern the impact it will have on the lives of those who live there. The charity: water gala raised over $2.4 million (USD), which far exceeded expectations.
PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) has often used non-traditional (sometimes confrontational) means to tell their story and draw attention to their cause. Their use of VR has generated a great deal of conversation. One video is shot from the perspective of a chicken on a factory farm. Another piece of VR content takes viewers into the concrete orca tanks at SeaWorld. The material is graphic and will likely make you feel uncomfortable, and that’s the point. The emotional reactions VR prompts – like life – aren’t always happy.
Made in partnership with the United Nations, Clouds Over Sidra is a 2015 VR film that highlights the refugee crisis in Syria, as narrated by a 12-year-old girl in the Zaatari Refugee Camp in Jordan. The film depicts the daily lives of the people who live in the camp, who’ve fled their home country merely to survive. It’s the first film shot in VR for the UN, leveraging the medium to tell the important stories of this vulnerable population, and generate greater awareness of their cause.
VR is the difference between watching something happen from the outside, and nearly experiencing it for yourself. Currently, there is an estimated 171 million VR users worldwide – a number that’s growing every day. 81% of people who try VR tell others about it, because it is a storytelling medium and we are storytellers at heart. The onslaught of the technology for marketing purposes may still be relatively new. But as long as VR continues to generate an emotional (sometimes uncomfortable) reaction in viewers, we’ll see non-profit organisations leveraging the medium to tell their stories in impactful ways.
The use of virtual reality (VR) and 360 degree video technology to tell a story has come along in leaps and bounds over the last couple of years and already in 2018 we’ve had numerous stories relating to the Sundance Film Festival, Slamdance Film Festival and the Raindance Film Festival with more still to come in the months ahead.
It’s not just in the world of fiction either, the VR documentary has also become quite a popular medium. In the last few days alone on VRFocus we’ve brought you news of the BBC adding yet more content to its VR hub with a new VR series exploring how the control of the flow of the river Nile is affecting politics in across the entire continent in Damming the Nile VR. There was also news from another familiar name in this part of the industry, Sheffield Doc/Fest, who have just launched an immersive documentary competition with a £12,000 (GBP) prize.
The latest announcement however comes from Australia and launched by digital agency Isobar. The documentary focuses on the varied ways the indigenous people of the country use dance and use music within their cultures. Called Carriberrie, the Sydney language word for ‘corroboree’ – itself meaning a lively indigenous dance ceremony or gathering – the documentary travels across the country from the rainforest to the desert to the Sydney Opera House itself. Looking at the traditional ceremonial pieces to how that history is inspiring modern day creations across both genres.
Premiering today at Sydney’s Australian Museum, Carriberrie will be shown throughout the month of March as part of Weave, the museum’s inaugural month-long Festival of First Nations and Pacific Cultures.
“The Australian Museum has been a great supporter of the project and I’m thrilled to present the world premiere of the work here, where I feel a kindred passion for exploring, understanding and helping to preserve First Nations cultures.” Said the piece’s director and producer, Dominic Allen.
“Isobar is committed to Australian arts and culture, and Carriberrie offered a great avenue for us to use our digital expertise in an innovative forum, showcasing a blend of traditional and contemporary dance pieces for the first time in VR.” Added Dave Budge of Isobar Australia, “Working with Dom, we’ve been able to truly capture the performances in context, showing the landscape and the country as well as the dancers.”
“For us, it’s also a great example of what can be done with VR. We believe in the power of VR for storytelling, for immersion and for giving a sense of presence and of place. This project helps show that in a beautiful way.”
The use of virtual reality (VR) and 360 degree video technology to tell a story has come along in leaps and bounds over the last couple of years and already in 2018 we’ve had numerous stories relating to the Sundance Film Festival, Slamdance Film Festival and the Raindance Film Festival with more still to come in the months ahead.
It’s not just in the world of fiction either, the VR documentary has also become quite a popular medium. In the last few days alone on VRFocus we’ve brought you news of the BBC adding yet more content to its VR hub with a new VR series exploring how the control of the flow of the river Nile is affecting politics in across the entire continent in Damming the Nile VR. There was also news from another familiar name in this part of the industry, Sheffield Doc/Fest, who have just launched an immersive documentary competition with a £12,000 (GBP) prize.
The latest announcement however comes from Australia and launched by digital agency Isobar. The documentary focuses on the varied ways the indigenous people of the country use dance and use music within their cultures. Called Carriberrie, the Sydney language word for ‘corroboree’ – itself meaning a lively indigenous dance ceremony or gathering – the documentary travels across the country from the rainforest to the desert to the Sydney Opera House itself. Looking at the traditional ceremonial pieces to how that history is inspiring modern day creations across both genres.
Premiering today at Sydney’s Australian Museum, Carriberrie will be shown throughout the month of March as part of Weave, the museum’s inaugural month-long Festival of First Nations and Pacific Cultures.
“The Australian Museum has been a great supporter of the project and I’m thrilled to present the world premiere of the work here, where I feel a kindred passion for exploring, understanding and helping to preserve First Nations cultures.” Said the piece’s director and producer, Dominic Allen.
“Isobar is committed to Australian arts and culture, and Carriberrie offered a great avenue for us to use our digital expertise in an innovative forum, showcasing a blend of traditional and contemporary dance pieces for the first time in VR.” Added Dave Budge of Isobar Australia, “Working with Dom, we’ve been able to truly capture the performances in context, showing the landscape and the country as well as the dancers.”
“For us, it’s also a great example of what can be done with VR. We believe in the power of VR for storytelling, for immersion and for giving a sense of presence and of place. This project helps show that in a beautiful way.”
Abortion is still an incredibly sensitive subject in many areas of the world, and often those opposed to abortion have little to no understanding of the mental and physical exhaustion these women go through. As such, the new VR documentary, now on Kickstarter, seeks to make a wider audience understanding of what women must go through, and why the choice is so important for so many reasons.
The documentary is titled The Choice, and will take viewers into a woman’s body as they experience the panic of realising they have an unwanted pregnancy. The documentary will introduce viewers to real women, who will talk about their experiences, their emotions, and the difficult choices they had to make.
VR was chosen as the medium for the documentary as they wanted to make users feel like a part of the world, a part of the woman’s life, and as if the decision was also yours. Traditional media can make you view the story of another, but so rarely can they make that story yours, too. VR’s potential for empathy is paralleled, thus the choice to make the documentary for VR devices.
After all, this documentary isn’t about making a splash on the world’s stage, but is instead about compassion. Compassion for others, women, and those that are suffering, especially if invisibly. The Kickstarter reads; “Compassion is necessary, especially in light of the fact that half of the society cannot personally imagine how it is to make this choice. Men do not ever expect to become pregnant. We want them to be equal and supportive partners in this debate and so we need them to understand even just a fraction of how it would feel to be in this situation. We want The Choice to be the tool that gives them the opportunity to gain this perspective so they can understand why women make this decision.”
You should look at the Kickstarter for The Choice right here, and donate if you feel you wish to support a good cause. When you’re able to watch The Choice, we’ll let you know, so keep reading VRFocus.
CODumentary is a 93-minute feature, created in the UK by Jonathan Beales and planned for release in September 2017, that explores how the video game Call of Duty grew into one of the biggest global entertainment franchise blockbusters of all time.
Damon stars in two of the Lido’s big films, Downsizing and Suburbicon, while Lawrence steps into horror movie territory with Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!
Renowned in recent years as a key launchpad for heavyweight Oscar contenders, the 74th Venice film festival has unveiled a lineup heavy on potential award-season frontrunners, as films start to jockey for position in earnest.
Alexander Payne, Darren Aronofsky and George Clooney are some of the big-name directors whose films will receive world premieres in competition at the festival, along with indie favourites such as Andrew Haigh, Abdellatif Kechiche and Hirokazu Koreeda, and even Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei.
The Cannes official selection list has been unveiled and it is a politicised lineup with a repeated thematic emphasis on the refugee crisis, designed to give the finger to the New Trump Order. The inclusion of Claude Lanzmann’s new film Napalm may be of interest to the White House press secretary Sean Spicer – horrified as he is about countries who use chemical weapons.
Virtual reality continues to be an incredible platform for creators to innovate when telling stories and there are plenty of groups taking advantage of this, large and small. Hulu has taken to the medium for news and comedy shows along with the Life brand’s shift into documentary-like VR content, but Within is an entity that was named entirely with VR storytelling in mind.
Continuing its trend of producing high-quality immersive content, Within unveiled a new episode of their science and engineering documentary series called The Possible.
Founded by filmmaker Chris Milk, Within collaborates with companies like Apple, NBC, Vice, and many more to create experiences across a collection of genres. The Possible, made with financial backing from GE, will place viewers face to face with cutting edge technology and discoveries across the life of the serial series. Its second episode is named Listening to the Universe and tackles something that Einstein actually got wrong:
A century ago, Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves—ripples in spacetime—but believed they were so small that humans would never observe them.
More recently, an MIT physics professor did the math and concluded that Einstein was wrong. So he built the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which measures almost infinitesimally small disturbances in spacetime—smaller than anything that’s been measured before. And in 2016, LIGO succeeded, detecting gravitational waves from a massive, faraway collision between black holes.
Pakistani-American astrophysicist Nergis Mavalvala PhD is the MIT physics professor mentioned in the episode’s summary and she’s also known for her pioneering experiments on laser cooling of macroscopic objects and in the generation of squeezed quantum states of light.
If this new episode is any testament to the future stories, The Possible is going to be a very deep dive into science and tech and include collaborations with some of the greatest minds in the world. Listening to the Universe is available in the Within app for iOS, Android, Steam VR, Oculus Home, and PS VR and it’s available to watch on their website as well.
Imagine scrolling online and coming across a news video about a natural disaster that’s just occurred. Maybe a journalist is explaining what has taken place, detailing the devastation, and what is needed to restore the community. Now imagine going into VR to view the same aftermath, but this time standing on the front lawn in front of what used to be a family home. Houses are in ruins; cars have been tossed; trees ripped out by the roots. It’s a different experience, isn’t it?
It’s not just in the world of fiction either, the VR documentary has also become quite a popular medium. In the last few days alone on 
“The Australian Museum has been a great supporter of the project and I’m thrilled to present the world premiere of the work here, where I feel a kindred passion for exploring, understanding and helping to preserve First Nations cultures.” Said the piece’s director and producer, Dominic Allen.
