Welcome back to Everything Immersive This Week, our weekly roundup of all things immersive.
We’ve been on hiatus while watching the pandemic unfold, and while we get the public beta of the Everything Immersive site up and running. The later is still coming along, I suppose the former is too, but that’s a whole other kettle of fish.
The other thing is: I’d gotten bored/annoyed by the format EITW had evolved into. A link dump is valuable, but it’s also somewhat unreadable. So while we’re going to keep the sections, this is going to start changing into something a little more like an “old fashioned” blog post. Providing context where we can, commentary on occasion, and a few conversational starters when possible.
Not all at once, if only because I’m literally working off the old template, but week over week, this thing is changing. So let’s get into it.
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ON THE PODCAST THIS WEEK
Virtual spaces can exist without VR headsets, and they can truly be wonders. This is an episode about one such space.
Yannick Trapman-O’Brien, creator of The Telelibrary joins us to talk about how getting stuck traveling in the pandemic and a whole lot of phone calls contributed to the development of his unique creation.
FROM THE WIRE: SHOWS, EVENTS, & EXPERIENCES
We’re still running the Newswire here at NoPro while the public beta of Everything Immersive shakes out. To get your work on the Newswire, submit at EverythingImmersive.com
Secrets — Virtual experiences where you share your secrets or listen to others!
Walks of Life- A La Jolla Playhouse Digital Without Walls (WOW) Project
Cabin in the Woods-Reporter Psychic Ricky is on the case!
Speakeasy Oil Change-He’s a high-octane mechanic. (From Please Don’t Touch the Artist)
LA: Road Trip Mysteries-An immersive adventure from the comfort of your car
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REVIEWS
Comfort TV and mystery stories. Both have been stalwarts of my own pandemic experience. Often with the two great favorites being mashed up together. (I’m currently in the third season of Hannibal, which isn’t quite comfortable, and isn’t exactly a mystery, but there’s enough dashes of the later and the time spent with the characters creating its own form of cold comfort.) This week’s reviews touched on both.
First Blake Weil took on the conversation centered BINGE from Brian Lobel by way of La Jolla Playhouse’s WOW Goes Digital program:
BINGE starts from that viewpoint: the idea that even the worst TV junk food fills some sort of need in our lives, and BINGE builds that into an affecting, dare I say therapeutic, experience. It’s a mix of a self-guided interview to be completed before the performance, a one-on-one conversation with an artist/TV superfan, and finally, a marathon they prescribe for you of curated episodes of their favorite show.
Come to think of it, the 2017 DuckTales is filling that comfort food/mystery niche. Which is why Zay and I keep podcasting about it.
From across the pond Shelley Snyder brings us word about Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Symmetric Mailshot, which starts off one small and quickly escalates into a sprawling mystery with multiple lines of inquiry and a large cast of characters.
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All in all: a small but fairly good week for innovative work, as the current obstacles keep getting turned into fuel for the creative fire.
‘BINGE’ Uses TV as a Tonic for Turbulent Times (Review)Or: how I learned to stop worrying and love my inner Carrie Bradshawnoproscenium.com‘Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Symmetric Mailshot’ Entertains at Home (The NoPro Review)CtrlAlt_Repeat’s latest scratches at the surface of immersionnoproscenium.com
News From around the Immersiverse
The news is running a bit tech heavy this week, which is to be expected as live productions are still frozen, but that doesn’t mean that live companies aren’t up to shenanigans. Oh no, quite the contrary.
Let’s start with the big one: Punchdrunk, creators of Sleep No More, announced they are working with Niantic, makers of Pokemon Go and Ingress.
Having long dreamt of working with the biggest players in gaming, we are proud to announce our partnership with Niantic, the leading augmented reality company behind popular gaming experiences Ingress, Pokémon GO, and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite.
Niantic’s Real World Platform will give us the opportunity to take our work outside of buildings and into the world around you. Across multiple projects, we want to bend the rules of genre and redefine the norms of mobile gaming. Our hope is that together, we can create something no one else can.
They’re not saying exactly what they’re working on, and this isn’t the first time that Punchdrunk has teamed up with a tech company, so I’m not exactly losing my mind over this one. Yet the companies feel like a good fit. Although I’m going to be more interested in whatever project they ultimately launch if it is less centered on game mechanics and more centered on the story.
Niantic is about to bring a “Catan in the real world” game to market, however. That could be interesting. I’ve never played Catan with people, so I’m not super attached to it but I do know how popular it is. (Very. If you don’t follow board games.)
From augmented reality over to virtual realties:
Facebook filed a patent for VR glasses that look like sunglasses. Cool. Patents are patents. I try not to get too excited about them. That’s how you end up with Vaporware™ brand hardware filling up the shopping carts of tech heads everywhere. Thinner and lighter is great, but we just went through all this with Magic Leap, so let’s focus on there here and now of VR for a while.
Like Dreams for Playstation VR. Sony hasn’t announced whether or not the upcoming Playstation 5 is going to be compatible with their VR solution yet, but they have announced that their game-building game Dreams is getting VR support.
There has been some incredible work done inside Dreams since it came out, with people recreating classic games, pushing the envelope on realism, and some truly oddball creations. Whether or not the Dreams community embraces VR is a big, big question, but we’ll start to see the fruits of that this month: the update drops on July 22nd.
Facebook envisions using holographics for super-slim VR glassesFacebook and Oculus have been trying to make slimmer and more comfortable VR headsets for a while, but their latest…www.engadget.comPS VR support comes to Dreams on July 22Play PS VR support comes to Dreams on July 22 Video Announced during today's DreamsCom showcase, Inside The Box, the…blog.playstation.com
Keeping in the domain of games for a second, this article about a modern art installation inside Fortnite caught my eye. I still need to go see it. Okay. First I need to figure out how to go see it. I know that Fortnite is on everything from phones to microwaves — kidding, microwave support comes next year — but I haven’t fired it up in so long. No, I didn’t even bother to catch the Rise of Skywalker event or when they did the Inception drive-in thing. I know that Epic Games has made big tweaks to how this promotional events play out inside the game world, but my sense memory of Fortnite is filled with junior high students camper killing me while I try and figure out how to build and shoot at the same time. Just let me do this stuff in Halo, yeah?
Anyway, the piece is called Your Progress Will Be Saved, and is part of the Manchester International Festival’s Virtual Factory. LaTurbo Avedon is the artist behind Your Progress Will Be Saved, but this piece is just the begining of the Virtual Factor experiment:
Over the course of a year we’ll be working with artists including the British-Nigerian artist and director Jenn Nkiru, whose global reputation was cemented by her work on Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s Apeshit video; the New York City based game developer and professor of video games, Robert Yang, whose work often focuses on gay men, intimacy and queer spaces; and the British artist Tai Shani, whose work encompasses performance, film, photography and sculptural installations and was one of the joint winners of the Turner Prize 2019.
Sure, Fortnite is limited to flat screens for now, but in many ways it is the most popular virtual world going amongst all the many options out there. As platforms go for raising awareness of immersive oddness in the mainstream it really can’t be beat.
Back in the dessert of real: all is not sweet in the halls of The Museum of Ice Cream, according to this article which dropped in Forbes this week.
This rainbow, however, doesn’t end with a pot of gold — from all indications, the Museum of Ice Cream is melting down. Spending was slashed in January. In March, Bunn temporarily closed the permanent installations in New York and San Francisco, and laid off around 200 workers. This morning, MOIC is holding a town hall to lay out Bunn’s plan to reopen to the public by the end of this month, pending Phase 3 changes. That’s already a Herculean problem: the pandemic makes the prospect of jumping into a perpetually-trafficked vat of colored plastic about as appealing as licking the restroom faucet.
But interviews with more than 20 former employees, most of whom worked directly with Bunn in MOIC headquarters, several still at the company right until March’s layoffs, point to a culture problem that cuts across the company.
Last but not least this week: there’s a “haunted garage” in Japan — basically a drive-thru Haunted House — that is finding a way to bring summer scares in the midst of the pandemic. I’m not sure what they’re doing in terms of safety protocols for the actors, but I suspect we’re going to see a lot more repurposing of drive-in and drive-thru frameworks in the months ahead.
Anything to get out of the house.
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