The Future of Storytelling is You

The Future of Storytelling’s immersive storytelling festival was held in NYC this past weekend uptown on 110th street in a large 75,000 square foot space spread over a few floors. Refreshingly, most of the festival content was more that interactive games. They featured journalistic stories, creative animations, multi person narratives, interactive adventures and much more.

The future of story in a three dimensional world is immersive, adaptable, multi-sensorial and most importantly transformational. You simply cannot sit back and stare at a screen in this new world of storytelling. When your screen becomes a voluminous space, when a book has characters jumping off pages, and a movie asks you for input into the story narrative, you are no longer a passive viewer. You are part of the story. The future of story telling is story living.

The organizers split up the festival into 3-hour sessions from Friday through Sunday, selling separate tickets for each of the 6 sessions to minimize overcrowding. The large space never felt overcrowded, at least while I was there Saturday morning. However many of the experiences had waiting lists that filled almost immediately. I could overhear some complaints among other attendees who were closed off from the lists.

Based upon learning from recent VR events, I made sure to have an advanced strategy in place for this conference: immediately go sign-up for anything that specified it might have a wait list, focus on installations that were unique to the festival environment or multi-sensorial, skip content that I could access myself later from home (i.e. via cardboard, Gear or online) while instead honing in on more complex demos with HTC Vive or Oculus and touch controls.

Even with my game plan in place, I did not have enough time to experience all the demos, but here are some highlights of what I did try:

Birdly
I had noticed this installation at a few interactive conferences during this past year, but had not yet experienced it because there was always a waiting line. Upon entrance to the FOST festival, I made sure to sign up for this demo immediately. Birdly exceeded my expectations. It was awesome! To start with, you get to choose from over 30 destinations to fly over, from local New York City, all the way to Florence, Italy or Salzburg, Austria or Tokyo, Japan, which I selected. The full body experience in a flight simulating machine with a Vive headset only lasted 2 minutes, but lasted much longer in my memory. Whereas most VR experiences are still limited to the head set, Birdly sets the bar so much higher by incorporating full body sensors, haptics and a physical bird like structure from which you virtually fly.

Flippaper
Although this installation featured a physical pinball machine, the experience was not so much about playing a game - but about creating your own. With a simple sheet of paper over a pinball screen, you draw your own screen with colored markers, each of which corresponded to a function (bumper, wall, speed). Through a drawing language based on analog tools, Flippap is a spectacular reinvention of a pinball machine! As a novice, my sketch wasn’t great – but it the game worked!

New Dimensions in Testimony
The most powerful and profound experience of FOST was a virtual conversation with Pinchas Gutter, a Holocaust survivor. Pinchas appears life-like as a 3D simulated projection seated directly in front of you, and he responds to any question asked. Through advanced natural language processing, the system interprets questions being asked and finds the most relevant responses in real time. The USC Shoah recorded hours and hours of content to power the experience. I can only imagine being able to use this technology in the future to enable people to have such intimate, realistic, one-on-one conversation with the likes of Nelson Mandela, Princess Dianna or Elvis.

Flock: A Holojam
This was a group experience in which you get to explore the flock-like nature of birds within animated Virtual reality. Equipped with a Gear headset and feather wings on your shoulders, you step/move around a small dark room with about eight other participants who appear as other birds in VR. Per the site description ‘the more aligned you are with the flock, the more joyous and intense your experience will be’

Late Shift
Seated in a small theater in area and equipped with an iphone, we watched the trailer for Late Shift. The interactive action-thriller movie invites viewers to make plot-changing decisions in real time (via clicks on iphone), while the film keeps running seamlessly. The film was produced in high quality, and I certainly paid more attention since I could control some of the narrative outcomes. It will be interesting to see how this sort of interactive film narrative evolves. Although you have decision-making control, I still felt like I was watching a screen versus participating inside the story.

Pearl
Google's Spotlight Stories launched Pearl, a 360 VR story, earlier this year. Somehow, it escaped my attention until I saw it featured at the Festival. Although I didn't view it there, I made sure to check it out this weekend on Cardboard at home. I was so emotionally impacted while watching this beautifully animated 360 video experiences that my eyes teared up and I started crying. The music, animation and storytelling are so powerful that I have a totally renewed appreciation for 360 video. This animated story is available on YouTube now and you can experience it today on your iPhone or Android. So go check it out! It is unbelievable.

Lastly, I could not fail to mention my perennial favorite Google Tilt Brush, which was also featured at the exhibition. This amazing VR content creation tool lets you paint life size in 3D. I have overheard people say Tilt Brush is like the next gen Adobe Photoshop. Since one of the biggest concerns in VR landscape is a lack of engaging content, I think tools like the Tilt Brush certainly provide a glimpse of how content will be created for future storytelling