Recently, I had the incredible opportunity to travel to Prague to attend ART*VR Festival held at the DOX Contemporary Art Museum. Just a half hour walk from the heart of the city’s historic Old Town Square, I strolled on cobblestone streets and crossed the gorgeous Vltava river lined with trees bursting with yellow leaves, medieval castle spires towering in the distance.
After checking my two coats and the scarf I bought from Primark when I realized I desperately needed one, I was ready to dive into the showcase of 10 different VR experiences all centered around the theme of empathy.
Virtual Reality is already such a creative medium, so of course the set design for Dimensions of Empathy would also be out-of-the-box while serving practical purposes. Large labeled jars contained artifacts that related to the experience, while also working as hook used to hang the headset when not in use and to conceal the wires and outlet needed to keep the headsets charged.
I sat in one of the swivel chairs, strapped on the Quest 3, and it was time to become a boy’s winged imaginary friend, sit across from a woman as she tells you about her choice to have an abortion, or soar over incredible landscapes and cityscapes in China.
VR and Empathy go hand in hand. “ The immersive, experiential qualities of VR allow audiences to connect to a story more than through other mediums such as books, television, or movies. It helps us experience something we would never experience in real life. VR can give us a glimpse of another age, gender identity, or physical limitation. It’s a powerful way of telling real stories in a way that helps people connect with the narrative. “ — Katherine A., VIVE Talk “Can VR create empathy?”
Half of the festival’s experiences were interactive, while the other half were animated shorts.
Interactive Experiences
The Choice by Joanne Popińska | 2021 | 25 minutes | Website
In this experience, a woman is seated across from you as she recalls the details of a high risk pregnancy that ended in her choice to terminate, and what navigating that process was like as a Native woman in the conservative state of Texas. This interview feels very intimate, as if you’re sitting across from and speaking with a close friend. This means you’re able to experience all kinds of body language and mannerisms as she moves through her emotions, like when she pulls down her sleeves to cover up her forearms when feeling overwhelmed, putting a hand on her face as her voice wobbles and eyes glaze with tears, and all kinds of micro-expressions of the mouth and voice.
There was a bit of weird clipping where she’s in the spotlight, but for example her feet fade to black at the shins and when her hands went out wide they also got caught in the darkness.
I loved the simple animation style of lines and ribbons over a black background, and in one scene when there’s a drive to the clinic, it felt very immersive to be moving down a road, even if you’re not within a car. The exam table and monitors also felt familiar, as everyone has been in a doctor’s room at some point in their lives.
The Imaginary Friend by Steye Hallema | 2023 | 25 minutes | Website
This was absolutely my favorite of the exhibition. I even dreamt that I got to experience it again!
First, you’re asked an essential question — are you a good friend? After answering ‘yes’ out loud, you find yourself in the bedroom of Daniel, a grieving eight-year-old struggling with the line between reality and fantasy.
Daniel decides his new imaginary friend will have wings, and when you look down at your arms, you find them covered in colorful feathers! Give them a flap using your controllers, and you’ll find yourself taking to the sky!
The experience contained a few fighting sequences, as you slashed at one-eyed monsters or shot lasers at them from above as you protect the car on a drive to a clinic to see why David’s imagination is overactive.
The message behind the story was beautiful as you watch Daniel heal from the grief of his mother’s passing. The one-eyed monsters became a tower of eyes crying waterfalls, as his deceased mother’s voice says it’s okay to let sadness flow through you. I loved screaming along with him ‘I am not afraid!’ as this experience had many components where you interacted with your voice.
There’s a short stint when Daniel puts you away into a jar, shamed over having an imaginary friend that even interferes at school. At the end of the experience, you’re set free to live in a serene cloudscape and Daniel can call upon you whenever he needs your help with a clap of his hands.
This experience had all of the elements that I admire within an immersive piece of media: making the person wearing the VR headset an active participant and character within the story, and lots of awesome interactivity. I hope my literal dream becomes a reality, and this touching experience can be released into headset libraries to be experienced at home by many!
MLK: Now Is The Time by TIME Studios and Flight School Studios | 2023 | 17 minutes | Website
In MLK: Now Is The Time, you set down the controllers for a hand tracking experience. Unfortunately, the tracking was not super reliable. While the seat I was in had bright lighting, the tracking went out twice at a certain spot of the experience and I had to restart, and the tracking would sometimes switch between hand and controllers if you weren’t careful and looked at or bumped the controllers.
This experience had a few interesting scenes that I haven’t seen done in other VR before. In one sequence, you have a Monopoly-like board game unfold on the table in front of you. 3D models of houses, freeways, and chemical plants pop up as it explains how red lining worked over time to disadvantage Black communities while white communities benefitted. One community in green has beautiful homes, lush trees and gardens, and freeway access, while the other in red is underneath that same freeway and near a spewing factory.
I loved the way the ballot dodged and weaved as you tried to grab it with your hands, as people speak about how they’ve experienced barriers to voting. The scariest scene was being pulled over by police. The animation was simple outlines in red or blue as the police lights flashed, and an elevated heart beating audio also made it very intense. You must keep your hands on the wheel for what feels like forever. Aggressive police bark orders, as a father’s voiceover guides you through what he’d taught you about remaining calm and cooperative to come out of it alive. It felt very immersive as the cop walks up from behind to knock at your driver’s side window like they would in real life.
However, some parts made me think about how incorporating flat elements into VR experiences needs more work in general. For example, I loved a scene where they had old footage playing on a rabbit ear TV on top of a milk crate in a crumbling building, all created in 3D assets. However, many of the flat images were simply floating in front of you with tapered edges.
Toward the end of the experience, you watch as flat black and white media is played interchangeably with footage from the more recent Black Lives Matter marches, but this was only in a small rectangle in front of you with some floating motes of orange and yellow light. I would have liked more thought on how to immerse someone into a march in virtual reality. As someone who marched for BLM back in 2020, it was a powerful and electric feeling to be surrounded by others who were similarly passionate about the cause as together you chant, march, and hold signs to make sure your voices on the issues of police brutality and systemic racism are heard. I feel that could definitely be turned into a 360 experience that would be much more emotional than watching flat footage.
Shoehorning flat media into VR has always been a reoccurring pain point since the beginning, and I found the scenes in this experience that were fully intended for virtual reality to be much more riveting.
Missing 10 Hours by Krisztina Meggyes | 2023 | 20 minutes | Website
This fully animated experience had a wonderful limited yet vibrant color pallet of purples and yellows with a cool stylized animation. At the end, it also shows you a map of which choices you made and which path you took. This addition was super cool and made me want to play over and over to experience every path.
Missing 10 Hours was incredibly interactive and that really immersed me into the story. You can bring chips or a bottle of beer up to your mouth, fist bump friends in greeting, grab a knob to shut the broken bathroom door, grab a cell phone to answer an incoming call, or squeeze a bottle of mayo all over a food truck in an act of vandalism encouraged by your scumbag friend that later gets the police involved.
I definitely felt the atmosphere of a bar, a gross bar bathroom with a busted door and graffiti all over everything, an eerie bus stop in the middle of the night with people trying to fight across the street, and finally a dark alley with no one around. These scenes feel familiar, and since it’s a 360 wraparound, the immersion into these places feels strong.
Your hands played a big role in the story — you made many choices through them as well. From putting your hands up for the cops, pointing them in the direction of the crime, or deciding to take something that is handed to you.
Non-Interactive Experiences
Missing Pictures: Naomi Kawase by Clément Deneux | 2022 | 14 minutes
The animation in this experience was incredibly cute as you peer into Aya’s tiny home like a diorama, and she appears like a doll. Everything was in cute miniature, kind of like Re-Ment figurines (if you know you know!)
This experience definitely keeps to 180 degrees, with nothing interesting going on behind you, usually just total blackness. The scenes took place in a small spotlight. However, for the scenes when the director is scanned in real life, it felt like uncanny valley because the quality wasn’t super clear, the fingers could appear webbed or the arms had a triangle where they crossed. She also looked weird as a photogrammetry scan placed into a background of a 3D modeled, low poly environment.
The spotlight effect was a great way to lead your gaze. There was a moment the spotlight moved up to reveal a Torii high above a long stone staircase. Craning your neck to see it emphasized how high up it was, and how many stairs the journey would be.
Once a Glacier by Jiabao Li | 2022 | 10 minutes
This mostly animated experience shows a girl kayaking through the icy blue caverns of a large glacier, with nothing but the peaceful sounds of water drops and a paddle hitting the water. As the girl grows up, the glacier also melts and shrinks. At first she keeps it in the backyard, then in the freezer, and ultimately it makes headlines as the last glacier on Earth and it finds it way into an art museum. The one scene of real-time video was putting you into the shoes of the glacier, watching from behind a glass case as humans all around you check out the gallery in a time-lapse blur.
21–22 China by Thierry Loa | 2023 | 25 minutes | Festival First Place Winner
This experience opens by flying over rice patties with the sun glinting back at you, one of the oldest forms of terraforming. As the experience continues, we see from a bird’s eye view the many ways that humans are impacting the planet. It felt like flying, and the footage was incredibly clear. There was no area where it warped or you could see where it stitched together. I also loved that there was no “wrong” way to view the experience- any angle worked, even though I was naturally drawn to the forward moving position like flying. Loved the intense music and the interpretations that went through my head. At first mountains resemble buildings, then you draw the comparison by flying above behemoths of towering skyscrapers. You pass over factories spewing white, soar through smoggy orange skies. Trucks file into lines like hard-working beetles as they tear up the earth. This experience gave me a similar feeling to the one I get while looking out of an airplane window — we are irreversibly changing and terraforming the planet for our own benefit.
Perennials by Zoe Roellin | 2023 | 20 minutes
No doubt this piece was visually stunning and artistic. The story had an interesting way to look at trauma, for example the sound design of getting overwhelmed by the heater as the sounds slowly increased to a blare as the pipes float, out of body, before Elias shuts it off and in an instant things returns to normal. I also like the flashback between Elias’ dad chasing him down to slap him, and him finding his niece in the woods and instead giving her a hug. Much of the story dealt with trauma being passed down through generations, and breaking that cycle.
However the angle movements was very hard to ignore. When they opened the door to the house, you feel as if you’re looming above from the dark like a creature in wait- the same with being in the back of a cupboard, like eavesdropping on a conversation from the shadows. This is a personal preference, but the jumpy cuts can lead to motion sickness, and it can be jarring to suddenly adjust to a new POV. VR is very different from cinema, and I believe must play by different rules when it comes to cuts and editing.
El Beat by Irene Lema | 2023 | 10 mins
The Palenquero language at first sounds familiar, and then not, as I tried to pin down what it might sound similar to, I came up short. The drums and music led me through the beginning of the African diaspora in Latin America along with tilt brush illustrated words, volumetrically captured people, and 3D modeled animals.
El Beat used a VR technique that I haven’t seen in a few years, which is assuming that the viewer is in a swivel chair. The letters spun around you and it was a lot of neck craning to keep up with where they were going. Although they used all 360 degrees, I’ve noticed that many VR experiences nowadays tend to keep the subject matter within a 180 view, like you would in real life. We rarely have our head on a swivel in our day-to-day and opt to ignore what’s behind us.
5 Techniques I noticed in Modern VR
- Observing a familiar environment — Have you been driving a car, visited a doctor’s office, or experienced the creepy feeling of being in a dark alley in the middle of the night with no one around? VR uses these environments that many have been in before in real life to feel even more immersive.
- Hands were very important in most of the interactive VR experiences. Most tend to be low-poly rendered hands with a solid color like white or gray with minimal shading. The story feels like your own when you can use your hands to make choices like you would in the real world. The Quest 3’s hand tracking is extremely accurate, which is very exciting to see how creators will seize its potential!
- Point-of-View: A heart-pounding police pullover, or being gawked at by 360 of crowds as a piece in a museum. Slipping into the shoes of someone (or in the glacier’s case, something!) has always been a powerful aspect of VR storytelling.
- Phones and texts: Instead of reading a screen, one technique I noticed multiple experience using was showing texts as bubbles floating before your eyes, including the typing bubble and texts moving up as a new one comes in. However in 10 Missing Hours, you’re handed a phone with an incoming call and you can decide whether or not to answer it by pressing the touch screen. I think using another familiar technology while in VR definitely immerses you even further into the experience, and might even let you forget you’re wearing a headset for a moment.
- 180 degrees of importance: I noticed that in almost all of these experiences, there’s usually black or something uninteresting at your back to signify that it will not be relevant, and to guide your focus on where to look instead. We tend to only look in one direction during our daily lives, and many of these experiences reflected that.
Thank you for reading! Prague was a wonderful city and well worth the almost 12 hour flight from Los Angeles. DOX will definitely be releasing more interactive and immersive content in the future, and I definitely plan to visit again someday. If you didn’t already have Prague on your destination list, I highly recommend you give it a try!
