Eric Kohn has been a professional film critic for 15 years, and he’s currently the Executive Editor at Indiewire, the Vice President of Editorial Strategy, as well as…

The Ristband music platform (formerly known as Overview Ark) launched an alpha version at SXSW during co-founder Roman Rappak's mixed reality show with his band Miro Shot that I previously covered in episode #1082. Ristband is described as 'your portal to the metaverse' in order to 'perform shows, discover music, play games, and hang out with friends.'

Radio Ghost is a 70-minute, interactive and immersive audio piece for three people that's site-specific to a mall. It's meant to unpack the unseen stories of unethical consumption and deconstruct the design patterns of shopping malls. It's has an upbeat and playful tone delivered by a radio DJ playing tunes from the 80s, and guiding each user on a ghost hunter journey as they cross thresholds into stores and discover unseen stories of oppression related to various items for sale. You report back your experiences to the other two players, who are simultaneously going on their own ghost hunting adventures. The experience also guides you through an embodied journey walking at different paces through the hallways, and invites you to pay attention to your surroundings in a new way. The end result was an immersive experience that I found to be both memorable and sticky for how it was able to change my perspective on how I see malls.

Paradise is an immersive audio piece exploring themes of domestic violence that was an interdisciplinary collaboration between Darkfield, VR documentary filmmaker Gabo Arora of Lightshed.io and researcher and clinician Nancy Glass from the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing. It attempts to blend a number of different XR genres together in a provocative fashion, including elements of immersive horror to provoke emotional reactions, interactive AI to tune the experience according to gender, elements of social impact documentary to challenge pre-conceived notions for why victims of domestic violence stay within abusive relationships, some social dynamics experiments done with your intimate partner about communication and understanding, and all set within a narrative context of a social game hosted by AI therapist of the future exploring why couples stay together or fall apart. I found the end result be confusing, muddled, and a bit too experimental without coherently tying everything together in the end.

Lustration is a 4-part episodic VR series illustrated within Quill that's in the fantasy, detective noir genre, and created by First Nation Creative Ryan Griffen. It allows you to change camera perspectives within Quill as it blends together aspects of the Afterlife that's a multiverse dimension overlaid on top of Present day Earth. It's a character-driven story, that ends up feeling like an initial pilot episode of a much broader story and world that's just getting started. Lustration originally appeared as a single-issue comic book, and Griffen has hopes to expand the story from this VR series into a television series as well. So I had a chance to chat with writer & director Griffen about his journey into VR, and his process of using VR in order to make the viewer work for and earn the knowledge and story that he's weaving together within Lustration. The fourth of four episodes are now available on Oculus here.

Roman Rappak's Miro Shot band had a unique mixed reality performance of a single song at SXSW to an audience of 50 people who were wearing GearVR headsets. The experience was live mixed by Rappak, who was switching between a monoscopic VR passthrough scene and a fully-immersive, stereoscopic VR explorations of a variety of virtual world scenes. It was an ambitious production that attempts to blend the physical with the digital in the context of a live musical performance, and continues long tradition of music experimenting with the latest emerging technologies to push the boundaries of musical experiences.

Ihyangjeong: Carving with Memories is by Korean 2D animator Sunghwan Lee of Studio Shelter, who used Quill to tell a spatial story about the connections between home, objects, and memory. The piece tells a larger story of Lee's journey from a dingy basement city apartment, the memories of his father's home in a traditional Korean home, to his aspirations of building a custom home in the country that can be a vessel for his memories. Lee emphasized the use of VR as a form of memory capture and sharing his own confusion and struggles around his journey of finding comfort in his home.

Targo Stories has created a number of really well-produced and well-told immersive stories using the 360 VR video medium over the past three years. Their latest co-production with Meta is Surviving 9/11: 27 Hours Under the Rubble, which premiered in September 2021 marking the 20-year anniversary, but it was also selected as one of the immersive stories showing at SXSW.

On January 10th, Ana Brzezińska was announced to be the new Immersive Curator of the Tribeca Film Festival, and I had a chance to speak to her before this announcement to do a retrospective of her time that she spent as Kaleidoscope VR's Head of Studio, Producer, and Curator of 16-19 virtual events, many of them during the pandemic. Today the 21 XR projects selected for the Tribeca Film Festival 2022 program have been announced, but I will be following up with Ana later as more information is announced on their virtual and hybrid festival plans as well as to do a deep dive into their program.

FRAMERATE is a timelapse LIDAR art installation by ScanLAB Projects that showed at SXSW. It encourages the audience to 'think and feel in another time scale: geological time, seasonal time, tidal time.' I had a chance to talk with director & ScanLAB Projects co-founder Matthew Shaw about their volumetric capture techniques and desire to create art that helps us understand how machines perceive the world.