At South by Southwest, the giant Texas festival of film, music, and technology, artists embraced virtual reality this year as a way to better connect with humanity, rather than escape from it.
VR and augmented reality are often associated with video games or the ongoing race for breakthrough hardware between tech giants like Apple and Meta, but they've had little success in terms of mass adoption. there is no.
But for inventor Niki Smit, VR is a way for humans to express their emotions and explore their mental health, usually through a distinctly tactile art therapy experience.
After donning regular headgear, users of Smit's “Soul Paint” program “paint” their virtual bodies using colors and lines to explore and express their inner reality.
“When you're stressed, you clench your teeth, so we draw this pulsating red thing near your jaw,” Smit said while demonstrating the software.
“What we have created here is an invitation to dive within yourself and explore yourself,” he said.
A huge hall dedicated to VR featured demonstrations where conference attendees watched movies and tested video games while pressing their faces into VR headsets.
But at Sumit's stand, users were visibly moved as they painted their virtual bellies a sickly green, painted their heads gray, and danced to find relief from their feelings of depression. Appeared.
“VR is not an extension of movies. VR is not an extension of video games. We are starting to see that VR is a medium about your own human body,” he said.
Victor Agulhon creates VR documentaries on subjects ranging from top chefs to the Kennedy assassination.
“I can't imagine working in any other medium,” he said.
“For me, this technology in particular allows us to do something unprecedented in terms of understanding and empathy.”
– Immersive, interactive –
“Humans have an insatiable desire to use storytelling as a way to make sense of their experiences in the world…and they want something more immersive with greater interactivity.” Vince Kadlbek said during a panel discussion on the future of entertainment.
Kadlbek is one of the founders of Meow Wolf, an artist collective currently specializing in large-scale art installations.
From video games to immersive art, he said a key way to engage audiences is to give them more interaction and control.
“I don't want to have the ability to go into someone else's world and build something in it. That's very limited,” he said, citing TikTok and Minecraft as examples of platforms that have made strides in that space. listed.
For Voyle Acker, immersion is also key.
Her studio, Small Creative, develops virtual reality experiences for small groups, specifically to “educate and bring culture to geographically distant audiences.”
“Today we can program anything we want, but it takes human intelligence to be artistic and find the right connections,” she said.
Creators are in high demand. French car giant Valeo attended the conference, known as SXSW, to encourage people to invent the future of in-car entertainment.
Executives introduced a video game for passengers that used sensors, cameras and radar to recreate the vehicle's environment in real time, but for fun.
“You can imagine interacting with passengers in other cars and letting them participate in experiences like sharing music,” said Jeffrey Buco, Valeo's chief technology officer.
~”Space Turtle”~
“What can a magic feather dress do?” I asked the computer in a mini-cinema showing an endless movie called “The Golden Key.”
In this production, generative artificial intelligence continuously generates images, narration, and audio, while viewers influence the results by answering questions.
“The magical feather dress transcends time and space. Woven from loose plastic floating in the ocean, the space turtles have repurposed it for the good of the world,” an audience member wrote.
The innovation on display in Austin, Texas, comes as the rise of content-generating AI worries many artists who fear being replaced by machines.
But Reimagined Volume III: Young Tongue director Melissa Joyner doesn't think AI couldn't create a VR-powered animated film inspired by the Nigerian story.
Generative AI could be part of the process, she says, but that “doesn't mean I don't agree with it, and it's not another person you respect.”
juj/arp/nro
