VR Storytelling Breaks Through At Sundance

Longform narrative, agency, and haptics point festival-goers toward the industry’s future.

Inside the VR Palace at Sundance Base Camp

“Most of these aren’t practical,” says journalist and entrepreneur Seth Porges, a VR enthusiast who reviewed some of the most compelling experiences at Sundance 2017, bestowing his “Really Cool VR Awards” in a summary for Forbes. “No one is going to be able to do the Synthesia Suit or roomscale in their home.” Yet Porges believes this year’s VR installations at Sundance represented a significant step forward for the industry — and for convincing an audience of film industry influencers to see VR in terms of storytelling, not just gaming.

Among the most transformative experiences identified by Porges included the near-feature-length Miyubi (by Félix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphaël) and Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin’s evolution-themed role-playing experience Life Of Us.

Miyubi, to which Porges awarded a “Future Of Movies” award, points the way for agency within longform. “I try to distinguish between 360 video and true VR,” Porges told us. “Miyubi allows you to go beyond the status of a mythical ghost suspended in air.” The experience’s 40-minute run time is “very long,” he admits, but what makes it work is the unexpected agency you discover through your own actions. (The film casts you as a 1980s robot, a child’s Christmas present.) “As I began to explore each scene’s background, I stumbled upon several Easter eggs that actually changed the course of the experience,” wrote Porges in Forbes. He tells us that the film shows how the viewer’s current 360 video experience of being “suspended in air like a mythical ghost” can be transformed into providing a sense of control over the action and narrative.

Life Of Us preview video doesn’t quite convey the immense power of its social VR breakthrough

Life Of Us shows a different kind of VR leap: a social one, says Porges. In this multiperson world, “users are placed in different physical rooms, but interact in a shared virtual space — participants see themselves (and the person they are partnered with) transform from primordial protozoa to modern man and beyond.” A voice modulator encourages the sense of abandon, letting you make noises and lose yourself in the experience. It “cuts down on the self-consciousness many people feel in VR,” Porges tells us. “I went in with a stranger and I felt like he was a friend.” The Verge’s Adi Robertson agrees, calling it “one of the most creative, playful things” studio Within “has ever done.”

The Sky Is A Gap, by much-lauded artist Rachel Rossin, is still essentially a demo, Porges says, but is an important demonstration of the potential of roomscale storytelling. Asteroids! is notable for the ways its Baobab Studios creators “blur the lines between a movie and a game.” Dear Angelica, “one of the most visually stunning — and tear-jerking — VR experiences I’ve ever encountered,” showcases the potential of storytelling on the Oculus platform. (Oculus’s Quill design program was built especially for this film.)

The full-body haptic Synthesia Suit has improved dramatically since Porges covered it last year. While out of reach for virtually all consumers in the near future, it points the way to VR experiences that will be far more immersive than even roomscale allows. “Traditionally, VR has operated with two senses, visual and audio. When you pick up an object and you don’t feel it, it breaks the illusion.” Sundance attendees could use the suit with Rez Infinite, a space-themed Playstation VR shooter game, or an artwork titled Crystal Vibes.

Other observers agreed that what they’d seen at Sundance 2017 brought VR storytelling to new heights. Inverse’s Jordan Zakarin singled out Miyubi and Dear Angelica as particularly unique. Miyubi, for its strong sense of empathy: “even though you are supposed to be a toy robot, you can’t help but feel emotional about your slow decline into irrelevance; that your memory and battery begin to go, and your vision begins to short-circuit, adds to the feeling of hopelessness.” In Dear Angelica, Zakarin felt himself “spinning around trying to keep up with the fleeting images” which were being painted around him as the lead character mourned and remembered her movie-star mother. “It was like floating in space — you’re surrounded by negative dark space — giving the whole experience an out-of-body vibe.”

Lines were long for Sundance’s VR venues like the VR Palace and Jaunt VR lounge. And while the works on display show the limits of technology that is still evolving, it’s safe to say the festival made many attendees believers in the potential for these unprecedented storytelling forms.