SoftlySteph's The Friction of a Modulated Soul took home the Best Dance Experience at Raindance Immersive in a groundbreaking performance that tells the "story about the different cages that bind us from our authentic truth." It's a piece that completely blew me away with it's technological innovations, her fluid and emotionally-driven dance, a moving story that takes you on guided journey towards authentic identity, and an excellent curation of music from other VRChat creators. The piece manages to tie together so many different strands of technical innovation, storytelling, and performance, and it was one of my highlights from the entire Raindance Immersive festival this year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAUjJ_ozldM

The crux of the innovations within The Friction of a Modulated Soul are from the new holographic shader (aka the "Apple Global Illumination") developed in partnership with SNR Labs' Apple Blossom, A://DDOS, and namoron (covered in great detail in the previous episode #1413) that both plays back recorded holographic objects that are a part of a timed dance performance, but also replicates and mirrors her dance performance at different scales in real-time. There's also real-time lighting effects on the 1.4 million point-cloud pixels that are utterly awe-inspiring, and took lots of black magic shader wizardry pull it all off by encoding and decoding information from video streams (again many of the more technical details are covered in episode #1413).

I saw this piece as a live performance during Raindance, but they're also working on a replayable VRChat world that should be ready within the next month or so.

SoftlySteph also curated a soundtrack of independent music by VRChat creators with five of the songs specifically composed for this piece. Everything in this piece was designed around story, which takes the audience on a journey from resisting internal disconnections, to achieving authentic connection to self, to then resisting collective pressures to disconnect, and then finally culminating with authentic connection.

https://twitter.com/SoftlySteph/status/1807125937819148769

Overall, this was a beautifully-executed piece that is pushing into new forms of dance genre and performance, and was well-deserving of the best dance performance at Raindance Immersive. I had a chance to catch up with SoftlySteph to get a bit more context about how this project came about, her journey into VR via the stage dance and dance performance scene, and then her intentions with architecting this story about authentic self.

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Music: Fatality