My day as a speaker at View Conference 2019, trying the Rift S and NFB’s VR storytelling experiences
Last year I have attended the View Conference as a blogger, and I have been able to listen to super interesting talks (like the one of Jan Pinkava) and to interview amazing people in the VR field (like John Gaeta and Donald Greenberg).
This year, I attended the WCVRI in China, so unluckily, I haven’t been able to do a full reportage of the View Conference for you. But on Friday, I have been a speaker, and so let me tell you my experience for just that day!
Being a speaker at the View Conference
The View Conference is a prestigious event in my city of Turin, Italy. It is all about 3D and CGI (and so now also about AR and VR) and every year features speakers that are very famous and important: the number of Oscar winners that speak at View is above 9000! Strangely, notwithstanding this, it is not much well known abroad, but in my city, every person that studies something CGI-related craves attending it.
When I was a student in computer science engineering, my teacher of computer graphics told me about this event for the first time. And every year, there is someone that advises me to attend it. That’s why when this year, thanks to Simone Favarin that has invited me as a speaker and Maria Elena Gutierrez that has approved our talk, I have been chosen as one of the speakers, it felt so magical to me. I’ve gone from being part of the audience to member of the press, to one of the speakers… I still can’t believe it.
On Friday morning, I made my speech about “Design Thinking and Virtual Reality” together with Simone, and it went pretty well. He talked about his expertise in design thinking, detailing all the biases of our brain, and I talked about virtual reality and its possible uses in design and in psychology. It was a good speech… even if we had no time to test it in the days before, we managed to do a good performance. Do you want to see the slides? Well, Simone and I decided to gift them to the community, so here you are the Slideshare link with all the PPT!
After the talk, we made people try the photic-stimulation app Mind Machine (made with Enea Le Fons) and HitMotion:Reloaded, the mixed reality game for the Vive Focus Plus that we are launching soon. People loved our game!
If you will ever have the opportunity of speaking at View Conference, well, take it immediately. You can really breathe a special air at this event!
Networking at View Conference
At View Conference, the atmosphere is very informal. And especially if you are a speaker, it’s easy to become friends with the other speakers. In just a few hours there, I have exchanged my business card with people of Pixar (Dylan, it’s been a pleasure!) and National Film Board of Canada. I have also met Gianni Cuozzo, a very smart entrepreneur working in cybersecurity (thanks for the dessert, Gianni!), my previous partner at Immotionar Gianni Rosa Gallina and Tiffany, a woman working in recruiting. So many meetings for just one day!
After that, Eloi Champagne of NFB has taken me to the demo area to try the latest experiences made by his association. Let me tell you a bit about these VR products in the next paragraphs. But before, here you are a video of Eloi playing our game 😉
Hands-on sessions at View Conference
Rift S
For the first time, I have been able to try the Rift S! It was the device used by NFB to showcase the VR experience “Biidaaban”.
Unluckily, the experience lasted only a few minutes and it didn’t even require the use of controllers, so I can’t write a real hands-on review… but let me tell you my first impressions anyway.
The Rift S seemed to me a good device. I admit I expected it to be much worse reading the specifications, but actually, it is not bad at all. It is nothing extraordinary, it just feels like a refresh of the CV1, but I think it is worth its price of $400.
The thing that has impressed me the most is comfort. For my head, it was much better than Rift CV1. The sponge on the facemask was very comfortable and the headset fit my head very well. I felt it also better than the Oculus Quest: it is much more balanced. Now I get why people say that the Rift S is better than Quest+Link for PC VR games.
The second thing that I loved was positional tracking. I don’t know what kind of black magic Facebook engineers have used (I think John Carmack’s black magic), but the Insight tracking worked like a charm. It was very fluid and precise, it felt as using outside-in tracking technology. My brain could feel that something was a little bit different in the tracking from the one of CV1, but it was just a slight sensation that I can’t explain. In any case, it’s the best inside-out tracking technology that I’ve ever tried.
I have not tried dark scenes with bright elements, so I haven’t been able to test glares and godrays, but for the very colored scenes of the experience, I haven’t seen any.
The display fill factor was good, but the resolution didn’t seem fantastic to me. Also, the colors weren’t that bright, because of the LED display. In the end, the display, in general, is what I liked the least… its specs are not great for being a VR headset in 2019.
As I’ve said, for $400, it is a good device. But of course, if I had more money, I would buy the Reverb, the Cosmos or the Index…
The Orchid And The Bee
The Orchid And The Bee is the first experience of the National Film Board of Canada that I tried. It is a 5-minutes video, that has been exported in 8K HDR. Eloi Champagne explained to me that while they know that no headset can showcase this kind of visuals at the moment, they thought it was a great idea exporting it this way so that it can be future-ready.
The video starts in an underwater setting, where you can see some jellyfishes floating around you. Then the situation evolves, and you start seeing always new creatures, some that look friendly and some others that look weird. In the end, you also see a little human baby floating underwater. I don’t know how to explain it… it is like a trippy underwater journey where you see different kinds of creatures. The authors define it as “a sublime and unsettling meditation on evolution, genetic modification and our tenuous position within the natural world”. I think that “sublime and unsettling” are the best words to define it, since from one side it is really well made and has a relaxing effect, while on the other side, it looks weird and a bit creepy.
The experience has been made by artist Frances Adair Mckenzie and it is special because it mixes a new technology like virtual reality with a classical tool like plasticine. All the video has been made with stop-motion of plasticine elements! So, it has not been made in CGI, but crafted by hand. For this reason, it required 4 months to be fully realized. It is worth to be seen just for this reason.
Biidaaban: First Light
Biidaaban: First Light is the experience that let me try the Oculus Rift S. It is a CGI experience made by NFB and Lisa Jackson, that makes us think about our future, our past, our lost languages and our relationship with nature.
In this experience, you get to see a special version of a future Toronto, where nature has reclaimed its place inside the city. You see actual real places of Toronto around you, but there is grass, there are trees, and there are no people. The visuals are really beautiful, and I loved being inside those places, even if they felt a bit weird.
While you are immersed in such beautiful environments, a voice talks with you using indigenous languages, the ones of Wendat, Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) and Anishinaabe (Ojibway), that are translated in English in floating text boxes that are all around you.
While I loved the 3D settings I was in, I had a hard time understanding the meaning of the experience, so I asked for some explanations. Vincent McCurley of NFB explained to me that this is an experience of “Indigenous Futurism”. It is an experience that should make us think of the civilization, of our future and its relationship with our past, and of the various languages that we are losing.
The progress is for sure something that is making us having better lives, but at the same time, we are losing a lot while we are evolving on the technological side. We have lost our contact with nature, we have lost our contact with humanity, and we are also losing all the cultures and the languages of the indigenous people of the world. Indigenous people had a very strong relationship with nature, and also their languages were less abstract and more connected to the land, to each other, and to time itself. All of this risks to disappear in the future.
The languages chosen for this experience are not random: they are the ones of the tribes that inhabited the place that was before known of Tkaronto, and that is now the modern city of Toronto. Biidaaban mixes the language and the love of nature of the original indigenous inhabitants of Canada with the technological present of a Toronto full of skyscrapers. It makes us visualize a future where the city of Toronto has become again closer to the culture and the vision of its indigenous founders. It is something that makes us think.
Homestay
(Warning: this description contains huge spoilers)
Homestay is probably the experience that I liked the most among the ones that I tried. It narrates the sad story of a Canadian family that hosts a Japanese international student that suddenly takes off his own life. It is pretty intense and sad, and after I removed the headset I still felt my heart very heavy.
In Homestay, you don’t directly see the story of the student. It is all narrated via an abstract symbolism. You stay inside a big Japanese zen garden, that is very minimal and low-poly. It looks like made of beautiful Origami, a paper technique that is Japanese exactly as the student. The visuals are all made with shades of gray, with special elements that are bright red or blue. While you are in this magical garden, there is the voice of a girl that narrates the story that has happened. She talks in first person, because she is the daughter of the family that hosted the suicidal Japanese guy.
In the beginning, she talks about the student arriving and being like a new brother to her. The story evolves positively, and so does your environment. At the beginning, you have just a gray tree in front of you in the garden, with red flowers growing on it. At a certain point, a red leaf comes close to you, and if you touch it with your controller, it triggers new elements coming to your garden (new trees, etc…). The story continues unfolding, with new leaves floating in front of you, that when triggered, make the garden become always more beautiful (you can see appearing more trees, a bridge, a little river, and some creatures).
But then the story starts becoming a bit sad, with the Japanese student becoming more introvert, starting staying awake more and eating less, and this is reflected in your environment with the garden becoming less beautiful and the interactions becoming less efficient. At a certain point, I found myself enclosed in a gray box, that for sure was a symbolism of the student being enclosed in the cage of its depression. I could still see red leafs, but I couldn’t touch them anymore, only make them move following the rotation of my controller, in a confused way. The leaf attracted other leaves, creating a disrupting vortex of leaves. This is another symbol of the family losing the “control” of the wellness of the kid, and the kid losing control of his life, that became always more turbulent.
When the little guy suicides himself, the interactions with the world get blocked, and you can only see a distant red leaf you can’t interact with in any way anymore. At the same time, the zen garden falls into pieces, and in a few minutes, all the beautiful world around you is no more. You feel powerless and sad, you see the beautiful things that you constructed around you falling into pieces, exactly as the family felt during the tragedy.
The experience is beautiful and intense. It is very sad, but also poetic thanks to the symbolism of the zed garden that narrates a so sad story in a very light way. Kudos to the NFB for this creation… and thanks to Vincent for having explained to me all its details.
That’s it for my beautiful day at View Conference 2019. I can’t wait to be part of View Conference 2020… and be sure that I will tell you about it on this blog!
And if you have questions, feel free to add them here in the comments or on my social media channels!
Disclaimer: this blog contains advertisement and affiliate links to sustain itself. If you click on an affiliate link, I'll be very happy because I'll earn a small commission on your purchase. You can find my boring full disclosure here.
