A new day, new experiences at the Sandbox Immersive Festival in Qingdao!
Magic Leap “The dead must die” GOT experience
Magic Leap’s GOT experience presented here in Qingdao is maybe the best “room scanning experience” I have ever tried in my life.
It works like this: you put the Magic Leap One on your head, and then you start scanning your room to prepare Magic Leap tracking for the true experience. To do that, you have to search in your room for some flying rings and look at them until they become frozen: when you find one and you have looked at it for enough time, you can go to the next one. All of this is used to let Magic Leap scan all the room properly without giving the user the impression that he is just scanning the room for technical purposes. The process is pretty boring and took me some minutes to complete.
After the tracking has been initialized, the app starts and asks you to select a proper wall. After you have chosen a wall that is big enough, you see a dagger appearing in front of you and you have to pick it with your controller. After a while, a big frozen portal opens up in the wall you selected and a bad man comes out of it, wanting to kill you. Seen from some meters of distance, the portal in the wall appears pretty cool and believable and looking through it, you can see a frozen world.
This frozen man comes towards you and you have to fight with him. And that’s a pretty weird fight, since the dagger looks almost transparent, and so you can’t see it that well. At the same time, the enemy comes really close to you, so you have no idea of what he is doing, because due to the low FOV of Magic Leap, you don’t see well him as well. So, in the end you resort moving the dagger in a random way against him… and bam! At the first hit he dies. He falls to the floor and the experience is over.
3 minutes of room scanning and 30 seconds of experience. In the end, I think Magic Leap has done a great job in making the room scanning experience using GOT’s rings [sarcasm]. That’s impressive: moving in the room just to prepare the tracking for an experience that almost don’t exist is really exciting. Who is the director of this experience? Robert B. Weide?
Gloomy Eyes
Gloomy Eyes is an experience set in a world where there is a fight between the humans and the zombies. There is a little girl, with a cute dog, in the humans’ world. Her uncle and his gang want to kill all the zombies. On the other side, there is a little zombie boy (actually, half human, half zombie), with the eyes that are lit and creepy (from here, the title of the experience). He’s a nice guy… but you know, he’s also a zombie, so he also eats people.
The dog of the girl sometimes go playing with the little boy. And thanks to this, at a certain point, they meet. They look one in the eyes of the other. You can see that some sweet feeling is coming to light, when the uncle of the girl sees the zombie boy and tries to shoot him. He falls from a bridge, lands in the water and there the experience ends.
It is a pretty short experience, because it is just a first prologue episode. I think that the authors are looking for money to continue it.
I think that Gloomy Eyes is very cute. First of all, it is interesting the choice of the authors of creating a real-time 6 DOF experience in third person, where you see all the story unfolding in a mini-world that is around you. Then the graphics are similar to the one of animations movie like Hotel Transilvania, and also the mood is very similar: yes, there are zombies, but they are cute ones (the boy plays fetch with the dog launching him a dead hand), and there is a lot of dark humor happening.
The visuals are very well conceived and also some special effects make the experience more pleasant: when the boy and the girl see each other, you can see some purple colored particles coming from the floor and making them fly. It is a great allegory of love.
And the fact that it is narrated by Colin Farrel is for sure a plus.
I would like to see how the story unfolds: Gloomy Eyes was very short IMHO, but it looks promising. For this reason, it has just won a prize at the Paris NewImage festival.
Nothing To Be Written
Nothing To Be Written is a 3 DOF VR experience about the world war. It is based around the fact that during WW1, the British soldiers could send to the families some letters with preset messages (e.g. “I’m fine”, “I’m returning to the base”, or “I won’t be able to write to you for five days”, etc…) to communicate them simple things and also show the family they were still alive. The advantage of these letters was that they didn’t need to pass through censorship, so they delivered faster. The disadvantage was that the soldiers weren’t able to write anything else on that, just fill the preset messages and sign them.
The experience starts showing you one of these letters, that you send to your family at home… and then you start seeing a lot of them flying towards their destinations, meaning that the soldiers that were in the battlefield sending them were really many. After that, you start seeing a set of visual animations showing you how these letters were the connecting thread between the men on the front line and the families. So you maybe see the interior of a house, then a letter of this kind arrives and with some smooth transitions, the parts of the house slowly become a barrack, or a trench, and inside them you see the silhouettes of all the soldiers there. Then these transitions happen again, parts of the trench disappear and piece after piece they become another house, and so on. During all these animations, you see the war zones and the civil zones always more connected. It is a way of showing how there were people at home worried for the soldiers that could die in war, how the war entered the houses of these people.
The experience ends with a soldier taking one of this letters at your home. It is the same letter that you sent at the beginning. So, during the experience, you just followed its travel.
Nothing To Be Written is a well-made experience and for sure thanks to very good visuals and audio soundtracks is able to create a good sense of discomfort in the user. War is always unpleasant and this experience is able to show how it impacted the life of many families in a creative way. It has an original theme (I didn’t know about this kind of war letters) and has a very original way of performing the scene transitions. It fostered also some sad sensations in me, so it worked.
It was not one of my favorite experiences, though, because I hoped for a more strong ending. For instance, I thought that at the end you received a letter that your husband died, after all the letters he sent you… while actually, you just get the letter of the beginning. It closes the circles, but I hoped for a more strong climax. I think this is something that you see to have feelings, to think about the war and how it was impactful, and that’s it.
Intel’s Grease
I continued hearing Grease’s most popular song while I was in the screening venue, so in the end, I went to see what was happening there and I found the Grease experience made by Paramount in collaboration with Intel Studios. Basically, Intel has recorded with its technology a volumetric capture of a professional crew while it was dancing the Grease musical. And the director was Randal Kleiser, the same of the original Grease. It has been a really hard work, made with top-notch technology. After that, it made the experience available in augmented reality.
So, I was able to take a tablet, put some headphones on, and frame with the camera of the tablet a round table with a big Grease logo on (clearly a marker for the experience). After that, the Grease music started and on the tablet, I was able to see the crew dance at its rhythm.
The quality of the visuals was astounding: Intel has done really a great job in recording the performance. I could see them dancing in the table as if they were just real minions, and since the tracking was rocking solid, I could zoom on them in and out and rotate around the table and everything was so good. Only when going very close to the dancers I could see the imperfections of the volumetric recording technology (people from very close look like impressionistic pictures). And it was so cool that also the environments were changing from time to time… so the floor changed color, the furniture around the dancers changed in real time in front of me and so the experience was more variated.
It has been one of the most original tabletop AR experiences that I’ve tried until now.
And that’s it for this post! Today has been a great day… and I have also had a selfie with Joanna Popper during the party in the evening (you can see that in the header)! But stay tuned because my experiences here in China are not finished yet…