INTRO: A little over a hundred years ago, the light switch was invented in the sleepy suburb of Lynbrook, New York. If this fact isn’t enough to convince you of...
Read More
Our creative director Dylan wrote this for the theatre site Better Lemons last week. As a former dramaturg (fancy, weird word for someone who helps develop new plays), he has...
Read More
At this moment of uncertainty, with tensions rising and accusations flying and an evil orange stooge puppet running for president, the people of Russia rather nobly invited VR Playhouse to come visit their country. They invited us to come talk about virtual reality at a tech conference but we like to think maybe also to broker a new kind of understanding between our country and theirs. So we sent Dylan. He’s harmless and, if you squint, he could maybe look a little Russian. And Dylan, as he is want to do, spent a day chronicling his adventures: 9am: It’s morning in Moscow and I’m rolling out of the Marriott Novy Arbat with my fellow non-Russian invitees, on our way to the Open Innovations Forum. We’re an eclectic mix of “entrepreneurs” and “experts,” ferried to Russia to speak on the various stages and panels that the forum offers over the course…
Here’s a piece of news that we’re very excited to share: “The Surrogate,” a narrative, virtual reality experience VR Playhouse co-produced with Peter Flaherty and Logan Brown, is a finalist in the VR/AR category at SXSW’s Interactive Innovation Awards. Melding 360-video with a computer-generated explorable environment, The Surrogate immerses viewers in the consciousness of a female protagonist whose point of view they control as they explore the photorealistic passageways snaking behind the walls of a modern house. The viewer can see into the rooms of the house through a series of portals in which live action, hemispherical videos offer an immersive vantage point. The viewer is able to choose how they experience the narrative by moving through the passageways autonomously, deciding how they follow the action, and which rooms they look into at any given time. As the story begins, we learn that our protagonist suffers from an anxiety…
Our last two days at Sundance were probably my favorite, and not just because we were all kinda exhausted and spent more time than usual lounging around in sweatpants in front of our condo’s fireplace, which is, let’s face it, why anyone is drawn to a wintery vacation environ like the one Park City offers in the first place. Also though, I went through my two favorite VR/AR experiences of the festival on Wednesday. The first was from ILMxLAB and used 3D projections and motion tracking to create an immersive Star Wars Holo Cinema scene for its audience to enter into. The second was called Real Virtuality. You play this with a friend, each of you wearing a whole litany of sensors to track your actual movement as you work together to complete tasks and advance through a virtual world composed of familiar, genre settings like a deserted spaceship or…
Recently, I was up late at night watching Jackass 2. You should know that I consider this to be an important part of my job at VR Playhouse. In one of the film’s stunts, the team had built a full pipe that they were trying to ride using what looked like a tiny, two-stroke pocket bike. The sequence mainly consisted of riders falling, over and over, taking their trademarked joy in their own pain. And then one of them pulled off the trick, riding this toy motorcycle all the way around the loop-dee-loop and, presumably, on to glory. It made me think about one of the more famous moments in skateboarding history. It happened at the 1999 X Games, when legendary skater Tony Hawk landed the first ever 900 in competition. It was a cool moment made exceedingly more dramatic by the way in which it was done. Hawk would fail ten…