Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality are power tools for telling stories, for improving learning, for bringing distant world experiences, both real and imaginary, into your hands and brain.
Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality are power tools for telling stories, for improving learning, for bringing distant world experiences, both real and imaginary, into your hands and brain.
Virtual Reality(VR) is powerful because it enables us to feel physically immersed in realities we could never otherwise experience. This visceral sensation of believing that we’re somewhere else is called ‘presence’. It opens up new possibilities for storytelling, deeper ways of understanding ideas and experiences.
Augmented Reality (AR) experiences are powerful because they keep you in the real world but alter that environment in unique ways.[1] The choice of which technology to use depends on your objectives and your audience.
Producers, directors and artists interested in how to tell these kinds of stories and make art in VR have already learned some techniques and considerations to keep in mind. Scroll down to see what we’ve been doing. Click here to skip ahead to our Guide to Creating Immersive Storytelling in VR.
TRACING PAINT
We’re in production on a new VR experience, Tracing Paint: The Pollock-Krasner Studio in VR, commissioned by the Pollock-Krasner House & Studio in East Hampton. We’ve recreated the studio exactly as it looked when Jackson Pollock was painting there in the 1950s, and then later when it was Lee Krasner’s studio in the ‘60s. Tracing Paint is designed to be an on-site experience but will also be available for the Oculus Quest.
WE ARE NATURE
We Are Nature: Living in the Anthropocene was a groundbreaking exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, that closed in 2018. Our 3D 360º tour is open 24/7 for potential funders, educators, exhibition designers, and anyone who wants to visit this exhibition to learn more about the human impact on climate change. Read the story here.
LAKE BAIKAL
Our VR first project was Lake Baikal: The Science and Spirituality of Extreme Water, MediaCombo partner Michael Owen traveled to Moscow, Irkutsk, and Lake Baikal, to produce three programs for Google Pioneer Expeditions in March of 2016. Michael and his Russian crew used a camera rig built around 9 GoPro cameras. They filmed on the frozen Lake, at the Involginsky Datsan, the center of Russian Buddhism, and in surrounding towns. The result was a short, impressionistic 360º film intended as a teaser for a longer VR documentary about the environmental issues affecting fresh water everywhere.
Room Scale
Now we’re using scientific data to design a room-scale experience about the Lake, which will allow users to compare the depth of the Lake with the height of the Empire State Building and its length with that of Manhattan!
THE 1907 TOUR: PIERPONT MORGAN’S LIBRARY REVEALED
You can immerse yourself in a world that seamlessly connects 1907 and 2020 in this AR audio tour for The Morgan Library & Museum in New York. The tour is a deep dive into aspects of the magnificent architecture and decorations and his unrivaled collection of rare books, and shines a spotlight on his librarian, Belle Da Costa Greene, and on Morgan’s personal life.
If you’d like to know more about what we can do, or have an idea you’d like to talk about, please get in touch!
The answer is always: It depends on the experience you want to offer.
Slip on a VR headset and you’re suddenly transported to a virtual place that feels as real as the physical space you’re in. That’s called presence. When the experience is over you can feel as if you’ve physically participated in the virtual world, and that memory can last for months. In part that’s because you have agency to direct your gaze and see everything that’s happening around you in every direction.
Pick up an Augmented Reality enabled mobile device and suddenly you can see people and objects in your physical space that aren’t actually there. Yet you can move up to them and around them – you can interact with them as if they were real. And you can interact with sounds too, just as you would in real life – moving toward them to hear them more clearly, or away from them until they disappear. This mix of real and virtual is informative, uncanny, and captivating.
The primary differences between the two technologies are that VR is immersive but isolating (though that will change). AR, or MR (Mixed Reality), on the other hand, locates people firmly in the real world where they can share information and reactions and reveals things they can’t see, but it’s not as visceral an experience.
Let us know if you want to start a conversation about this.
Once you’ve affirmed that VR is the right technology to tell the story, there are five main components to consider to create the best possible VR experience:
Narrative, Environment, Cognitive Impact, Social Impact and Technology.
Narrative Considerations
Environment (created with visuals and sound)
Cognitive Concerns
Social Impact
Technology
If you want to know more about immersive storytelling, please get in touch. We’re here to help!
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