Body of Mine VR won a special jury prize for the SXSW Immersive Competition for it’s potent use of virtual embodiment to explore gender dysphoria and testimonies from a number of different transgender folks. Director Cameron Kostopoulos leaned upon his own queer-identify story of being exiled from his family due to his queerness, and wanted to create a safe refuge in a virtual space to explore stories from the LGTBQIA+ community, and particularly from trans-identified folks.

The experience uses a seven-point tracking system to give the audience a full embodied experience, and you spend the majority of the experience in front of a mirror as you’re able to track your embodied movements as they shuffle through nearly a dozen different trans-identified avatar representations. Kostopoulos leans heavily into the slight offsets in the trackers or the proprioceptive differences of the different shapes and sizes in the avatars across a broad spectrum of avatars in order to evoke a certain amount of either gender dysphoria or body dysmorphia that is thematically mirroring the themes of the the trans-identified testimonies that Kostopoulos collected and that you hear in the experience that are by touching different parts of your body that these clips are related to. Overall this was a really powerful use of embodiment within VR, and was rightly honored by the jurors with a special jury mention.

I had a chance to catch up with Kostopoulos at SXSW where we talked about his journey into VR, his design process, some of the technical difficulties of Bluetooth interference with the Vive trackers in the context of an exhibition space, and some of the underlying financial constraints and costs for exhibiting a piece like this.