The Game Lab is located in the Broad Art Center, Room 3252. Inside are several computer stations with VR headsets: three Oculus headsets and two Vive headsets. Each station had a collection of two to three VR experiences, designed to inspire students by showing them the breadth of experience that is possible with VR. And the breadth was stunning.
Part of the trouble with a showcase like this is that the experiences themselves are so immersive, so gripping, that you spend half your time being enthralled by just one. Which is exactly what happened to me. Zero Days VR was an artistic immersive documentary experience. The environment was designed and built around an existing feature-length documentary, unsurprisingly named Zero Days. The creators layered the audio on top of an engaging, futuristic technolandscape where the viewer was gently gliding through walls of circuitry that pulsed and reacted to the words being spoken. Occasionally large panels would appear with clips from the documentary itself, but mostly the viewer is spending their time absorbing the landscape, watching it react to the narration and audio of the documentary. Truly engaging, and an exciting future development for documentary film making.
Notes on Blindness is a British documentary from 2016 based on the audio tapes of John Hull, a writer and theologian that gradually went blind and wrote a book about blindness.
This was the second experience that I had the privilege of being immersed in. John Hull narrates the expanding aural atmosphere, beginning on a park bench and detailing, one by one, the various sounds that bring his world to life. Children laughing, people walking by, birds taking off in flight, joggers passing by, all of these things appear as ephemeral blue outlines as Hull’s voice, with a warm and crackling analog texture, illuminates the experience. It was simultaneously calming and exhilarating, and definitely unlike anything I’d experienced before. And certainly something that could only be appreciated in a VR environment.
Unfortunately (or, rather, fortunately), these two experiences captivated me throughout my time at the Showcase. Although I regret not being able to experience any of the other showcases, the two that I was able to engage with make confident in saying that the list below must be equally as exciting to experience.
Zeynep Abes, curator of this Showcase, has an incredible understanding of the multitudinous possibilities when it comes to VR experiences. Below is a full list of experiences that were on display (in no particular order):
Spheres
Dear Angelica
Gymnasia
Land Grab
A Short History of the Gaze
Museum of Symmetry
Melody of Dust
Chocolate
Davina
