On the Morning You Wake (to the End of the World) is one of the most powerful experiences I've seen in VR, and is also one of my favorite piece in the Sundance New Frontier 2022 selection. It tells the story of a errant emergency alert text message that was sent to 1.4 million people in Hawai‘i on January 13, 2018, which read 'Emergency Alert: BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.' This VR piece takes us to a variety of different people in Hawai‘i providing a range of different reactions, but it ends up being a dream-like meditation on facing mortality, connecting to friends and family, and reflecting that we still live in a world where nuclear annihilation is still a reality.

Gondwana VR simulates 100 years of climate change in the Daintree Rainforest within a 24-hour durational simulation that's running each day throughout the Sundance New Frontier 2022 selection. Lead artists Ben Joseph Andrews and Emma Roberts symbolically translated scientific projections into a degrading ecosystem in VR that's made up on 40-50,000 forest assets across a virtual space of over 30 acres, but they also created a generative sound design based upon over 40 hours of source audio that represents how the soundscape of insects and birds are projected to change over 100 years from 1990 to 2090.

We Met in Virtual Reality is feature-length documentary by Joe Hunting premiering today at the Sundance film festival. It follows five different protagonists (2 couples in long distance relationships and a sign language teacher) throughout the course of a year in their various travels and relationships within VRChat. It starts to show the types of full-body tracked & embodied interactions that are happening within social VR as an observational, cinéma vérité documentary, but it also tells the stories of these five protagonists lives in a very real and humanizing way.

The Sundance New Frontier 2022 selection of 15 immersive stories is available starting today until January 30th, and I had a chance to speak with chief curator Shari Frilot an overview of this year's selection. Access to New Frontier Spaceship and Gallery is $50 with the Explorer Pass, which also provides access to the shorts and episodic content at the festival.

William Uricchio is a Professor of Comparitive Media Studies at MIT, who started Open Documentary Lab in 2012 as a research initiative to look at implications of emerging technologies & the implications for the work of documentary. The MIT Co-Creation Studio was started in either 2018 or 2019 to research methods of immersive media creation. We talk about the theory, practice, & history of immersive storytelling and the medium of documentary, as well as the R&D Progam collaboration between IDFA DocLab and MIT's Open DocLab that was launched in 2018.

Michaela French is a visual artist working with moving image, primarily in immersive experiences in the context of a full dome space. She's been collaborating with DocLab since 2019 in creating dome content, supporting new artists, and promoting a full-dome medium as a potential alternative immersive experience beyond single-user VR experiences. She is also a lecturer and researcher, and the chair of the Full Dome Creative Network. We talked about the following projects that have shown at IDFA DocLab since 2019:

Francesca Panetta is a freelance immersive artist, director, journalist who worked at The Guardian experimenting with new forms of storytelling, then as a creative director at MIT experimenting with new forms of storytelling using AI, and now is an independent artist. We talked about the following projects that have been featured at DocLab since 2014:

Vincent Morisset is the founder of the studio AATOAA, and has been doing interactive projects for the past 2 decades. He's worked with folks like Arcade Fire and the National Film Board of Canada on projects spanning mediums from screens, XR headsets, as well as physical installations. One of the core features of AATOAA's projects is interactivity. Caroline Robert's Brain Stream premiered at IDFA DocLab 2021 and has been working with Morisset for the past 10 years. We talked about the following projects that have been featured at IDFA DocLab since 2013:

Ali Eslami is an Iranian artist who has been working with VR since 2014 & living in Amsterdam since 2018, and we talked about these projects that have been featured at DocLab since 2016:

Roel Wouters is a founding partner of Moniker, which is a small tight-nit studio doing projects on how people relate to technologies, social impact of technologies, and the side effects to our lives. We talked about many of their social experiments and interactive projects featured at IDFA DocLab since 2016: