iNK Stories challenges us with their haunting, multi-sensory vérité VR

The stray dog is the first to notice that something’s off.

We’re in an ordinary town square, somewhere in a war-torn country, where I’m watching a little girl help her father fix an engine outside. It sputters to life, and she squeals in delight. A radio plays in the distance. I see that Father is quite pleased with their handiwork. Mother appears on a balcony above me. I crane my neck straight up to see her. She shouts, calling the little girl inside. The stray dog wanders over.

Bark, bark, bark. At first, I think the dog wants to play. He comes towards me and then immediately backs off. Bark, bark, bark. Then a helicopter appears in the sky above us. There’s shouting, but I don’t understand what they’re saying.

The bomb drops.

A shower of dust and debris lands on my back after the explosion. I’m crouching behind an oil barrel but can see only white smoke. After it clears, I don’t see the stray dog anymore.

I notice a fire behind me. I can feel the heat radiating from the flames.

And then I hear someone, trapped in the rubble, crying out for help. There’s no one else around.

What do I do now?

Hero, created by iNK Stories (lead by Navid and Vassiliki Khonsari) and Starbreeze VR, is a visceral, shocking one-person-at-a-time VR piece that brings the news to life. It is a free-roaming experience where the viewer is invited to touch everything around them and walk through a carefully-designed environment which maps to what they see in their headset: tires, barrels, crates, ledges, walls, and more.

Imagine Iñárritu’s award-winning Carne y Arena installation but completely untethered.

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For anyone who has ever wished for more agency with these kinds of immersive experiences, Hero might be the answer. The creators place you at the center of the documentary-style story and what happens next depends entirely upon your choices. You play yourself, not a voyeur or an assigned character. You can make a difference in this world. (And apparently, the characters are real-life Syrian refugees as well.)

It’s intense and emotional. It feels like the future of VR. As a staff member guides me out, I notice that my knees are weak and my adrenaline is still pumping. I’m out of breath. I’m having trouble forming coherent thoughts and full sentences. I’ve been swept away by the experience.

She offers me water, and I gladly accept, taking a moment to collect myself.

Hours later, I am still overcome by Hero. Yes, I wish the piece was longer. The backpack is a bit heavy, it would be great if the display had a higher resolution, and the mapping of the physical world against the digital one gets miscalibrated at times. But these are minor, fixable issues.

For me, it’s easy to make the connection between what The VOID is doing with their “hyper-reality” Star Wars and Ghostbusters experiences (which I also love) and what iNK Stories accomplishes with Hero, which they call a “vérité VR experience,” a riff on cinéma vérité.

Both companies use similar techniques, but explore wildly different subject matter. The effectiveness of Hero shows that these hybrid virtual/physical multi-sensory experiences can be fun and thrilling, but can also help us overcome tendencies like “psychic numbing” to the consequences of war by putting our own bodies into the center of the story. And there’s even more than meets the virtual eye in Hero, as it brings immersive theatre techniques and VR together in a way which deserves to be seen by a much wider audience.

Because tonight, for a few moments, I was in Syria. Intellectually, I know it was all fictional, but somehow the experience of Hero feels like it all really did happen. I was there.

And that feels like the most immersive thing of all.

Hero continues at the Tribeca Film Festival’s Virtual Arcade through April 28. Tickets are $40 for each 3 hour time slot. Capacity is extremely limited and this particular exhibit will likely have a very, very long wait.

Catch up on all of our Tribeca Immersive 2018 diary entries.

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