When it came to online virtual presentations in 2020 one of the best was Venice VR Expanded, part of the annual Venice International Film Festival. Now in its 78th edition, the prestigious film event returns in September in both physical and virtual form, with the virtual reality (VR) showcase once again being held within the social app VRChat.
The Last Worker. Image credit: Jörg Tittel
This year Venice VR Expanded will feature a total of 37 immersive projects from 21 countries, with guests able to preview the official selection through VRChat. If you’re an accredited guest you’ll also be invited to “Meet the Creator” sessions, opening and closing parties, and other performances. Just like the 2020 edition, the Venice VR virtual world has been designed with the technical support of VRrOOm with a virtual version of Venice and the in-real-life VR Island Lazzaretto Vecchio.
New for 2021 is the Venice VRChat Worlds Gallery. This will have a selection of 35 virtual worlds “celebrating the creativity of creators using VRChat as a platform to build their own fantasy worlds.” As an additional extra, there will be five special events, including live performances, taking place across five VRChat virtual venues.
Venice VR Expanded is split into several categories, not all of which are available online. The “Competition” category has 23 projects, “Out of Competition – Best Of” is a selection of 12 VR works launched since the 2020 event; one “Out of Competition Special Event”, “Biennale College Cinema – Out of Competition” (one project), and then the VRChat Worlds Gallery. The special event and out of competition categories won’t be available online. Everything else will be, in partnership with HTC’s Viveport and Oculus.
As for what’s on show during Venice VR Expanded 2021:
VRChat Worlds Gallery
A MAZE․ TRAIN STATION
AQUARIUS
ATLANTIS˸ SUPERRARE EXHIBITION
CLUB GUMBALL
CRAFTY CLIMB
ERS
CRYPT OF THE SPIRITS
CRYSTAL DUNES
CYCLE OF LIFE
DEEP BLUE NIGHT
EDEN
FFCR
FRANK
GUMBALL LOUNGE
KARAOKE CENTRA
LAST HOPE WATCH TOWER
LOST IT
MIRЯIM
MONORAIL COASTER
MONORAIL COASTER LITE
MOSCOW TRIP 1952
MUSEUM-OF-VRPAINTING
NOIR – CALL OF THE VOID (SPOOKALITY RELEASE｜TECH DEMO)
Venice VR Expanded will run from 1st – 19th September 2021. If you don’t have a VR headset you can also head to these collaborating physical spaces around the world during that time period. All part of the Venice VR Expanded Satellite Programme, you’ll need to make a reservation directly with each venue. The benefit of an onsite visit is the locations will present those works not available online.
Centre PHI, Montréal, Canada
Sandman Studios – Sandbox Immersive Festival, Beijing and Shanghai, China
MC2: Grenoble, Grenoble, France
Centquatre-Paris, Paris, France
Invr.Space, Berlin, Germany
MEET Digital Culture Center | Fondazione Cariplo, Milan, Italy
Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini –Laboratorio Aperto di Modena, Modena, Italy
Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Turin, Italy
M9 – Museum of the 20th Century, Venice Mestre, Italy
Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Less Media Group – Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMOMA), Moscow, Russia
Espronceda – Institute of Art & Culture, Barcelona, Spain
Euromersive Turkey – IKSV Salon & Kolektif House (Maslak), Istanbul, Turkey
Portland Art Museum & Northwest Film Center – Portland Art Museum, Portland, USA
VRFocus will continue its coverage of Venice VR Expanded, reporting back with the latest updates.
These virtual metaverses everyone keeps espousing may promise a digital nirvana full of fluffy clouds and people getting along like they’re in a Disney movie, however, simply offering a place to chat isn’t enough, we need entertainment. Some might say these virtual worlds are the entertainment but not everyone wants to be creative, some of us just like to put our feet up and switch off. Well, all that and more is being dreamt up and catered for.
Facebook Horizon
Hello there
First and foremost these digital realms are designed as communication platforms. Able to connect friends and family with a greater sense of togetherness than a video or phone call can provide. Or you can meet entirely new people, stepping into an area that’s completely dedicated to your favourite pastime, TV show or even your occupation. Spending hours nattering about subjects others have no clue or little interest for.
Hanging out with mates is a very natural thing for any human, most of us need to connect with one another in some way and the pandemic has brought this into the spotlight like never before. It’s why VRFocus will be going more in-depth about the social features and issues of metaverses in a future edition. As for now what we all really want is to have some fun in a digital universe with limitless potential.
Burn up the dance floor…
There are numerous social platforms appearing that support both VR and non-VR devices and they’re trying to persuade new users with a variety of means. They’re also gunning for different markets, namely younger audiences with a fresh, colourful feel whilst those focused on adults tend to have a far more serious vibe.
It’s this latter segment where you can see a real push in specific entertainment marketing. Rather than building blocks users are given art, music and culture to explore and enjoy. For instance, Sensorium Galaxy which is due to launch later in 2021 is heavily focused on the dance music route. It’s going to have a dedicated music world called PRISM where DJ’s will perform exclusive sets. Some big names have already signed up like Eric Prydz, Carl Cox, Armin van Buuren and David Guetta. So if you like to dance your socks off it might be well worth a look.
Sensorium Galaxy isn’t the only one leveraging the power of music. Already well versed in this medium is Sansar which has been holding events for a while now. The latest will be Australia’s Splendour in the Grass music festival digitally recreated as Splendor XR for two days in July.
Music easily bridges many divides and brings people together with a foot-tapping beat, so it’s no surprise that it would make a great catalyst for metaverse adoption.
We are such stuff as dreams are made on…
However, music is only one small avenue these platforms can utilise. There’s a vast cultural resource metaverse’s can tap into – and have already been – when it comes to entertaining the masses. Over the last year, a prime example has come from film festivals. Unable to host premieres in-person, events like Venice Film Festival, Cannes, Tribeca and Sundance have all turned to interactive mediums to connect with audiences worldwide. They’ve even found greater success as these events are no longer elite, prestigious showcases few outside their industry can attend, providing true global appeal like never before.
This is even more so for niche technologies like virtual reality (VR). Cannes XR, Tribeca Immersive and NewImages Festival combined this summer to create XR3, an immersive film festival via Museum of Other Realities (MOR), exploring an art space that allowed guests to step into each experience as if it were a live installation.
MOR isn’t really a metaverse as such. VRChat, on the other hand, is and that played host to SXSW Online XR, one of the best representations of this topic to date. SXSW is usually held in Austin, Texas but for 2021 the organisers recreated areas like Congress Avenue and the Red River Cultural District, all freely explorable. There was even a cinema to watch regular 2D content.
When all of this immersive entertainment is so easily accessed why go anywhere else?
SXSW Online XR in VRChat
Get those creative juices flowing
Undoubtedly though, the biggest draw for any of these virtual realms is user creativity. Places like Rec Room, Roblox (non-VR), VRChat, and the upcoming Facebook Horizon are all built on the premise of user content creation, giving the people who inhabit these worlds the freedom to build whatever they want. Because, quite simply, it keeps everyone invested and coming back for more.
Rec Room has millions of users across multiple VR and non-VR platforms, allowing them to create their own rooms which can be as simple as somewhere to hang out or entire games to run around in. You can even earn money, where tokens are exchanged for in-game items. Collect enough tokens and they can be redeemed for actual hard cash, Rec Room expects to pay out over one million by the end of the year. Playing and getting paid, if that’s not an incentive what is?
Places like Rec Room, Roblox and others are definitely geared towards that younger age bracket mentioned, like giant Lego toyboxes to jump into and explore. Finding a happy medium where all of these scenarios can easily co-exist is the eventual goal as none of these virtual planets quite cater to everyone. How these worlds will collide is another matter entirely.
VRChat, the popular social VR platform, announced its secured a Series D funding round of $80 million, which brings to the startup more than five times its overall lifetime investment.
The round was led by Anthos Capital, alongside participating investors Makers Fund, GFR Fund and others. According to Crunchbase, this brings VRChat’s overall outside investment to $95.2 million.
VRChat is a free app that brings together VR and non-VR users in user-generated spaces that can range from the mundane to the truly fantastic. Having celebrated its first taste of virality back in 2018, the PC and SteamVR-compatible app went on to include support for Oculus Quest in late 2020, which propelled it yet further with record-setting concurrent user numbers. The company now boasts over 40,000 concurrent users.
The company says the investment will “expedite development of a creator economy where members can earn, an enhanced social discovery system for more meaningful experiences, and expansion to more platforms. These enhancements will contribute to VRChat’s rapid growth and allow more people to access this virtual universe.”
Last year, social VR app Rec Room also dipped its toes into the digital economy by offering its creators real financial reward for developing on the app, which includes things like premium experiences, avatar accessories, and in-game gadgets. Rec Room also posted some pretty substantial funding, as its latest round garnered it a $100 million Series D and a $1.25 billion valuation.
This means Rec Room and VRChat now rank among some of the most valuable VR companies outside of platform holders Facebook, Valve, and HTC.
The Severance Theory: Welcome To Respite recently premiered as part of the Tribeca Film Festival and the theatrical experience comes alive inside VRChat with live actors performing with a participant embodied as a child named Alex.
The experience is also open to invisible audience members who can access unique parts of the story without the pressure of participation. The performance is part of a growing and quickly evolving trend of simulated theatre. Performers in different parts of the world can put on VR headsets and don avatars to perform in ticketed productions while toying with scale in ways physical theatre cannot. We saw The Princess Bride adapted for Rec Room a couple years ago, Tender Claws’ The Under Presents offered a version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest that played with similar audience participation ideas as Welcome To Respite, albeit in The Tempest the participants were muted throughout the experience. The Sundance Film Festival earlier this year premiered a reflective experience called Tinker that was accessible with headsets at home, and there’s even an escape room-type experience guided by a live performer in Adventure Lab’s Dr. Crumb’s School for Disobedient Pets.
I recently embodied Alex during one of these recent showings of Welcome To Respite as performers Deirdre V. Lyons and Braden Roy played my mom and dad. Here’s a description of the experience from the official website:
Upon visiting your family’s home after your mom’s passing, you are whisked into a forgotten memory from childhood. Each interaction is as meaningful as it is fascinating when you rediscover your past and delight in the simplicities of being a kid once again.
However, something is not quite right. Perhaps it’s the masked tension between your parents. Maybe you are hearing voices that seem to be only in your mind. It could even be that there is a monster hiding in your closet. After all, respite is only temporary when you are at the whim of your own mind.
Welcome home, Alex.
Overall, I was impressed by the capabilities of VRChat as a delivery platform (no wonder the startup just raised $80 million from investors) for such a production and found myself pretty deeply impacted by the experience. I invited Lyons and Roy into our recording studio for an interview diving into exactly what it takes to put together a performance like that.
Embedded below is our edited discussion and you can follow along with the transcript underneath. If you’re interested in theatre, how to get started with it in virtual reality, what VR does that physical theatre cannot, we covered those subjects and more. Please note that there was a bug in our recording software that caused some slight issues with the audio quality.
From Physical Theatre To Virtual Theatre
Ian Hamilton: Thank you so much for joining us, we’ve got two guests in our studio here today. You’re both the performers in ‘Welcome To Respite’. Can you tell me about the experience and how it came together and what you’ve just finished at Tribeca.
Deirdre V. Lyons: Hi there. I am Deirdre V. Lyons, I am the producer/performer on The Severance Theory: Welcome To Respite. It has that first part because in theory it’s going to be a four-part series. So this is The Severance Theory: Welcome To Respite. And the next one will be The Severance Theory: Cognizance as we go on we’ll change the last part there. This all kind of started back in August of 2019 when I was part of a production as just a little voiceover role that I did for a friend doing an in real life performance of this show that I went to see later. And I had such a beautiful experience there. For me, it was all about the parents and the love and this sort of feeling of wonder and a memory that felt like it was mine, but wasn’t mine. As we were working on our other productions PARA and Krampusnacht I kept thinking about the kind of thing I wanted to bring to VR, which was this sort of intimacy that I had seen fleetingly in moments of my past work. And I approached Lyndsie [Scoggin] about it – she’s the creative director of CoAct [Productions] – she didn’t even have a headset at the time. I brought it to the rest of the team. I said, ‘Would you consider this as our next project?’ And luckily they said, ‘yes’.
Braden Roy: Indeed we did. Yeah. Deirdre and Steve [Butchko] approached Brian Tull and myself, by the way hello, I’m Braden Roy, one of the co-founders of Ferryman Collective. Steve and Dierdre approached us and as we were kind of getting towards the end of our run of our prior production, Krampusnacht and basically said exactly what Deirdre said just now and kind of said, you know, “It’ll be just this small thing. We’ll do it really quick. It’s simple. It’s just a house and the parents and the child, and it’ll be a nice piece that we can take to festivals and stuff. And then we got started and we spent six times more development on it than our prior projects. And I couldn’t be happier for it. It’s beautiful. It’s been quite a journey.
Social Tools Like VRChat Versus Custom-Built Apps
Hamilton: My daughter was the one who went through The Tempest with you. I went through an early version of The Tempest myself and then bought a ticket for my daughter to experience it. She loves acting and I really wanted her to experience this. Prior to that I had seen a production of The Princess Bride that was put together in Rec Room. That was really cool to see attempted, and it’s interesting to see these two extremes of an acting VR experience. In The Tempest you’ve got custom-built tools, a purpose-built world just for the realization of that entire Tempest experience. But with VRChat, which is how you delivered this most recent Welcome To Respite experience you’re co-opting a social experience much like Rec Room was co-opted for The Princess Bride a couple of years ago. Are we going to see VRChat and social worlds like that used for these live experiences more often? Or do you think it needs a custom built world just for acting and performances?
Roy: It’s going to be both like right now, VRChat is making strides towards offering creators of worlds methods to monetize their content in some respect, they haven’t drawn any lines in the sand, so to speak, but they’ve said they’re kind of looking towards ways that people can do that in ways that they can improve the user experience. I believe Altspace and Rec Room and all the others are likely having similar conversations, just because there are a lot of people that are taking these worlds and taking them in directions that the creators didn’t originally intend necessarily, you know, they’re having raves with live DJs and live musicians and improv groups and theater, more traditional theater, like, the Orange Bucket Acting Troupe in Rec Room who had put on Princess Bride and some other things and all that combined I think the creator of these social platforms are realizing that there’s a market for this, that they’ve given the community these tools and these tools are being used in ways that they didn’t necessarily anticipate, but they’re looking for ways to support and to allow it to thrive. Having said that, having bespoke apps similar to, The Under Presents or, another similar experience, Dr. Crumb’s Home For Disobedient Pets, which have their own, tailor-built app that’s specific to it. There’s very, very much a place for that just because you have tools exactly as you need them. You don’t need to worry about pushing up against the edges of the limitations of a platform that was designed without the sort of creations that you’re making in mind. So I think it will be both, there’s definite pros and cons to each one. A bespoke app costs more and the development resources are much more, and it doesn’t have a built-in audience while social apps have free resources available and the ease of access for someone getting their start.
Lyons: The social VR apps are available currently and you can start using them and creating stuff. And I think there is a market and an interest in an app that would be just for theater makers. I know that there are people talking about that and wanting to do that.
Using VR For Emotional Impact
Hamilton: Let me recap my experience of going into this. So I went into VRChat and the very first thing was an onboarding experience where I was basically walked through how to deactivate some of the safety precautions that VRChat has built into the platform to keep people out of your personal bubble. And I knew this was going to get pretty intimate. So I started preparing myself for that. Then I went to the experience, the fact that it’s a VRChat world and the way commands the user’s view changes everything around you and then puts you exactly where you need to be was really surprising to me. I did not expect to see that out of VRChat. You really have some narrative control. What I remember of the experience were the intimate moments where I was child-sized. And with you as actors maybe two thirds larger than I was really put me in an entirely different mindset. Then you come up to me as parental figures. I didn’t actually know what my relation was supposed to be to them. I knew they were parental figures in some form, but I didn’t know how much I was supposed to be attached to them. Who are these people to me? And it made me judgmental and really trying to process whether these people were going to hurt me in a very deep way. There was this conversation between the two of you where [you] talked about drinking and it really struck a chord with me pretty deeply. Do you often get this reaction out of people that these things key in on their own personal histories?
Roy: Yes. And everything that you’ve described to this point is by design to a certain extent. Alex, the main primary audience role who steps in to actually interact with the mom and the dad and plays a child and is interacting with them, he, she or. they, suffer from Dissociative Identity Disorder which at the time of this memory they are unaware of – they’re just seven years old. All that they know is that things are different, they’re returning to their home for the first time after having a long stay with their aunt Cathy and they have gaps in their memory. There are things that they don’t know, things that are unsure of anxieties about these things. Depression and other negative feelings and they don’t know why. They’re asked questions and they don’t necessarily always know the answer. And some of that anxiety is intentional. It’s by design in order to make the audience member kind of inhabit the role and ground them, which can sometimes be slightly unpleasant, but there’s oftentimes has the opposite effect where while they may be unsure at first they feel a very strong feeling of love and attachment and are able to project their own personal experiences onto the production. Be it something with alcoholism or things with their parents, but they project the positive things as well, or experience things vicariously they wish they had experienced as a child. There’s a scene in the attic where the dad kind of pours out his soul and shows his love to Alex. And we’ve had multiple people come up to us and talk to us afterwards and explain they were either brought to tears or nearly brought to tears because growing up they never had that level of connection where their dad was actively telling them that he cared about them. And that’s by design which is all stuff that we can ultimately project upon. Be it trauma, which is an unfortunate hallmark and universal feature of the human experience, be it dysfunctional family, be it a loving mom and dad it’s all there by design.
Lyons: In real life I had experienced this production and I got to go to it and there were things there that are magical and wonderful, like actually eating the cookies, but there are things that you can do in VR that you can’t do in real life, like taking and shrinking the audience member down to that perspective where they’re seven years old looking up at their parents. The body remembers what that’s like even though in your mind you’re an adult, being in the avatar that gives you that perspective just puts your body into a place that remembers those moments. In this particular production we leave a lot of stuff open and vague so that anybody can project their experiences onto that. The idea is that they are your parents either through natural childbirth or adopted, and we wanted to make sure that, when we dealt with the parents that there was only love going to Alex from them.
Roy: It’s very interesting how, through the affordances of VR, something as relatively straightforward as a change in scale of your viewpoint in relation to other people in the experience can cause something that’s like a shedding of the ego in a sense where you can revert to certain things as Deirdre said. I find that fascinating and it’s one of my favorite parts about making work in VR is how you can change a person’s perspective through how they interpret the world around them and how that affects their behavior and their mood.
People Can Participate In Very Different Ways
Hamilton: Do you have a range of Alex’s in the way that they’re brought out. I was a very timid character. There was a bit of fear tinging my experience. There are very scary moments in this production. Don’t want to spoil them too much for people who might still experience it. But there is one moment where something pretty mysterious and scary happened and it instantly put me into a flight type situation where I didn’t want to go over to that area and I sort of receded. You as performers prompted questions to me, drew out of me as much as I could. I participated in the performance as much as I could, but it was still a muted experience for me. Do you have people who play Alex and do the complete opposite?
Lyons: Oh, yes. Alex’s that are like, ‘are you okay, Alex?’ Like, ‘oh, fine. I’m fine.’ I’m like, ‘okay. All right, well, that’s good. I’m glad.’ But yes, we have chatty Alex’s. We have quiet Alex’s, they really do run the gamut.
Roy: We have the fun troublemaker Alex’s which choose their angle to be like, ‘well, I’m a seven year old, I’m going to be the naughty child’ and then going around and like putting crayons in the boiling water and trying to grab the liquor bottles. That’s the exciting part about this format, this medium of, instead of NPCs, having live actors and live participants acting in real time is that there’s an unpredictability of what can happen and how we as actors can react in the moment in a naturalistic way that makes sense for the reality of the world that we’re actively building with our audience in real time. We have a script obviously and we try to guide people along it and usually they go along that path. But just knowing that anything could potentially happen is fascinating and very exciting.
Lyons: There’s also the freedom to play a bit with the Alex’s to where you allow them to just sort of take the story and you go with them down that story for a while before you bring them back into your story and let them feel like they’re not just participating, but they’re actively leading the story and giving them the freedom to do that.
Is Simulated Theatre Or Physical Theatre Better?
Hamilton: Do you prefer real physical performances or do you prefer what you’re getting out of VR?
Lyons: I very much like VR. I very much like pioneering in this new field and being a part of the people who are letting the world know that this is a viable storytelling platform. There are things that are different than in real life, but there are things that are just as profound and so as we explore and discover it will become its own thing. Right now we’re just seeing where it goes.
What Is ‘Welcome To Respite?’
Hamilton: Could I have one or both of you explain the overall arc of the story so that we have that for the people who haven’t seen this?
Roy: The story starts off with Alex in his, her or their, inner space where they’re greeted by an alter, which is an alternate personality and one of the key elements of Dissociative Identity Disorder. And they’re told essentially that they need to be shown this memory to go back and remember to help them move forward in their present life. And then they’re brought to their childhood home when they were seven years old, where they are just returning from an extended stay and their aunts and they’re greeted by mom. And then they have a nice talk and greet and hug and start to go in and get comfortable with each other again, and reaffirm their love to each other. Or at least mom’s love to Alex and they go through something that’s it’s more or less what could be considered a mundane evening as a child, but due to the nature of Alex, both the actual audience member themselves and Alex the character that they’re inhabiting having these anxieties and things that they don’t understand it heightens things, both the highs and the lows as they are kind of reaffirmed how much that their parents love them despite how troubled their parents might be with one another, and how they’re working together to get through these things. Meanwhile, Alex themselves, is dealing with some of the consequences of trauma. Which it should be clear, no trauma is ever shown or touched upon. It’s only the after effects, the stress, anxiety, that’s kind of left in the wake of trauma. And just coming to terms with that general feeling before finally getting to the close of the chapter as they get ready to move on to what’s next in order to move forward as a person. And also it should be stressed this is only chapter one of four of a planned series.
Hamilton: Explain to me the original creation of the story.
Lyons: It was done in August of 2019 in Los Angeles as a in real life production. And had about a month’s run and the intention was to go on and do the rest, but then COVID hit.
What Can People Do To Get Started With Making VR Theatre?
Hamilton: For the people out there who are watching this, listening to this who, are maybe on the fence about getting a headset or haven’t gotten one for themselves or they’re artists, actors, directors, writers, what should they do to partake in this?
Lyons: Get a headset for $300 and get going because right now, there’s no gatekeepers. You could get involved and you can start creating stuff and you can move so much faster than in any other medium because it’s wide open, the wild west. I would encourage people just to get out there and get started because it’s so accessible and there’s so few people doing it that it just makes it so much easier to gain traction and visibility.
Roy: Every time that we have someone go through one of our productions or someone goes through a production similar to it seems to ignite a spark of creativity and a desire to be a part of it. Now is the best time to get in and start experimenting. If you don’t have VR, or you don’t have experience with VR, my first suggestion would be to speak with a family member or friend or coworker that happens to have VR. So you can actually try it and wrap your mind around that particular aspect of it first and foremost, or go to a place that has a kiosk or something of that nature. So you can understand that it’s not just a screen floating in front of your face , that it’s transportive. And then after that, in terms of people who want to get their hands dirty, everything that we did here with few exceptions, were free tools. VRChat itself is free. Places like Altspace and Rec Room and Facebook Horizon. Those are all free social spaces, Neos. And then of course, Unity and Unreal to an extent and Blender. These are all free tools with some caveats in some cases, but the barrier of entry is non-existent. The only thing that you need to do is to dive in really. It can be very intimidating looking at all of these different things and not know where to start, but the secret is to just pick someplace. It honestly doesn’t matter where you start. There’s no right or wrong place. If it’s something that you want to do there’s thriving communities of people who are in similar places to you in terms of wanting to create things and they will help you and guide you and help figure out these things along with you. And then limitless resources on YouTube and everything else where you basically can just pick the place you want to start and start running from there.
Hamilton: Deirdre, I want to ask you, do you have a guess as to how many hours you’ve spent in headset at this point?
Lyons: No, I don’t know a good, a good amount. I can tell you the longest I spent a headset at one time was five hours doing The Devouring, which was awesome. But also like an experience in and of itself. I’ve had back to back shows. I’ve had two different shows in a day. I’ve gone from a show in real life to a show in VR. It’s my life now.
Hamilton: You seem like you’re a rarity right now. How long until there’s a lot of other people who can do what you are doing and actually support themselves with it.
Lyons: It’s hard to say. It just depends on how fast this industry grows. Time will tell.
Managing The Audience To Performer Ratio
Hamilton: When the actual production is going live and you’ve got a person as Alex, how many people are manning the controls at that given moment? Two?
Roy: Just the actors themselves.
Lyons: Yeah. Once we get them into the world it’s just them. They play the on-boarding characters as well as the mom and dad, they’re triggering all the stuff that happens and making sure that the things that are supposed to happen at the right time happen. Yeah, it’s just us.
Roy: Yep. And that was by design. Making sure that the cast and crew ratio to audience ratio is in such a balance where audience members don’t need to pay a ludicrous amount of money for a ticket. And the cast and crew can reasonably expect to get a fair return for the time that they put in for a given showing. We have three actor teams that can work simultaneously, are also stage managers and do crowd control and everything all at once. That way we can maximize the cast crew to audience ratio.
Lyons: Right? Because you can’t fit that many people in an instance. So you can’t make huge audiences at this point. So you have to build these sort of small shows with that in mind. Otherwise you get a one-on-one of actor to audience ratio and that not sustainable.
Paying For A Unique Experience
Hamilton: When we wrote our stories about Supernatural and this subscription-based program for getting fit, there was a very large segment of this audience that’s already getting headsets who just rejected that idea out of hand, said ‘a subscription? I’m not going to pay for a subscription. I buy my games once and then I play them.’ But those gamers weren’t the ones Supernatural was targeting. Supernatural wanted to get to people who don’t want to go to a gym, who have been failed by other ways of getting fit. And those people are more than happy to spend that monthly subscription. What’s it going to take to get a critical mass of people to realize that virtual performances are really worth spending money on and spending time on in a substantial way. It really did affect me deeply but it’s very hard for me to sort out – how many of those feelings are going to be experienced by others out there, or whether they’re going to have a completely different experience?
Roy: There’s a few things to dive into there. The first one being the perception that gamers might have on subscriptions and things of that nature, where if, depending on their background and their experience and how much that they’re willing to spend on something they’re typically used to spending between $10 and $60, depending on the platform and the title and then just having this thing that belongs to them indefinitely that they can play over and over and over. And trying to communicate the value of going through something like this, where it’s you do it once and that’s your ticket? It’s inherently unique. That can make it something that’s somewhat unpredictable and makes reviewing potentially difficult in a traditional sense at least as it might compare to a movie or a game or something that’s relatively static and linear. Even if there’s branching paths. That’s part of the beauty of it is that when you go in you are getting an experience that happens once. No one else will have an experience exactly like you, that moment in time is yours and it belongs to you and you alone forever. Unless you go with friends. You see a lot of people they might not care about going to a theater. They like going as a social experience that they can go to an activity and make a new memory with their friends or an escape room or a play, or in real life immersive theater. And that’s very much the sort of thing that we’re also offering here. In terms of monetization it’s most similar to that in that it’s a unique experience that you have at a venue, which just so happens to exist on your face or online, depending on how you view it, that you can keep with you forever, but it’s internal and it’s something that can be very special and personal in a way that something that’s prerecorded simply cannot. In order to communicate better to our listeners or viewers, what exactly they can use as a frame of reference for the experience itself. How I tend to explain it to friends and family members who are like, ‘what are you doing? Are you making a movie?’ I tell them to imagine something like Gone Home or other narrative games that there isn’t combat or anything. You’re just exploring and interacting with characters and kind of building out the world, except for in this case, every single NPC is played by a live human being in real time with you. So that sometimes in those games you’ll get a branching dialogue and maybe the dialogue choices that you’re given, they don’t actually fit with what you, the player, view you as what your take on that character might ask. You don’t have the option of going beyond that, with what we’re doing- you do, you can choose that. You can find what character you want to be and make that who it is and the experience dynamically adapts to that on the fly due to its very nature.
Lyons: It’s very much theatre. How often do you get to get that close to the actor in a theater? It’s a very special thing, you can go to Broadway and spend easily the price that you would spend on a headset for seats at a theater and I don’t necessarily think that this is for gamers per se. Maybe it’s the parent who borrows little Johnny’s headset, that they got them for Christmas.
VRChat Vs. Gatekeepers
Hamilton: I was really blown away that you were able to pull this off in VRChat and it was rather eye opening to me to know that you could control the user perspective, take them from place to place, and mess with scale. Everything you said earlier in this interview, there are an incredible number of tools that are really free to use right now. And the thing that you mentioned that there are no gatekeepers at this point in time. People get very scared of Facebook. We see it in our comments almost every day. There are people that understandably refuse to buy a Facebook headset. I get the criticism and the concern, but they aren’t the end all be all gatekeeper, at least not yet, of what people can say and do in this space. I think people have already kind of given up to a certain extent. They think it’s going to be Facebook’s world and this is something that they’re not interested in because of that. VRChat is not owned by Facebook, at least not yet. And the fact that you’re able to do all of this in that kind of open world that’s available across all these devices is a pretty substantial moment in my view.
Roy: Yes, this medium and format is so much more – we’re barely scratching the surface of what this is capable of and what will be used in the future. One thing that we didn’t really touch on for people at home, If this seems something that’s intriguing to you, but you don’t want to be the center of attention to be put on the spot and be expected to perform. First off, if you come through as Alex, we have no expectation for you to act one way or the other. But there is a second track to the show that we can have up to nine audience members that go through who, while they’re invisible and inaudible throughout, they have a tangible role and they actually have things in there just for them. There’s fragments of memories that only they can find. And there’s a few key scenes where they’re able to step in where they still remain invisible and inaudible, and they don’t need to worry about having eyes on you, but they’re able to tangibly interact in and be a part of the story in a very real way. So don’t be afraid. It’s fun. And it’s approachable and that’s, that’s it. That’s all. I’ve got.
Hamilton: Thank you so much for the time, we’ll see you again in the next performance.
VRChat raised $80 million in a Series D investment round to accelerate development and prepare for social VR growth.
The round is led by Anthos Capital with Makers Fund, GFR Fund and others participating. VRChat says it has more than 40,000 concurrent users after being the top free VR application on both Steam and the Oculus Rift store, and VR is not required to use the flexible platform for world creation and socialization.
“VRChat hosts a vibrant, creative, and engaged community that has played a critical role in shaping its continued development. We’re excited to work with our investment partners to further grow and empower our community at an accelerated pace,“ said Graham Gaylor, Cofounder and CEO, VRChat, in a prepared statement.
Rec Room raised $100 million earlier this year while Facebook pursues its Horizon social networking tools and a handful of other free-to-use social networking efforts pursue the goal of enabling connection and play no matter their physical distance. According to Crunchbase, VRChat raised a total of $15.2 million prior to this funding round.
“As the market for virtual reality grows, VRChat is primed for significant expansion and growth as the leading platform for virtual worlds,” said Brian Ames, Managing Director at Anthos Capital, in a prepared statement.
Everyone loves the idea of a virtual world. Someplace where they can break from reality and do (almost) whatever they want, free of the confines of annoying details like physics or being nice. It’s why videogames have become so incredibly popular yet the virtual world of somewhere like Fallout and the true vision of a metaverse are very different ends of the digital spectrum. Because these metaverse’s creators are imagining aren’t concerned with fairy-tale lands with quests to go on, these are fully functioning ecosystems with economies, entertainment and logistics like the real world, just without physical restrictions. Sound daunting, well it is so hold on tight?
Introducing worlds within worlds
This idea is nothing new and has often appeared in pop culture, whether it’s The Matrix with the rather sinister human simulation theory to the gamer-friendly Oasis which featured in Ready Player One.
Nowadays, fantasy is becoming reality and in doing so gaining notoriety thanks to prominent figureheads such as Epic Games’ Tim Sweeny continually dropping in the metaverse buzzword. But what do these alternate digital realities really offer and why are they gaining such prominence of late?
While the basic idea behind the metaverse is a shared virtual space that mirrors the real world where you can hang out with friends or attend a gig, as this sector grows so does the competition and there are plenty vying for your time. You may think the internet already provides everything you need in this regard yet virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) takes this to a whole new level. For the first time, you can literally step inside the metaverse, buy a digital item that you can interact with and then sell on if you so wish.
Getting Social
The core feature of any metaverse is its ability to socialise with friends and strangers alike, joining them at a bar for a virtual drink and catch up or making new friends with a shared love of Star Wars. All without the physical limitations of travel, an important factor when the world is gripped by a pandemic and likely one of the reasons why this subject has grown to such prominence of late.
However, just like the real world these digital realms also have to deal with similar problems, creating safe and secure spaces where everyone feels comfortable coming back to, day in and out. Videogames may offer players the chance to be good or evil but an online virtual world cannot allow guests to be derogatory or discriminatory towards one another. Otherwise, it creates a negative environment nobody will want to be a part of.
Solutions to this are already widespread and continually improving. Most common is simply blocking another user or reporting them, apps like VRChat for example allow you to highlight someone and mute them. While in Museum of Other Realities (MOR) which regularly host festivals – like XR3 currently – has a bubble feature where only people within that sphere can communicate.
Keeping Entertained
Whichever world you join you’ll want to be entertained and that’s going to be one of the biggest marketing opportunities to attract new users.
From attending digital festivals, exhibitions, movie premieres or enjoying some multiplayer videogame mayhem the possibilities are endless. And the competition is already getting fierce before some of the worlds have even launched.
As mentioned places like MOR allow you to visit film festivals like Tribeca or Cannes XR, whilst Sansar has gone down the music route hosting Splendour XR and the Lost Horizon music festivals. Sensorium Galaxy, on the other hand, hasn’t even arrived yet it’s already lining up an all-star cast of DJ’s including David Guetta and Carl Cox to perform, all fully motion-captured.
This also opens up interesting opportunities for brands to reach existing and new audiences. Banner ads and pop-ups will be a thing of the past here, with companies able to explore new interactive ways of communicating their products, creating events you can attend or having an actual object sat there in front of you.
Culture vulture
All of this will inevitably lead to the creation of digital culture, where users will want to clothe their avatars in certain apparel or join groups which appeal to their politics or ethics. You could one day see people protesting in a metaverse about social injustice, climate change, pollution of the oceans, political suppression and much more.
And just as current cultural trends would enter the fray so would new ones spring up entirely inside these worlds.
XR-Commerce
All of this inevitably fuels a digital ecosystem full of buying potential. Casual users might want to buy a new skin or wardrobe for their avatar, whereas those serious about investing in the metaverse can buy virtual property, businesses and even land to build upon.
Again, this is already underway mainly supported by cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology to facilitate a safe and secure method of conducting transactions. Somnium Space for example launched in 2018 conducting a land sale with locations split down into ‘parcels’, each with a different value depending on their size. This used the Ethereum blockchain, allowing buyers to then sell assets on marketplaces like Opensea.
Having this type of commercial ecosystem allows creators to make money, building digital items which can be minted into NFT’s (Non-Fungible Tokens) to be sold at auction. NFT’s have exploded in the past year, some selling for millions.
Metaverse commerce will also create a hierarchy where people won’t be able to afford land in a prized location or a new pair of limited edition sneakers. That opens the door for high-end brands to step in and serve a clientele who demand only the rarest items.
The future virtual dream
All of this is just the tip of a virtual iceberg as the digital and the real intertwine, as new worlds are created and new innovations appear. We’re really just at the beginning of this journey into immersive, social XR worlds and there’s still plenty more to discuss across all of these subjects mentioned and more – we’ve not even started on immersive full-body and facial tracking!
So VRFocus will be continuing to dive deep into the XR metaverse, looking at those universes that are forging ahead, the creators behind them as well as what the near and far-flung future holds. Hopefully, to prepare yourself you’ll join us on this tech-filled ride.
A team calling itself ‘Akiya Research Institute VR Lab’ wants to turn phones and webcams into a multi-view body tracking system.
We found no web presence for any “Akiya Research Institute” beyond the Twitter account started this month. We translated the Tweets posted over the last several days to the account, and its videos have already gone viral after just a handful of tweets. As we’ve not been able to find more information about the team and their direct messages are not open, we encourage those involved to reach out to tips@uploadvr.com so we can dive deeper into the work and team.
We are developing software that allow anyone to use motion capture! No special equipment required. Minimum requirement is two webcams connected to a PC. It can also be used for full body tracking in VR. Coming soon. pic.twitter.com/r3kZHdISKe
— 空き家総研VRラボ -Akiya Research Institute,VRlab- (@Akiya_Souken_VR) May 20, 2021
No VR system on the market today comes with body tracking, but some VR enthusiasts use HTC’s Vive Trackers or Microsoft’s Kinect. Social platform VRChat is the most popular use case, as well as mixed reality streaming with an avatar for LIV.
HTC Vive Trackers cost $99-$129 each. Typically three are used for body tracking. If you don’t already have SteamVR Base Stations they’re $149 each, so the total cost approaches $600. Microsoft’s Kinect is no longer sold, but available used for between $50 and $200. It works, but only from a front-facing angle and the tracking quality isn’t always great.
MocapForAll
Akiya says it’s building software for PCs called MocapForAll. The idea is to fuse the perspectives of multiple cameras you already own, like phones and webcams, using deep learning algorithms to track the parts of your body.
You’ll need to use at least two camera sources, but the system can support more for a better result.
It sounds like the tool is meant for regular motion capture, but can also be used for real time body tracking in SteamVR, as demonstrated here:
— 空き家総研VRラボ -Akiya Research Institute,VRlab- (@Akiya_Souken_VR) May 24, 2021
A Tweet posted today claims the software will be priced around $100, with a time-limited free trial available.
So just how practical could MocapForAll be for VR? A video demonstration showing system resource usage in Windows seems to show it sending an Intel i3-8350K from 80% utilization to 100%. Ayika says this is a debug test in the Unreal Engine editor, not representative of final performance. It mentions “precision-focused and speed-focused modes, with frame rates of around 30fps to 100fps”, suggesting users can choose the balance between performance and quality.
It’s too early yet to draw any conclusions about the software, but we’ll be keeping a close eye on any future demonstrations & announcements.
An incredible new VRChat world pays tribute to classic Sega title, Jet Set Radio, in VR.
Jet Set Radio Festival is an in-development environment for the social VR platform, developed by Lakuza, Waai! and Darkjayson. The world recreates the look and feel of Dreamcast classic, including an accurate layout of its iconic city and even bringing some of its classic characters into VR. Check it out in the trailer below.
As you can see, this isn’t just a simple recreation of Jet Set’s world, but also its mechanics. Inside the environment players will be able to grind, wall-run and double jump just like in the original game. Perhaps not the most comfortable experience for VR, but for fans of the series this is sure to be a treat. This being a VRChat world, you can also do all of this with friends.
The world will be available to play on PC VR and non-VR, but is too large to fit onto the native Quest app. Lakuza says they might look into making a smaller map for Quest once this release is complete, though. A full release date for the Jet Set Radio Festival isn’t yet known but hopefully it isn’t too far off.
Back in February we reported on the launch of a new VRChat avatar creator that can generate a virtualized version of yourself to import into the social platform in a matter of seconds. Slowly but surely the platform is becoming a VR destination with something for everyone.
2020 saw the likes of the Venice Film Festival, Raindance, Cannes and more switch to online programming, embracing virtual reality (VR) tracks through platforms like the Museum of Other Realities and VRChat. SXSW Online 2021 – which begins next week – had to follow suit as well, with SXSW Online XR providing a showcase of immersive content and industry discussion.
For SXSW Online XR the film festival has turned to VRChat to host its immersive programming, with the platform offering artist representations of Congress Avenue and the Red River Cultural District for users to explore. In these two locations, guests will find the Paramount Theatre, The Contemporary and other spots where live sessions, meetups, special events, 360° videos from the Virtual Cinema program, and 2D video feeds of SXSW Online 2021 programming will be available.
The main content selection will be held under the Virtual Cinema banner split down into three subcategories:
Virtual Cinema Special Events
Dream – A live, online performance by The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), in collaboration with Manchester International Festival (MIF), Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF) and Philharmonia Orchestra.
Theon Cross – ‘We Go Again’ – Virtual avatar of Theon Cross performing ‘We Go Again.’
Welcome To The Other Side – Jean-Michel Jarre and French VR startup VRrOOm host a concert in a virtual Notre-Dame.
Backstage Tours of Mount Olympus – Tour the stage of Finding Pandora X.
Virtual Cinema Competition
Biolum (World Premiere)
(Hi)story of a Painting (World Premiere)
Of Hybrids and Strings (World Premiere)
The Passengers: Her & Him (International Premiere)
Poison (World Premiere)
A Promise Kept (World Premiere)
Reeducated (World Premiere)
Samsara (World Premiere)
Space Explorers: The ISS Experience Episode 2: Advance (World Premiere)
WebbVR: The James Webb Space Telescope Virtual Experience
“SXSW really wanted to create a space in the virtual world that brought Austin to life in a spectacular way,” said Blake Kammerdiener, XR and Film Programmer in a statement. “So we came together with Louis Cacciuttolo and his company VRrOOm, whose recent work includes Welcome to The Other Side with Jean-Michel Jarre, and artist Vincent Masson to create this fantastical virtual space that honours Austin, and a few of the venues that we are gutted to not be using this year.”
Unlike some of the other online festivals, SXSW Online 2021 won’t be offering a free public area to get a taster of the event. You’ll have to go through the official registration which costs $325 USD giving you access to the entire festival. For further updates on SXSW Online 2021, keep reading VRFocus.
Yesterday we reported on the launch of a new feature for the free to use platform that lets users import virtualized versions of themselves into VRChat based on a single photo. In our own testing the feature worked well but, following launch, we noticed comments online about results for people from more diverse backgrounds. The creator didn’t always immediately provide an accurate representation of a user’s skin color, for example, and others couldn’t find the hairstyles and other options that best represented them.
We brought those concerns to Wolf3D CEO Timmu Tõke, who told us fixes would roll out starting today.
“First, we’re aware that we’re not doing the best job in representing all ethnicities well in the VRChat avatar creator and our entire team is working hard on improving that immediately,” Tõke said.
Over email, he explained two crucial issues with yesterday’s launch. The first addresses missing hairstyles.
“We were in a hurry to launch and decided to disable some “heavier” (in terms of poly count) hairstyles to fit the Quest poly limit,” Tõke explained. “These hairstyles turned out to be important in representing people of color. We’re working on bringing them back ASAP and will be deploying new hairstyles throughout today.”
Another issue that we were able to replicate ourselves was that bright lighting in some photos made skin tones appear immediately lighter than they should have been. “We launched VRChat with an older texturing system, which depends a lot on the lighting of the input photo,” Tõke explained. “We will deploy a fix in an hour [at the time of writing] that improves that significantly.”
Looking further down the line, Tõke promised that Ready Player Me will offer better options for gender neutral avatars (the current solution predicts body types based on photos) and will also add more religious assets. In fact the company has just added a hijab option and plans to implement more along with more facial cutomization options and styles including hairstyles and assets for all ethnicities.
“Our prediction is based on a diverse dataset of 20,000 face scans,” Tõke added. “We’re doing a good job in generating diverse, realistic avatars in the background, but we can do the stylization part where we make the avatar more cartoon-like a lot better.”
