Tribeca Immersive reveals VR, AR and the world’s largest holographic display

The Tribeca Festival’s annual Immersive showcase returns on Friday, bringing an abundance of virtual reality and experiments with next-generation sound and augmented reality – even the premiere on a giant holographic display.

Over the past five years, Tribeca Immersive has grown into one of the largest American events showcasing the latest interactive storytelling in tech-forward formats such as virtual reality. This year’s exhibition includes a wide range of VR, plus projects based on AR and binaural 3D sound.

There’s even a holographic movie showing a new one 65-inch screen from Looking Glass Factory for the first time. It takes the pint-sized version CNET has been watching lately and extends it to cinematic scale.

This year’s Immersive Committee, which opens Friday and runs through June 19, also spans the liminal state of pandemic life now that one foot is stepping back into personal norms and the other is still standing in the virtual copies of events during COVID-19 shutdown. Tribeca Immersive has personal experiences that are only available on the party’s treadmill in Lower Manhattan. But the exhibit also has a virtual wing that can transport you from your home to an imaginative gallery of VR pieces if you have a $ 5 ticket (but also a relatively expensive VR setup).

“We’ve learned and evolved over the last two years, so both the physical presence and the digital presence are equally important,” Casey Baltes, vice president of Tribeca Games and Immersive, said in an interview ahead of the festival. opening.

Conceptually, the 2022 Immersive Program curates its two dozen pieces across four themes, according to Ana Brzezińska, Immersive Curator. They include motifs of nature, society and identity, art and memory and “tomorrow,” she said.

The virtual Immersive environment also reflects these themes, Brzezińska said. Tribeca commissioned VR artist Danny Bittman to build the space and create an “Alice in Wonderland experience” that presents its 12 projects as you explore its periphery.

Immersive, personal and at home

Most of Tribeca Immersive is installed in Spring Studios, the festival’s central hub. But two personal pieces take place elsewhere in the city: a VR project called Evolver, which takes place in an independent location near the southern tip of Manhattan, a project involving well-known authors as director Terrence Malick as producer and Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood providing music, and a site-specific piece called Mushroom Cloud NYC / Rise lets you unlock a pier on the Hudson River that incorporates augmented reality and an NFT.

Spring Studio’s main room is where Looking Glass’ giant holographic screen shows Zanzibar: Trouble in Paradise, a delightfully filmed documentary about women growing seaweed on an African island while struggling with the effects of climate change.

Spring Studio’s installations also include some projects that are exclusively available there in person:

• Kubo Walk The City, a 20-minute VR animation set in Korea under Japanese occupation;
• Missing image Ep. 3-5, three new episodes running 56 minutes in the series, where filmmakers talk about a VR creation of films they never quite succeed in;
• Plastisapiens, a 15-minute VR work depicting a future where plastic and organic life merge;
• Iago: The Green Eyed Monster, a six-minute VR recording of the villain in Shakespeare’s Othello, rethought as a woman;
• The Intravenous, a 25-minute immersive sound experience in binaural sound, about an epidemic of overdoses in Vancouver;
• Please, Believe Me, a 28-minute piece by renowned VR artist Nonny de la Peña exploring the case of a woman whose symptoms of Lyme disease were ignored by the medical establishment;
• ReachYou, an 11-minute AR project described as a transmission from a future where the Earth is no longer habitable.

Other in-depth projects are available both in person and at home:

• Emerging Radiance: Honoring the Nikkei Farmers of Bellevue, a three-minute experience combining hand-painted murals and AR filters – this piece has been exhibited as AR in person in Spring Studio and recreated for VR in the virtual Tribeca Immersive exhibition;
• LGBTQ + VR Museum, a 20-minute VR celebration of queer stories and art;
• Planet City VR, a 6-minute VR that explores a fictional city of 10 billion and gathers all the people on Earth to let the rest of the planet exist without our intervention;
• The Black Movement Library – Movement Portraits, 17-minute VR portraits of artists who contribute their movement data to an archive called the Black Movement Library;
• This Is Not A Ceremony, a 25-minute VR that winds its way through numerous testimonies of being a Canadian native;
• Container, a 16-minute work that is partly VR and partly installation art that touches on modern echoes of a slave trade tragedy in 1794.

And finally, a few projects are exclusive to the virtual Immersive environment:

• Limbotopia, a 25-minute surreal animated VR movie that takes a dreamlike journey through a mysterious city;
• Mescaform Hill: The Missing Five, an 18-minute animated VR graphic novel about a police detective investigating the disappearance of several officers;
• End of Night, a 49-minute VR piece about an escape by boat from Nazi-occupied Denmark;
• Exhibit A, a 25-minute project described as a VR love letter to colored women;
• Glimpse, a 23-minute interactive VR animation set in the mind of a crushed panda artist who recently broke up with his deer girlfriend;
• Missing pictures Ep. 2, an episode of the VR series.

To access these from home, you need a VR headset that connects to a computer and can run applications through Steam, because Tribeca Immersive’s exhibit was built in the Museum of Other Realities, a Steam-powered VR environment.

Oculus Quest, the country’s most popular VR headset for consumers, is not enough alone. To use your Quest to explore Tribeca Immersive, connect it to a fairly powerful laptop or PC with its Oculus Link feature.