Tribeca and Cannes offer up an immersive VR art museum you can try at home

I started my gaming laptop and untangled the cables from the VR headset. Linked the parts, cleared the space for entering. Postponed the children’s distance learning material. After downloading a multi-GB app on Steam while my laptop fans were whirring, I was finally ready. I put on the headset, entered a virtual museum, and cried without interruption for almost half an hour.

Visiting an art festival is practically not the same as my experiences from the past few years when I walked through blocked physical spaces that were artistically choreographed to integrate actual objects and virtual worlds into wild experiences. I never visited Sundance, but with Tribeca’s annual immersive showcase There would always be a handful of moments that felt immersive theater for VR.

This year, Cannes XR and Tribeca have released a free online presentation of virtual works on Steam and an app called The Museum of Other Realities. The experience runs free until June 26 (but the work can be experienced until July 3 if you buy the $ 20 app). You need a VR-capable PC and a PC VR headset (on Oculus Quest will work with that right USB-C cable) to include everything in it, which means that other phone-based game consoles and standalone devices like Oculus Quest (without a PC) and PlayStation VR are excluded. But I did a short dive on the first day of the showcase and was immediately rewarded with a moment that I will never forget.

It was not easy for anyone to attend the often expensive and exclusive immersive art festivals in places like Sundance, but for those who want to attend from home, the unfortunate closure of physical spaces, conferences, and festivals due to COVID-19 has resulted in it experiment a lot. I observe 360 degree videos from Tribeca on an Oculus Quest earlier this year that was an attempt to spread immersive art. However, the virtual showcase of VR art in the Museum of Other Realities seems to be one of the first real tests to bring a bigger event into a virtual world. Especially as a free event, it is worth taking part in the next few days.

I had never been to the Museum of Other Realities before, although in recent months it has become a popular place for immersive art and AR / VR events. When you enter the VR app from Steam, you’ll feel like you’re in a museum with sloping, curved walls and a great but neutral design. Inside, curated exhibits are waiting behind corridors like a real museum room. Signs for Tribeca and Cannes XR events point the way when you enter.

I found a VR experience in Tribeca’s Virtual Arcade called The Book of Distance, a VR experience created by Russell Okita and produced by David Oppenheim and the National Film Board of Canada and previously released at this year’s Sundance Festival. It is an absolutely beautiful and heartbreaking story about the artist’s grandfather, who moved and drove from Japan to Canada and took away his possessions when his family was taken to a detention center during World War II.

When I entered the room for the experience, I found a room with photographs and virtual personal memorabilia that led to an area that involved me in the story. It was told with theater-like set pieces, items that I could pick up and examine, photos and documents that I could keep before they blew away or slowly dissolved. I took photos of a family using a virtual camera that turned into real photographic documents that I kept in VR for a moment. I learned something about the story that I hadn’t known about. The narrative and the sound felt like an experience from a museum, but also like a transport event. The experience was mapped onto my available footprint, which is not a lot. It worked well enough for me to take a few steps through spaces like an inch or when packing possessions into a briefcase. My tears were constant. The experience was profound.

Is this a future of immersive conferences?

This was just a haunting experience, but there is more. If you have a headset and a VR-enabled PC, dive in, it’s free (if you use the app for the next few days or buy the app afterwards). Downloading the app takes a while and requires a reasonable amount of disk space. I miss the real human leadership in real immersive physical events, the onboarding that helps you dive into another world and then reflect when you come out. I miss talking to others. In my house I was alone in an empty room.

The Museum of Other Realities allows some conversations with guests, but I found it confusing. Avatars appear like ghosts. I couldn’t figure out how to involve people and start talking. In the end I drifted to the next exhibition.

While massive conferences like Apple’s WWDC are largely handled via video presentations and chat apps. There is also the option of using VR or AR to bring you into shared experiences. Something Companies like Spatial working on it. Extremely curated art exhibitions like that of the Tribeca / Cannes help with this.

“At the beginning, of course, I was a little disappointed that I could not deliver the Real Life Edition, especially because we announced a new venue in Cannes shortly before the Real Life lockdown, and for XR it was me too. ” A very cool achievement, “said Elie Levasseur, program director for Cannes XR, about a call before the festival.

“But in the course of the organization [virtual] Design I feel even more excited. If you ask me now, I will tell you with certainty that I would like to have a virtual room in 2021 too, because I believe that it complements each other. “But Levasseur also admits that real life, especially for artists, is still the key.” Artists need to have a physical connection to the public, to decision-makers, and to people who can spread their work. This is really important so that at some point they have a physical connection. ”

The online presentation of virtual works offers real advantages, especially to reduce the costs for artists. “We can tell artists that we have this online edition, you don’t have to travel, you don’t have to rent an apartment in Cannes for a week, which is very expensive. For us, the breakeven point is much higher for the online edition than for it real edition, “adds Levasseur.

In this sense, a physical immersive event still makes sense, especially for artists and business people. But maybe what I now see from home is the beginning of a way to spread these haunted ideas far, much like films find their way from festivals to theater to home.

How Experiences everywhere are more virtual and Artists and artists find their wayIt will probably be a long time before we find out how telepresence works perfectly, but my first moments in this haunting festival have already led me to believe that this will be an integral part of the overall picture, even beyond locks.