Jen Gouvea, Kent Bye's late wife.

Words alone could not convey the pain and depth of emotion Kent Bye felt in the weeks after he lost his wife to suicide last fall.

"It's a lot to try to describe to someone so often times I just don't talk about it," he said. "It's a burden."

Wrestling with how to express himself and honor her memory without conjuring the darkness of her death, Bye, 38, turned to technology.

A former documentary filmmaker, now a video marketer at Portland technology company Puppet Labs, Bye has been dabbling in virtual reality - a simulated, computerized world made to look highly realistic with goggles that shut out the real world and present a three-dimensional alternative.

Virtual reality has an avid, hopeful following among hard-core gamers and is sought after by big tech companies, which think it might be transform the way people experience technology by creating a deeper, more personal experience. For Bye, it is a new kind of art form and an outlet for his enduring sorrow.

"There's some things you just can't write about or describe," he said.

What Bye created over 10 frantic days this spring, working with a half-dozen friends, is a kind of choose-your-own-adventure experience that takes participants into a ghostly, computerized world that draws on Bye's memories and his late wife's own words.

Viewers strap on virtual reality goggles and roam from room to room in a spartan, animated house that sits open under an eerie, starlit sky. Ghostly characters reflect on their own deaths and speak with the living they left behind.

The characters are simply floating heads, roughly rendered, and the app freezes occasionally. If it's technologically imperfect, the performance - called "Crossover" - is nonetheless emotionally wrenching.

Virtual reality company Oculus VR selected it this month as a finalist in a contest seeking new applications for virtual reality. Winners will be selected this week.

"I think the reason it was selected as a finalist in this contest is because it's a new art form, a new kind of experience," said Raven Zachary, one of Portland's best-known entrepreneurs and a friend of Bye's.

Virtual reality is still relatively obscure. A starter kit of a basic pair of Samsung Gear goggles, plus a smartphone to run the apps and provide the screen (it attaches to the front of the goggles) runs $1,000. The hotly anticipated Oculus Rift goggles don't go on sale until next year.

Still, the degree of excitement around the technology is manifest in the $2 billion Facebook paid for Oculus last year. And even a few minutes with a pair of VR goggles conveys some of the promise.

A computerized table looks rudimentary and cartoonish but somehow feels real, like you could reach out and touch it. Grasping something from the real world while in a virtual reality landscape is confusing, and headset wearers frequently complain of nausea when they're in a fast-moving VR environment.

"It's something more than a Viewmaster and something less than a dream," said Zachary, a pioneering mobile app developer who co-founded the Portland firm Small Society. After selling it to Walmart Labs and working there for three years, he is exploring entrepreneurial opportunities in virtual reality.

"The smartphone was a tremendous technical achievement, but it was very much a pragmatic achievement," Zachary said. Virtual reality conveys an immersive intimacy that suggests it could be something more.

While much of the excitement around virtual reality focuses on video games, the narrative potential is getting a growing amount of attention. For example, Headcase, a virtual reality studio with offices in West Hollywood and downtown Portland, is exploring live-action virtual reality storytelling.

The immersive, three-dimensional nature of virtual reality confers a sense of presence, Bye said, that theatergoers feel when they're watching actors on stage. It's an intimacy we don't feel watching a movie or TV.

The narrative concept for "Crossover," in fact, comes from an experimental New York theater piece called "Sleep No More," which presents an adaptation of Shakespeare's "Macbeth" through a series of disconnected rooms. Attendees can choose different characters to follow or locations to watch, but don't see the whole picture.

For "Crossover," Bye mined video blogs he and his wife made years before her death, adapting her words for one of the ghostly characters in the virtual reality play. He drew on passages from her journals - in the form of letters to her late father, who also committed suicide - to create a conversation between them.

"Often times when someone takes their own life it's a burden that's passed on and the pain doesn't go away," Bye said. "It's just passed to their survivors."

Making "Crossover" helped him deal with that burden, Bye said, and reach back to memories of her life that transcend its end. At the story's conclusion, the ghosts gather in a single room to reflect on their lives, say a final goodbye to the living and dissolve into mist.

"When I see this now it's a virtual grief ritual at the end," Bye said. "It's what I was searching for after she'd passed."

-- Mike Rogoway

mrogoway@oregonian.com

503-294-7699

@rogoway