I heard the familiar "ding dong" of the NYC subway as the doors closed and looked over to the person sitting next to me, and all of a sudden, they were telling me their life story. It was like one of those serendipitous moments of human connection th...
‘Blackout’ is a VR love letter to NYC’s subway riders
I heard the familiar "ding dong" of the NYC subway as the doors closed and looked over to the person sitting next to me, and all of a sudden, they were telling me their life story. It was like one of those serendipitous moments of human connection th...
At the Tribeca Film Festival this year, filmmakers displayed a mastery of virtual reality, with a series of emotional, meaningful stories. It's an encouraging sign, considering previous efforts to produce coherent, non-game VR experiences have flound...
Twenty minutes into Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, I realized I know the actress for an embarrassing reason. We're introduced to one of the defining moments of Lamarr's career. She appears nude, hiding in some bushes in a 1933 black-and-white Czec...
Thanks to its ability to give you a first-person point of view, virtual reality has quickly become a vehicle for empathetic storytelling. Testimony, a VR project that premiered at Tribeca 2017, does so by putting you in a virtual support group, showi...
At first, the elephant looks like it's asleep. But then you notice it has stumps where there should be feet. Its tusks have been sawed off. And there are countless maggots crawling along a gaping hole in its face. It's a horrifying image as I describ...
At the Tribeca VR arcade this year, there were displays ranging from the harrowing to the distracting, but few were as eye-catching as Treehugger:Wawona. It's an interactive art installation that had headset-wearing participants hugging and caressing...
It's easy to criticize virtual reality for being isolating and a bit anti-social, but there's a lot of potential for connection with shared VR experiences. One good example is Life of Us, the latest entry from the VR studio Within and director Chris...
You've read about the Holocaust in books and seen it portrayed in films. But it's another experience entirely to walk through the site of a concentration camp in virtual reality, led by a survivor who lost his entire family there. The Last Goodbye, w...