The MetaMovie review: Theater meets Virtual Reality in a fun adventure

Yesterday at the Venice VR Expanded festival, I finally managed to try “The MetaMovie”, an experience of improvisational theater in VR. I already talked about this project many months ago, when I interviewed its creator Jason Moore and was intrigued by this project, and now I’ve finally been able to experience it.

I have to warn you that this article is a bit personal for me. Since that article, I’ve become a bit friend with Jason. I’m very proud of having seen him go from a Kickstarter campaign that miraculously reached the end goal in the final hours to be selected at the very important Venice Film Festival. He’s also a Patron of this blog (and you can become too!) and I’m really happy to know him, but anyway I’ll try to keep this article unbiased.

The MetaMovie

So, what is The MetaMovie? The idea of The MetaMovie is the one of bringing improvisational theater to VR. In The MetaMovie there is a sort of screenplay and various actors perform live every time to recreate a story. So for instance, in The MetaMovie: Alien Rescue, the experience that I’ve tried, the story is about rescuing some alien creatures in danger and there are 3 actors, impersonating a girl and two alien warriors, that are on a desolate planet to perform that mission. The actors perform live and they have a basic structure of the plot, but they have every time to make up what to exactly say and what exactly do.

The best part of the show is that there is also another actor that shapes the story, and that one is you. You become the main character of the story, and all the other actors around you behave depending on what you are doing. Of course, they guide you so that you will follow the main plot of the experience (that you don’t know), but what exactly happens depends on you. This means that every show is different.

Since it is a very interesting show, that every time is different, there is also the possibility of being part of its audience and just enjoy what is happening (introverts will approve this): you can impersonate a little creature (a flying tiny robot in Alien Rescue) that flies around the space and can watch the action from all the points of view.

The concept is very interesting, because it mixes theater with virtual reality.

The technological platform where all of this happens is NeosVR, the ultra-open social VR space developed by Frooxius and other two developers. Neos is one of the most powerful social VR spaces out there and it is impressive that it has been developed by a so little team. The MetaMovie team exploits the power of Neos to be able to offer its pretty cool experience.

WARNING: ALL THE REST OF THE ARTICLE CONTAINS MILD SPOILERS AND THE VIDEO CONTAINS ENORMOUS SPOILERS

My experience with The MetaMovie: Alien Rescue

If you want to watch my full experience with The MetaMovie, you can enjoy it here below! I promise that you’ll have some fun 🙂

To enjoy the MetaMovie I had to start a special application on Viveport (probably a fork of Neos VR) and then I found myself inside a starting lobby, where I have been welcomed by a tiny robot. I admit I started with some little issues (like my Mic not working), but the team was all there to help me. Aegis Wolf from the Neos dev team spent various minutes helping me in solving the issues (damn Oculus Virtual Audio Device) and in explaining me how to interact with Neos menus. He also was kind enough to explain me how to configure everything for the Youtube Livestream. Then Jason arrived, we had some chat and then the team explained to me how I should have interacted with the virtual world: how to grab objects, how to shoot, how to activate the spotlight, etc…

It was my first time in Neos, I was using the Vive Cosmos, and I found amazing that the team spent so much time with me to introduce me to the experience. I would have felt lost if they hadn’t helped me during my first minutes of complete confusion. I think this is what everyone proposing a similar experience should do. The welcoming moment was fundamental.

In the experience I was the Hero, that was the main character of the story, and was dressed with a futuristic armor like the one of the soldiers in Halo. Flying around me, with the avatar of tiny flying camera bots, there was the audience, that was formed by around 6-7 people.

After I was ready to go, the experience started. Jason, dressed as an elegant dog, told me what was my story, or better part of it. The first thing that he said was that I should have started thinking about my backstory, especially about the planet I came from. Then he told me that I had to help my cousin in rescuing some alien creatures that have been trapped by an evil alien race that wants to do experiments on them so that to transform them into aggressive soldiers under their control. After that, he said that we were ready to go. I entered a teleport station and I found myself on my big spaceship from where I started my quest.

I don’t want to spoil you the whole plot, so let me just tell you that after some minutes I actually joined my (female) cousin and her two (male) alien friends and we started investigating what is happening to the poor alien creatures that are being used as a war weapon. After some little enigmas, some shooting, and some chats that lasted for around one hour, we came out of a door, that the whole experience was over. I found myself back again in the initial lobby, where the whole team of actors greeted me again, and after some fun and some photos, I departed.

The MetaMovie: Alien Rescue review

The MetaMovie: Alien Rescue requires a lot of improvisation. If you are too shy, or you are too serious, or you just want to watch something passively, buy a ticket as a spectator. If you want to be active, you should impersonate the main actor, even if you have no idea what you are doing. Basically it is as if someone put you on the stage of a theater and told you to perform a show that night with the rest of the crew. It feels like when you fake your CV and then you get hired and you have to perform the job anyway: it requires some courage and inventiveness.

For instance, when Jason told me that I had to invent myself my backstory because I would have needed it later on, the “anxiety” started. OMG, what backstory should I have??? From what planet do I can from??? I mean, the backstory of the VR developer on Earth is too boring for a show that is worth seeing (unless Johnny Sins decides to do a movie about it, but that’s another story). So I started thinking very fast about a story to say. And since I’m a simple man, I came up with this story of a guy that comes from Pluto, and that spends his whole time having big parties, drinking, dancing, chasing girls and why not? Also shooting people.

But this having to make up thingsdoesn’t end with this starting story: during the whole show, the characters will speak with you and will require you to do some actions. “Hey Tony, open the cage!”, “Hey Tony, what should we do now?”, “Hey Tony, what do you think about this?”. Too many things to do, too many questions you have to provide an answer for. You are the hero, everyone is relying on you. And since I’m not Steven Seagal, that always knows the right things to do (breaking bones) and to say (some sentence taken from a fortune cookie), that created a bit of anxiety in me, because I always didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t know if I was saying the right thing.

If you ever have to try the MetaMovie, let me give you a piece of advice: relax, because there is not a right answer you have to say. It is not an examination, it is an experience. Whatever you will do or say, the other actors are always ready to support you and to guide you: if you don’t solve an enigma, they will do that for you; if you don’t know what to say, they will start speaking between themselves, and so on. They are there to support you, not to judege you.

There was a moment where I was asked to tell a joke: I started thinking, but the only things coming to my mind where things that sounded well only in Italian or dirty jokes (my kinky mind, I know), so I just said “Oh, nothing comes to my mind”. I was pretty embarassed (not as embarrassed if as I had told the dirty joke, though), but the rest of the crew never underlined this: they went on and told a joke for me and so we could proceed in the experience. You can relax because actually you are there to have fun, even if I have to say that it is normal that you will feel some anxiety because there is some pressure on you as you are the main character.

What I like to do in this kind of contexts is trying to make the experience the funniest possible: the other actors are working, but they are also there to have fun. So usually telling some jokes, hugging people, and doing crazy stuff is the best to enjoy these kinds of improvisational experiences. The actors will always follow the mood that you have set and if you’re being funny, the experience will be funnier for everyone. I spent my whole adventure talking about getting drunk and having parties on Pluto, hugging people, enjoying alien drugs (sorry mom), and shooting with the gun whatever moved like a true cowboy. This absurd character I was impersonating was funny, and later on, Jason told me that also the team had fun having it in the story. It also worked because I like to be funny: you have to find a character that suits most how you truly are in your life.

I really liked that the actors around me guided me throughout the whole story: this way we never got struck. And I also liked that the rhythm is pretty hectic and you have not even a moment to think. This is cool on one side, but on the other side, sometimes you feel a bit like a ball in a flipper. Every time I entered a new room, I always liked the idea of exploring it, but after some seconds that I was there hanging around, someone else from the crew, moved me immediately in the right direction to perform the task that we had to do. Sometimes I had to make some little tasks, but I needed some time to get used to the interface of Neos, so my partners after a short time did it for me to make things smoother. I admit I would have loved sometimes a bit more time to think, to explore, to take confidence with the environment around me. Instead, you are always guided to do the next task and do it fast. 很快很快! I understand that the show has preset times, but maybe at this point, it would be better to shape the environment for this speed. For instance, if the environment shouldn’t be explorable, probably it is better to design smaller rooms, so that there is nothing to explore (or create big rooms with clear roadblocks).

I loved that the other characters have a clear personality and that since they were made by live actors, they felt so real. And since nothing was scripted, they could every time adapt to the real context that was happening. One of the characters, for instance, looked like being a shady person, and I didn’t know if I could trust him or not. And while I was talking with him, I started behaving a bit as I behave in real life with people I don’t completely trust. This is a true next-level of immersion.

The experience is interactive, and I shot some enemies, and activated some triggers. This is another feature that incremented the immersion in the experience.

Regarding the graphics, I can say that Neos is not the best social VR space that I tried in this sense. It appears a bit rough and there were sometimes some issues with the smoothness of animations: the monsters that tried to attack me looked like their movement was a bit choppy. The overall quality is the one of an indie game made by a very small team.

As Jason said when he welcomed me to the experience, The Metamovie is still a bit rough around the edges. The graphics can be improved, sometimes there are some glitches, and also the audio quality should be smoother. I had for instance lots of issues in understanding the robots and AIs speaking in the experience. Their voice was distorted in a weird way, and since I’m not a native English speaker, I missed a lot of what they said. So at a certain point an AI said something that to me sounded like “I fdalfjldksfhldks laboratory ajfldkjfljds jfsd lkfj lfj la door fdjalfjdsl”, and then the actors told me “Tony, what do you think?” and I was like “eeeeeeeeh, weeeeeellll… MAYBE YES, MAYBE NO?”

But apart from these problems, the experience was very cool. It was like living the exciting life of another person for one hour. You find yourself in his body and you have to behave like him, living some amazing adventure. The actors were very smart in guiding me and in involving me in the story, and having fun with me. The plot was intriguing and I was a bit disappointed when after one hour the experience was over, because there was still a lot to do there… but this is only Metamovie Part I. The even better part is that, as I noticed when I played Mandala at the Sandbox festival, after you finish the experience and you stay there with the other actors to chill for some minutes, you feel like you are all friends because you’ve lived a great adventure together. And this is another thing that I loved about Metamovie: it connects you emotionally with other people around the world: even if you know nothing about them and they just played a role the whole time, it is like if you had done something together and so you feel a bond with them.

The MetaMovie – Final considerations

If you’re someone that is a bit adventurous and social, you should absolutely try The MetaMovie. If Jason Moore and all his team manage to fix the roughness of the experience, The MetaMovie can really become something like Theater 3.0. It lets you live a new life for 1 hour, it gives you fun, it connects you with people. It is great. The road in front of them is still long, but I think they are on the right path: in any case, the experience is fun today even if there are some issues here and there.

The big problem of The MetaMovie is in my opinion on the business side. Everyone wants to be the Hero, and due to the high quality of the experience, I would personally pay for it $10-$20. But that money is not enough to pay all the crew for that time, so they also need money from the audience. The issue is that I personally don’t know if I would pay to be the audience of an improvised experience whose main character is another person I don’t even know. Also because if that person is weak, the whole experience results weak.

What the team should do is involving more people. When I tried Mandala in China, we were 3 people acting randomly in the story: we didn’t know each other, but thanks to the talent of the actors and to our desire to have fun, the overall experience was great for every one of us. Probably The Metamovie team should consider something like that in the future… or it should give more agency to the spectators (maybe letting them choose how certain things of the story should turn out with a poll).

Let’s see how they will solve this big riddle… I guess they’ll improvise, as they do every day :). For now, compliments to my friend Jason, and to all his crew and good luck for their future!

(And if you want to have more info about The Metamovie and its next shows, you can check out its official website)

(Header image by Jason Moore)