Black Ice VR is a sci-fi horror immersive narrative that experiments between switching between 3rd person and 1st person POV, and it was produced as a part of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts' The Media + Emerging Technology Lab (METL) 6-month Immersive Storytelling Program. (Disclosure METL has been a sponsor of the podcast advertising this program and I've served as a mentor on the first two years of the fellowship. See episodes #863, #967, & #970 for more context). I had a chance to have a brief conversation with XR creators Arif Khan (Writer & Director), Darren Woodland Jr. (Technical Artist & Sound Implementer), and Lawrence Yip (VR Developer) about their experience.

Future Rights was a prototype at SXSW that aimed to bring bringing Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring into VR. They were showing a short demo at SXSW, but they have plans for a sort of dance autotune and collaborative performance that uses AI to help augment people as they dance along to live ballet performers. I had a chance to do a quick check in with the collaborators on this project, which is a co-production between choreographer Alexander Whitley, director Sandra Rodriguez to get a bit more context on this unique project and how they plan on continuing to develop it in the future.

The Choice is an interactive documentary that explores the issue of reproductive rights in Texas. The team uses a special stereoscopic compositing pipeline that combines depth sensor information with a stereo camera capture, but creates a shader to preserve stereoscopic differences of specular reflections in the texture that's being projected onto a mesh. The end result is that it creates a more plausible face-to-face context to bear witness to testimony of traumatic experiences. The view is given the option to go down some branches by being able to chose which question to ask next, but the end result is trying to recreate experience of having someone share their story with you in the type of one-on-one intimacy that can be recreated within a volumetric context in VR. I had a chance to talk with collaborators Dr. Joanne-Aśka Popińska and Tom C. Hall about their technical innovations, but also the topic of reproductive rights through the personal story of a planned pregnancy that threatened the life of the mother and reveals the peculiarities of Texas politics that has cultivated an environment where doctors are either deliberately withholding or lying to patients if they believe the information they share may lead to decisions by the patient that goes against their personal political beliefs.

Céline Tricart is an award-winning VR director who gave one of the main SXSW Keynotes about immersive storytelling, live action role play, and emotional bleed. She started as a writer, went to film school, made a cinematic VR documentary Sun Ladies VR, created a 6-DoF and interactive narrative The Key, has spent over 20 years doing LARPs, and recently starting a game design company. I had a chance to talk about he journey of storytelling across multiple mediums, and dive deeper into her experiences of LARPing, living stories, and becoming so connected to characters and situations that it bleeds into her life. We also unpack how she sees that storytelling is moving from 3rd person POV to 1st person POV and increasing the levels of immersion with VR, AR, immersive storytelling, and LARPing.

Liminal Lands is an environmental VR piece commissioned by Luma Arles to document and volumetrically capture different objects and organisms within 'overlooked wetlands at the edge of the Mediterranean.' It's a piece where the sound design adapts to your movement around the space, and there are also organic textures projected onto 3D objects that are also reactive to your movements. Artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen applies a fine arts aesthetic and production philosophy to his work, and the end result creates a sort of liminal experience that is hard to fully categorize -- perhaps because part of Steensen's intent is to blur those fixed categories into a more liminal space that spans both scale, but also space and time.

AmazeVR is a VR Concert Platform that premiered part of an experience at SXSW that they will be taking on a 10-city concert tour called Megan Thee Stallion: Enter Thee Hottieverse. I had a chance to speak with AmazeVR's Head of Creative Eric J. Krueger about the social VR and interactive aspects as well as their unique volumetric compositing of different techniques that gives a really high-fidelity resolution within the Quest. Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality and entertainment within the experience, and the social dynamics of watching this with 100 other people in a movie theater will no doubt provide a visceral first-time VR experience for a lot of people. Their tour will be starting in Los Angeles on April 5th, and then headed to San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Miami, Charlotte, Washington DC, and ending in New York City with the last show on July 3rd.

The Peabody Awards have expanded beyond the traditional categories of Entertainment, News, Podcast & Radio, Documentary, Arts, & Public Service, and into new formats of Digital and Interactive Storytelling that include Transmedia Storytelling, Interactive Documentary, Audio, Co-Creation, XR, Social Video, Game + Play, & Interactive Journalism. To mark this expansion, the Peabody Awards announced 16 Legacy Award winners yesterday, and moving forward these Digital & Interactive Stories will be honored at the same level as the traditional broadcast media winners. I was able to have three conversations with some of these Legacy Award Winners that have an explicit VR connection including Nonny de la Peña, Notes on Blindness, & Forensic Architecture.

On the Morning You Wake (To the End of the World) is now available for free on Oculus, and it's a must-watch immersive story that won the best XR Experience at SXSW. It's a three-part series that dives into the broader implications of a false missile alert sent to 1.4 million people in Hawaiʻi on January 13th 2018, which grounded the abstract concepts of nuclear non-proliferation into a viscerally embodied and human story about the realities of potential nuclear annihilation.

Forensic Architecture is an innovative interdisciplinary, non-profit research group that uses the tools & techniques of architecture to tell spatial stories of state-sponsored violence and human rights. Their 79 investigations since 2010 have be awarded with a Peabody Institution Award as a part of the new category of Digital & Immersive Storytelling. They use the spatial context to weave together many different types of data including 'open-source data, satellite data, surveillance footage, citizen video, audio, mobile phone meta-data, witness testimony, and 3D representations of physical objects and people.' They have been pioneering the fusion of this media as they strive to produce a spatial context that is elevated to the rigor of evidence that could be admitted into a court of law. They've been using lots of techniques like photogrammetry and reconstruction of 3D models, and they hope one day to put a judge into a virtual reality headset to display some of their spatial stories & spatial contextualization of evidence. They lean heavily into concepts like 'situated knowledges' & 'situated testimony' to use these spatial contexts to evoke eye witness testimony for state-sponsored violence and human rights violations. I had a chance to talk with Forensic Architecture Research Coordinator Robert Trafford about the underlying design philosophies, and an overview of some of the spatial storytelling innovations that have earned them a Peabody Award.

The immersive story of Notes on Blindness: Into the Darkness (2016) VR experience (Quest, Rift) was awarded with a Legacy Peabody Award for Digital & Interactive Storytelling along with 15 other projects on Thursday, March 24th. This experience has come up again and again, and in a Voices of VR podcast episode that feels long overdue, I had a chance to speak with Producer, Creative Directory, & co-founder of Atlas V Arnaud Colinart about the evolution of this piece from the original New York Times Op-Doc/Short Film version that played at Sundance 2014, and then to the feature-length film and VR version that both premiered at Sundance 2016 (and later released on Quest on 2019). It's a brilliant use of immersive storytelling and spatialized audio, and I get a lot more details on the evolution of this historic piece from Colinart as it is rewarded with a Legacy Peabody Award for the new category of Digital & Interactive Storytelling.