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'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 that you dream of when you move to a city -- before the crushing reality of daily life makes you more cynical. It also wasn't real.
VR is telling deeper, more important stories
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 floundered, mostly due to the medium's infancy and a lack of widely available technology. Finally, though, we seem to have moved beyond the novelty of virtual reality and are starting to see it used to tackle various important issues.
The 'mother of WiFi' gets her due in a new documentary
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 Czech-Austrian movie called Ekstase (or Ecstasy), which I first saw in a German art museum earlier this year. Back then, as executive producer Susan Sarandon put it, "She was the first woman to reenact an orgasm on screen!" I wish I knew Lamarr for a nobler reason, but I was just one of many who associated the actress with her less-savory exploits.
Hideo Kojima on his cinematic influences, 'Death Stranding' and VR
If you're starting a new gaming festival, having Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima aboard is a good way to prove you mean business. That was the case for the inaugural Tribeca Games Festival, which featured Kojima in a keynote conversation tonight with Geoff Keighley, producer of The Game Awards. The wide-ranging chat covered Kojima's cinematic influences -- of which there were many -- and his progress on Death Stranding, his long-awaited upcoming project.
I sat in on a virtual support group for sexual-assault survivors
Thanks to its ability to give you a first-person point of view, virtual reality has become a common vehicle for empathetic storytelling. Testimony, a VR project that premiered at Tribeca 2017, does so by putting you in a virtual support group, showing the effectiveness of simply watching people tell their stories, especially when the subject is as disturbing as sexual assault.
'The Protectors' shows how VR can help save African elephants
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 describe it -- but when viewed as a 360-degree video in a VR headset, it's even more so. You can't easily look away without shutting your eyes. And the three-dimensional sound makes you feel as if you're actually there.
I smelled and hugged a tree in VR, because art
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 a giant foam sculpture with cutouts (oblivious to how silly they looked). Naturally, I had to check it out, and came away intrigued by its implications for art and museums.
We lived through the history of evolution in VR with 'Life of Us'
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 Milk. It lets you and a friend (in my case, our Reviews Editor, Cherlynn Low) relive the story of evolution on Earth. And while it's relatively short, we found it to be fascinating.
'The Last Goodbye' is the VR Holocaust memorial we need today
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, which debuts at the Tribeca Film Festival this week, follows Pinchas Gutter as he makes his final pilgrimage to Majdanek, a former Nazi Germany extermination camp in occupied Poland. It's a trip he's made many times, but this one has a specific purpose: to capture his account of the Holocaust so we never forget that it actually happened.
Apple Music's next exclusive is a Clive Davis documentary
Apple Music's next documentary focuses on music industry legend Clive Davis. Last night at the annual Tribeca Film Festival, it was announced that Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives would be exclusive to Apple's music-streaming service. That report comes via Deadline. While Davis' name might be unfamiliar, his influence has been felt throughout the music industry for some 50 years. Davis is responsible for signing Bruce Springsteen; Carlos Santana (above); Earth, Wind & Fire and Alicia Keys in addition to cofounding Sean "Puffy" Combs' Bad Boy Records among many, many other accomplishments. For more on his career, be sure to check out New York Times' recent interview with Davis.
