XR3 is a joint exhibition by Cannes XR, NewImages Festival (France), and Tribeca Festival (United States) presenting the best of immersive creation in June and July 2021.
This unique digital showcase will bring together more than 55 virtual reality experiences, including a number of 2021 premieres, and hand picked selections of works from some of the most acclaimed VR creators and studios in the world. All festival sections will be hosted at the MOR in a bespoke virtual venue created by the MOR team, and collaborating artists.
For detailed information about the XR3 line-up, the event or tickets, please visit:
The XR3 virtual showcase at the Museum of Other Realities is available in two parts: Edition 1 : June 9 to 20, 2021 Edition 2 : July 6 to 17, 2021
Please note that between June 20 and July 6 the XR3 showcase will be closed, and will only relaunch for the second edition on July 6.
Tickets & Downloadable Content (DLC)
The XR3 showcase is a large-scale, multi-chaptered virtual exhibition divided into three major sections (Cannes XR, NewImages, Tribeca), each containing between a dozen and twenty high-end virtual reality experiences.
To access VR experiences presented in each section users should download a festival ‘DLC’ (downloadable content) package. For optimal performance, we recommend downloading the XR3 showcase in sections (Cannes XR, NewImages, Tribeca).
Please make sure you have sufficient disc space on your PC before purchasing the ticket, and entering virtual reality.Festival DLC packages are download-heavy files, their size may vary between 30 and 50 GB
Please leave a sufficient amount of time to download the content on your PC before entering virtual reality. We recommend downloading each festival DLC separately, at least two hours before visiting the showcase.
Accessing the Showcase
Step 1. Purchase your XR3 ticket on Steam, or get a free access code with your festival accreditation
Step 2. Download the MOR App
Step 3. Download a selected festival DLC (Cannes XR, NewImages, Tribeca)
If you own a festival accreditation or pass, please use the Steam code provided by the festival to activate DLC for free (See tutorial here).
Step 4. Restart your PC and headset
Step 5. Enter the Museum of Other Realities
In the MOR lobby please look for a shiny red carpet leading to the XR3 venue. Follow the carpet to access the showcase, and enjoy the selected festival section.
*DISCLAIMER: The XR3 project has been commissioned by Tribeca Film Festival, Cannes Film Festival - Marché du Film, and NewImages Festival - Forum des Images. For more information about the programme, tickets and accreditations, and event support please contact your relevant festival team For technical questions and platform performance issues please contact the MOR or check out the resources in our Help Centre.
Hope to see you there!
Immersed in Restoration: With Glen Fraser, John Harrison and Jacki Morie
Our next talk event on March 25th, 2021 at 9 am PST stirs up the pressing question concerning the temporality of VR art. We're honoured to host and extend the perspective of VR long-timers Glen Fraser, John Harrison and Jacki Morie as our guest speakers for 'Immersed in Restoration'.
While it might surprise contemporary VR artists in 2021 to hear about the first three decades of VR art history, the question to also raise is why don't people know about these early works? Can they still be experienced now, and where? What would it take to resurrect them? In this MOR Salon event moderated by Jacki Morie, we'll look at a famous 1995 VR artwork by Char Davies, and hear from its guardians what efforts have been made to keep it alive and running for future audiences to enjoy.
MEET THE GUEST SPEAKERS
About Glen Fraser
Glen Fraser builds software for the interactive and immersive arts. Experienced in graphics, sound and device programming, he developed VR projects at the Banff Centre for the Arts and Telepresence Research in the early 1990s, before shifting to create commercial tools for 3D artists at Softimage, in Montreal. After moving to Spain, he contributed to audiovisual performing arts and open source projects, and has become active in the local live coding community. Immersence contracted him to remaster Osmose and Ephémère in 2013, and he continues to collaborate with Char Davies on new projects.
About John Harrison
John Harrison is a Software Engineer whose focus is on working with artists to develop VR artworks. He developed some of the earliest VR art installations, including over a dozen works produced at the Banff Centre for the Arts from 1991-94. From there, he focused on creating VR installations for Char Davies in Montreal, Canada, developing Osmose (1995) and Éphémère (1998), which subsequently toured worldwide. After stints as a developer for Softimage|XSI and as a computer vision PhD student at McGill University, he has returned to the art world, and is now working at Immersence to develop innovative tools for the creation of new artworks.
About Jacki Morie
Dr. Jacquelyn Ford Morie is known for her use of Virtual Reality (VR) to deliver meaningful experiences that enrich people’s lives. She developed multi-sensory techniques for VR that predictably elicit emotional responses from participants, and through her company All These Worlds, LLC, makes virtual worlds for social connectivity, Mindfulness, storytelling and stress relief for veterans and others. She recently built a virtual world ecosystem for NASA called ANSIBLE, designed to provide psychological benefits for future astronauts who will undertake extremely long isolated missions to Mars. Dr. Morie is currently working on a new version of her patented scent device to bring more emotional power to VR.
A little more about this restoration project offered up from Glen Fraser’s blog, in his own words -“Immersence is Char’s research company, which was founded in 1998 to continue the work she’d started at Softimage. Shortly after its founding, I believe Immersence purchased the last four dVisor headsets produced, just before Division went out of the HMD business entirely. This turned out to be a smart move; a couple of those headsets continue to function – sort of – though neither of them does so gladly. And until the Vive and Rift headsets came along this year, the pickings were slim for a good replacement headset.”
Hear the full story by joining us on Thursday morning. See you in the MOR on Thursday at 9 am PT!
Immersive Arcade: The Showcase - North American Launch
The #SXSW21 Immersive Arcade North American launch party is this Friday at 6 PM PT!
We invite you to use this opportunity to experience four stunning experiences from Volume One: Realities and Dimensions. The showcase features Common Ground, Darkfield’s The Invisible, Fly and Notes on Blindness. All four experiences are available in all their richness in an exclusive venue created for this showcase.
Immersive Arcade: The Showcase is the first national collection of the best of British virtual reality (VR) and 360 experiences. The showcase has been commissioned by UKRI, as part of the ‘Audience of the Future’ challenge. Created in collaboration with Kaleidoscope and the museum, the showcase is themed around an exploration of the human mind, and designed to reimagine celebrated VR productions.
To learn more about this showcase, you can read more here.
WHAT TO EXPECT
Join us on Friday March 19th for the IMMERSIVE ARCADE SHOWCASE PARTY, which we’re also calling the American Premiere of the Immersive Arcade.
A quick meet and greet with Jessica Driscoll, René Pinnell and Robin Stethem
An introduction to the Volume One artworks and creators by Jessica Driscoll
And for anyone new to the museum, a short demo about how to visit this showcase
Hope to see you at 6 PM PT on March 19th! Download the MOR app and enjoy this free period till March 26th.
Immersive Arcade: The Showcase - Volume One
The MOR has been working alongside Kaleidoscope and Digital Catapult as the host venue for a showcase of British XR excellence. We are excited to invite you as we announce the opening, and with that, the first volume of a very special showcase on March 12th 2021! Join us for the opening on March 12th.
The Immersive Arcade: The Showcase is the first national collection of the best of British virtual reality (VR) and 360 experiences. The showcase is designed to reimagine these celebrated productions and immerse visitors within them. The collection is themed around an exploration of the human mind. This dynamic collection draws together eclectic productions from across documentary, experiential and narrative genres, themed around an exploration of the human mind.
Volume One: Realities & Dimensions
The Kaleidoscope of ways in which human beings tell stories.
The showcase will feature:
Common Ground
by Darren Emerson, East City Films
Common Ground is a VR documentary narrative exploring the history, politics and human face of the current crisis in the UK housing system. Through the brutalist concrete blocks of the notorious Aylesbury Estate, the biggest social housing estate in Europe, audiences will enter its world from its construction to its controversial redevelopment today. This multifaceted VR documentary questions notions of community, examines the dis-enfranchisement and demonisation of the working class, and captures the sense of betrayal that residents feel when they are forced to move on.
The Invisible
by Darkfield
Imagine you could make yourself invisible. What would you do with this remarkable talent? Could you resist the temptation to wreak havoc on the unsuspecting? If you cannot be seen, how can you be held responsible for anything? Meet the invisible man and choose your path.
Fly
by Charlotte Mikkelborg, Novelab
From a multiple award-winning VR team and Oscar-winning special effects team, Fly enables you to become a time-travelling pilot - from the earliest imaginings of Leonardo da Vinci and his ornithopter, to the Wright Brothers’ success on Kitty Hawk Beach and, ultimately, into one potential future of flight.
Notes on Blindness
by ARTE, Atlas V, Archer’s Mark, Novelab
In 1983, after decades of steady deterioration, John Hull became totally blind. To help him make sense of the upheaval in his life, he began documenting his experiences on audio cassettes. These original diary recordings create the basis of this interactive non-fictional narrative which is a cognitive and emotional experience of blindness. Storytelling, art direction and graphical universe form a unique and singular immersion, completed by movement tracking, specialized sound and controller interactions.
-- To access the showcase please download the additional content here. Mark your calendars and learn more about the showcase by heading over to the Immersive Arcade website.
Tilt Brush by Accident : With Guest Speakers Drew Skillman and Patrick Hackett
Perhaps this event can be branded for bringing VR lore in the MOR - as Skillman and Hackett from the VR studio by the same name, Skillman & Hackett will be narrating the conception story of Tilt Brush in the MOR, this Thursday on Feb 25th, 2021 at 6.30 PM PT.
Now the latest news doing the rounds in VR circles about this award-winning application was announced on January 26 this year - when Google released the source code to the game under the Apache 2.0 license on GitHub. Celebrating a month since the announcement, we thought that bringing Skillman and Hackett in as guest speakers - the original creators of Tilt Brush themselves - would be fitting. A truly stellar twitter thread by Danny Bittman from the same day that Google open sourced Tilt Brush VR and shut down internal development does a nostalgic take on the journey of the application and its creative purposes as deemed by users.
Tilt Brush was developed as part of a number of different augmented reality, virtual reality, and natural motion experiences in 2014 at the company Skillman & Hackett, before being acquired by Google in 2015. The creators have mentioned previously (in a 2016 article that featured on Fast Company) how the idea of drawing in 3D space came from a chess game prototype they were working on - “It was a happy accident. Tilt Brush came out of an experiment with a virtual reality chess prototype, where we accidentally started painting the chess pieces in the air, and it was incredible”.
While in earlier versions of Tilt Brush, it was only possible to draw on two-dimensional planes users of the application can attest to why Tilt Brush has won itself the accolades it has. For those unfamiliar with the application, here’s a tidbit from Nicholas Scibetta who interviewed Skillman and Hackett in 2016-
“Tilt Brush allows users to paint in 3D space with one hand while the other hand works as your palette, tool box, and menu. You can paint with an enormous variety of exotic materials (including neon light, animated fire, or streams of rainbows) and then save, share, and remix your creations and those of others. Tilt Brush is what many say is what you should put on for someone trying VR for the first time, or someone who isn't a traditional gamer, to sell them on the VR experience.”
We are keen on hearing the longer version of the Skillman & Hackett story with a rich sneak peek promised from the prototyping period of Tilt Brush. The talk is titled ‘Tilt Brush by Accident: Our Creative Process for Emerging Technologies’ with some pointers on innovating for the VR industry.
About Patrick Hackett:
Patrick Hackett is an independent game developer and creative technologist. He is co-creator of "Tilt Brush" and is currently working on an unannounced game with I-Illusions, creators of Space Pirate Trainer. Prior to diving deep on AR & VR, Patrick worked in the games industry for over a decade as a Gameplay Engineer and Project Lead. Patrick applies cross disciplinary skills including design, engineering, and physics to create immersive experiences at the bleeding-edge intersection of art and technology.
About Drew Skillman:
Drew Skillman is a creative coder and technical artist. He is co-creator of "Tilt Brush", and is currently working on unannounced computer vision & machine learning powered interactive experiences at Google. Prior to diving deep on AR & VR, Drew worked in the games industry for over a decade as Technical Artist, Visual Effects Artist and Project Lead. Drew applies cross disciplinary skills including design, visual effects, engineering, and physics to create immersive experiences at the bleeding-edge intersection of art and technology.
The near-identical bios happen to be a running joke between the duo as they have been working on projects together as collaborators for a fairly long time now.
Join us in the MOR Auditorium for this very special event on Feb 25th, 2021 at 6.30 PM PT! This event might be more visually spectacular than any other talk event so far - that much we can promise.
Spatial Sound, With Guest Speakers Em Halberstadt and Millie Wissar
Em Halberstadt (@emaudible) and Millie Wissar (@soundseeds) from 'A Shell in the Pit' will be in the MOR at 6.30 pm PT on Thursday, January 28th, 2021 - to deliver a talk about spatial sound. As seasoned sound designers with diverse insights to share from having worked on sound for games, videos, installation art and for short animated films - the duo will be taking us through workflows for some of the work they've done for VR art in the MOR.
A Shell in the Pit is a Vancouver based diverse team that specializes in detailed, nuanced soundscapes for video games and interactive experiences with a passion for the artful, educational and whimsical. We have contributed music, SFX and/or technical audio to over 30 titles including Untitled Goose Game, Rogue Legacy, Night in the Woods, Fantastic Contraption and more.
About Em Halberstadt
Em Halberstadt is from Ottawa, Canada. She has been working with A Shell in the Pit and on the sound of the MOR. Other work of hers includes sound design for indie games like Untitled Goose Game and Night in the Woods. She's interested in helping people understand the art of listening and thinking about sound.
About Millie Wissar
Millie Wissar is a sound artist from Lima, Peru. She has collaborated on projects with Cities and Memory (Space Is the Place, Three Words, Remixing the Global Lockdown and Dante’s Inferno) and with Santo Noise 2020. Through her field recordings she explores topics that revolve around memory, binaural sound mapping and acoustic ecology.
Em and Millie are collaborators on projects such as Tchia and have previously worked on Ikenfell together.
While our speakers hope to take us through new sound tools, workflows, software etc. they have generously offered to open up to answering questions during the event - about how to effectively communicate with sound designers when designing sound for VR art. The talk promises to be a neat dissection of the different factors that make up spatial sound. The talk will be especially helpful for VR artists looking to better understand how to approach incorporating sound into their artwork.
Make the sound decision and join us this Thursday.
Fixes and Updates
Added the Tortoise feature, a pad that slowly guides visitors through the museum. You can ride the tortoise through the museum by yourself or with friends.
Added a Talk to Strangers mode, which automatically connects visitors to the same room as others who are also in Talk to Strangers mode.
Added Clappers and Noisemakers to give visitors more ways to express themselves and show appreciation during presentations.
Updated the drink models to better match their functionality. For example, a small cup makes you shrink, and a large cup makes you grow in size.
Small UI Improvements
MOR Patch - 1.4.9 - Tortoise
Version 1.4.9
Hey everyone, we've pushed a minor update.
Fixes and Updates
Added the Tortoise feature, a pad that slowly guides visitors through the museum. You can ride the tortoise through the museum by yourself or with friends.
Added a Talk to Strangers mode, which automatically connects visitors to the same room as others who are also in Talk to Strangers mode.
Added Clappers and Noisemakers to give visitors more ways to express themselves and show appreciation during presentations.
Updated the drink models to better match their functionality. For example, a small cup makes you shrink, and a large cup makes you grow in size.
Small UI Improvements
If you run into any issues or bugs, please let us know by posting on our Steam forums or in our bugs channel on Discord. You can also send an email to Editor[at]MuseumOR[dot]com .
Let’s Get Real : With Jacki Morie and John Orion Young
On Wednesday, November 25th 2020, at 6.00 PM PST, two pioneers from the VR art industry are going to be in conversation about matters of value, ownership, and data collection in the VR art industry. In this talk event, they will be generously sharing their perspective on the genesis of VR and its current growth trajectories, in real time.
We have the honour to be hosting immersive artist, scientist and creator Jacki Morie; bringing us scoop on what-was-hot in VR in the 1990s, and sculptor and technologist John Orion Young; explaining the crypto-economics of his art.
When Pixels were Precious
by Jackie Morie
Jacquelyn Ford Morie (or Jacki Morie) is an artist, scientist and educator working in the areas of immersive worlds, games and social networks since the late 1990s. Until 2013 she was a Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Creative Technologies at which point she started her company, All These Worlds, to take her work in virtual worlds and avatars to a broader audience.
It’s important though to go beyond the above description given how this iron lady is a ‘futurist’ with her brand smattered across several disciplines and intersections; across research, education and early adoption of VR technology, starting with significant contributions to the early perceptual and navigational studies for the Army Research Institute. In her talk at the MOR though she’s bringing her artist self forward, accepting quite bluntly how much of her artwork has gotten lost because the short lifespan of technology, but also how much the current VR wave has gained as it perches atop messy cables she has both held and then stowed away, over the years.
Ownership in the Metaverse
by John Orion Young
As some may note, John Orion Young (aka JOY from JOY World) has exhibited several works in the MOR in the past. We’re happy to have him return as a speaker this time, as who has ever said they’re done asking their questions about crypto art? As he’d be describing his experiences and experiments with creating smart contracts with tokens and removing ownership from the Blockchain - he has a solid lot to offer when it comes to building realistic financial systems on top of art that exists virtually.
The contrast between the two speakers quickly shrinks when we take into account the fact that they’ve both had to hack a monetization aspect in their own special style, as novel VR artists. Jacki would be sharing her technically diverse journey as she saw equipment come and go, from shiny to redundant. While John intends to share his rule of thumb - “Don’t trust, verify”, as he advances furthermore into Ethereum and brings AR into the picture to help his collectors own their JOYs in augmented proximity.
We expect this talk to become as philosophical as pragmatic, knowing the speakers’ frames of reference. Both, Jacki and John, are ready to cut deep into the subject of art ownership, the lack of future proof gear and formats, and the role of financial systems that could help sustain this beast of a medium.
So if you’re ready to, Let’s Get Real?
*The event will begin at 6.00 PM PST on Wednesday, November 25th 2020.
MOR November 2020 : Body Clock
We’re ready to share a collection of six works by artists questioning and challenging the body for its physics, as it climbs meaningfully outside of limbs and limitations to clock a newly calculated body dialogue. The MOR is excited to be back with this show, and most eager to see what conversations emerge from the intersection of these artists. The show opens on November 19th at 6.00 PM PST. Mark your calendars as the event is always a neat opportunity to meet the artists alongside the artwork.
New in the Museum
Gossamer
Andy Baker, UK, 2020 Created in Unity.
Gossamer is a room scale experience that might be the most ephemeral aspect of this show, with wispy tendrils forming and multiplying by truly leaning into musical tendencies of mathematical patterns. The maths behind the piece can partially be traced back to the work of mathematicians like John Conway and George Hart. He also credits Keijiro Takahashi’s faux-bokeh implementation in Unity, which is used in Gossamer.Andy told us how calculated care went into tuning the process to allow a wide variety of forms to appear. “Generation based on randomness can often feel a bit arbitrary and meaningless. The trick is to balance the elements so there’s an illusion of something intentional going on”, he shared. The look and feel come from a love for geometry but also wanting to soften it, by getting rid of the ‘hard edges’ to give it more fluid life with breath and texture.
Deep Connection
Marilene Oliver, Alberta, 2018-19 Created in Unity.
3D Slicer was used to conceive the work.Marilene Oliver has a massively impressive body of work that takes an interest in corporealities, from a perspective conceived through the materiality of digitised bodies. Deep Connection is her first work which makes use of virtual reality as a medium. Marilene’s experiments using the Body VR app to create 3D medical scan datasets that appeared as semi-transparent blocks of data - which as an experience in the museum has a layer of sound design that alters the reading of the flesh and tissue image, and makes the viewer differently engage with their own digital gaze.The work is interested in this more connected view of the body where the exploration can be one of empathy as the artist’s own body is replicated for the dynamics of virtual space.
Gerald McWonky
Mez Breeze, 2018 Created in MasterpieceVR.
Almost a centerpiece in the show, with its size and mass in the gallery, this is a piece by Mez Breeze. Here’s Gerald McWonky helping ground any aloofness you brought with you, with his insistent weight but opposing body language. This robo-humanoid is here to plonk, with no airs or cares. But in a near-endearing way (you most probably will turn your head at all angles) this mighty assemblage of ‘scrap’ will remind you of your fondness for Frankenstein. Originally Gerald was created as part of the “Sustainable Future Cities Initiative" developed by Microsoft, Samsung, MasterpieceVR and Sketchfab. “The process was all about getting a decent sense of weight to him, with an asymmetrical skewed-ness [without him looking too lopsided] while hinting that he’d been placed on a scrapheap, possibly after having key components scavenged from him [explains the holes]!” Mez tells us.
Dami & Falian: How Was Your Day?
Edward Madojemu, Nigeria, 2019 Created in Oculus Quill, Gravity Sketch, Photoshop and Unity.
We included a 360 film in this show, and you’re going to like the way its glue holds. How Was Your Day by Edward Madojemu invites you to follow two characters who go on adventures involving alien worlds. With one character representing the ‘new’, and the other embodying the ‘accustomed’, the film explores the folds of the unknown. This short science-fiction story is in fact how Edward chose to process the emotions as he came from Nigeria to Canada.
Quantum Tesseract: A Folding in Space Time
Kris Pilcher, USA Created in Unity.
Quantum Tesseract visualises the fourth dimension through sculptural projections of “HyperCubes” [fourth dimensional shapes] existing in a constant state of quantum unfolding. As a viewer, one will find themselves in the beyond-place, where the three dimensional existence is made possible only through virtual reality. This spectacular piece with its play on light and colour within a forming and reforming cube, was inspired by a conversation with bio-artist and researcher Joe Davis and a challenge by him to create a tesseract in virtual space. This piece is based on the research work of Four-Space Visualization of 4D Objects by Steven Richard Hollasch and Luke Holland. “By visualizing dimensions beyond our current space, we can perhaps get a glimpse into true base reality or find a connection to the Quantum Soul that connects us all” hopes Kris.
The Hug of Hong Hengcharoensuk
Sufee Yama, Thailand, 2020 Created in Oculus Quill.
Sufee Yama shared how this piece is an attempt at preserving past memories with her late grandmother, and sentimenting them into the projected future. The piece was conceived during a cleaning spree spurred by the pandemic, taking the artist back to a shared past with her grandmother. This immersive portrait is a recreation of an oil painting, created in VR using Oculus Quill. “The expressions of every brush stroke and choice of colors in the original oil painting that were filled with love and admiration are revived again in 360 space by the Machine Learning - Style Transfer technique using an amazing software called RunwayML. In this way, I can always re-immerse myself and others into the love of my grandmother again anytime.”
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
We interviewed Nick Ladd and added two spatial interviews from his visit, which can be viewed near his works ‘Prey’ and ‘Prehistoric’. For the longer piece that covers more ground about his work at Studio Syro and his mastery of Quill as an animation tool, you can read a dedicated blog piece here.
Hoping to see you at the show for a fuller, more in-sync with these bodies experience!
MOR Patch - 1.3.10 - Post VIFF Fixes
Version 1.3.10
Hey everyone, we've pushed a minor patch.
Fixes and Updates
Removed content from VIFF to coincide with the end of the festival.
Fixed bug that caused player name tags to display the wrong name.
Fixed bug with art pieces not showing up in the museum.
Updated portal visibility animation.
Revamped intro visuals in the MOR entrance.
If you run into any issues or bugs, please let us know by posting on our Steam forums or in our bugs channel on Discord. You can also send an email to Editor[at]MuseumOR[dot]com .
