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Exposing New Realities: Immersive, Participatory Art, Games & Storytelling at the 2017 Northampton Film Festival

By Kathy Bisbee On September 23, 2017 In Uncategorized With No Comments

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(September 21st, 2017, Northampton, Mass.) The Northampton Film Festival will launch its second year of curated immersive content showcasing games, experiences and stories in VR, AR, 360, social media and participatory art-making at the A.P.E Gallery at 126 Main Street, Northampton, MA on Saturday, September 30th, 2017, from 12-5pm.

This event is free and open to the public on a first-come, first-serve basis.

With the help of five local artists, Exposing Next Realities will be reflected in LIVE art-making throughout the day inside of Google’s Tiltbrush, a 3D tool for creating art inside of VR, by Robert Markey, Laurie Goddard, John Nordell, Gary Smith, and Lyn Sisler.

Local Pioneer Valley artists; Robert Markey, Laurie Goddard, John Nordell, Gary Smith, and Lyn Sisler will take part in LIVE painting inside of Virtual Reality. Attendees will watch Oscar-nominated VR film ‘Pearl’ and experience the immersive journalism piece ‘Across the Line’ about crossing a protest line at abortion clinics.

The 3D art will be preserved for community viewing during and after the festival. The community can also try Tiltbrush and create their own art or participate in collective virtual and “in-real-life” murals, as well as a new sculpting tool called Masterpiece VR that allows multiple artists to create simultaneously inside the same virtual space. The Pioneer Valley Game Developers will again host locally-developed games and experiences.

Boston-based artist Alexander Golob and interactive media artists from the Public VR Lab (co-founded by Brookline Interactive Group and Northampton Community Television) are coordinating interactive murals and art creation, providing the community an opportunity to create their own 3D and social media art through murals composed of hundreds of individual snapchats, #theSnapGallery.

By adding art to their compositions to the snaps with markers, visitors will bridge image-making techniques and traditions with digital age content creation. This interactive project demonstrates how everyone can be an artist and/or an activist, especially when combining voices into something larger than a single person, like a community art installation.

To participate in #theSnapGallery project, send your Snap submission to Alexander Golob through his Instagram and Facebook pages (@AlexanderGolobArt) and through email (alexandergolobart at gmail.com).

Drop by Immersive @NFF on Saturday to play games with the Pioneer Valley Game group, experience virtual reality, and create art inside of Google’s Tiltbrush VR and Masterpiece VR’s artmaking tool.

Other Featured Immersive Experiences

Zen Parade is a surreal journey through a 360° 3D animated world of living sculptures – A five-minute psychedelic abstract art experience that can be enjoyed anytime to relax and rejuvenate.

In Allumette, you’re an invisible witness to a moving tale of dreams, love, and tragedy, set within a city nestled in the clouds, where a young girl and her mother sell matches that resemble sparklers. Everything goes well at first, but a tragic event completely changes the story’s tone. However, despite the melancholy vibe, it’s still a heartwarming experience.

Pearl is another 360 interactive story that follows a little girl (named Pearl) and her father as they both pursue their dreams. While short, it’s a remarkably powerful and inspiring tale. You’ll watch as Pearl grows on the road with her musician dad, starting off as a bubbly little child. Soon, she transforms into a teenager with a mind of her own and a love of making music. Pearl is an Oscar-nominated story you have to experience in VR in order to witness its full potential.

ACROSS THE LINE is an immersive VR experience that combines 360 video and computer-generated imaging (CGI) to put viewers in the shoes of a patient entering a health center for a safe and legal abortion.

Tilt Brush is a room scale 3D painting virtual reality application developed and published by Google.

Masterpiece VR is the first art creation tool to feature collaborative functionality, allowing two users to sculpt at once. Four artists can paint and sculpt together simultaneously. That means that you and your friends—regardless of where they are in the world—can make 3D content together in real time. https://www.masterpiecevr.com/

Immersive Demos: Pioneer Valley Game Developers

VR Jogger | Sick Pixel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WF1Zgvrsy6Y

Color BlastAR | HitPoint Studios

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WYKcCe0RWo

Vanishing Point | Woodpenny

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vanishing-point/id1064338731?mt=8

VR Academy Classes

By Andrew On September 19, 2017 In Uncategorized With No Comments

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BIG and the Public VR Lab are pleased to offer several classes in virtual reality this summer and fall.

WebVR with A-Frame

Want to make 3D websites? We’ll show you how in this two-session class! Instructors from Fasility will lead two sessions on how to make virtual reality for the web, also known as WebVR. We’ll use A-Frame, a popular and free framework from Mozilla that makes VR as easy and powerful as editing HTML.

Next sessions: September 7th & 14th 5:30-7:30pm – $50

Designing for VR: Creating 3D objects with Blender
Blender is a free professional open-source 3D computer graphics software used for creating animated films, visual effects, and video games. This two-session introductory course will provide you with a basic understanding of using Blender, including creating basic shapes, color and rendering options, and modeling techniques.

Next sessions: TBD

Introduction to Unity
Unity is a powerful and widely-used game engine for developing VR experiences, as well as video games for consoles, mobile devices, and websites.
This 2-session workshop will introduce you to the basic functions and concepts of Unity and will provide you with the opportunity to do 3D modeling and coding through its systems.

Next session: Monday, October 23rd & 30th – $50

Unity – Basic Coding
Unity is a powerful and widely-used game engine for developing VR experiences, as well as video games for consoles, mobile devices, and websites.
This 2 session workshop will introduce you to the basic functions and concepts of Unity and will provide you with the opportunity to learn basic C# coding.

Next session: TBD

Creating VR Experiences With Simmetri –
Simmetri is an immersive design tool for creating interactive experiences for VR. In this one-session workshop taught by its lead developer, you will learn about the basics of Simmetri and create a mini-VR experience with your classmates. You will also export a 360 degree video of your creation for uploading to YouTube to share with friends.

In the class, we’ll learn the basics on using the tool and begin exploring and experimenting with various ideas.

For ages 14 and up

Next sessions: TBD

Illustration in VR: Using VR Doodler
Want to create a virtual reality experience? Not crazy about learning Unity? If you like to draw or tell stories, come learn how to use VR Doodler, an easy-to-use online tool that enables you to make a 3D drawing on the web that you can ultimately turn into a virtual reality story!

For ages 14 and up

Next sessions: TBD

What is Community VR?

By Kathy Bisbee On September 15, 2017 In Uncategorized With No Comments Permanent Link to What is Community VR?

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What is Community VR? (the short version, for now)

Co-founder and Director of the Public VR Lab, Kathy Bisbee presenting on Community VR at NATOA 2017

I’m in the process of writing a longer article than this one about a new movement I hope you’ll join me to seed, fund, cultivate and grow. It’s called the Community VR movement. Like its sister movement, Community Media, it’s a movement where everyone can participate, create, learn, share and express. Where everyone’s stories matter, everyone is included, and everyone’s voices can be heard. It shares a goal of providing equitable access to media making tools, training, and in inspiring the next generation of journalists, filmmakers, creators and storytellers. The only thing it doesn’t have in common with community media is that it’s not yet ubiquitous or woven into our social, cultural, economic and public fabric. Yet.

The Public VR Lab is building an inclusive Community VR movement that will facilitate public dialogue; provide professional training; empower community knowledge and creation of 360, virtual and augmented content; provide access to tools, headsets, arcades, toolkits, and professional expertise; and generate locally-focused, broadly impactful, Next Realities experiences in the public interest. Here’s a recent highlight reel about our work at the Lab.

At the NATOA conference (the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors …) in Seattle this week, I was met with surprisingly-engaged enthusiasm from government employees who tried our HTC VIVE after my presentation and wanted to figure out how they could use VR and 360 in their communities. Colleagues began the process of signing up to become a Public VR Lab affiliate; others wanted to purchase our Public VR Lab Toolkits (VR demo and content creator toolkits); others still asked about our curriculum, equipment, staffing; and NATOA attendees from Alaska to Massachusetts inquired about applying to our national collaborative project called “Immigration Stories in Full Frame: Reimagining Migration.”

We have to be mindful not to make early mistakes as this new medium grows from infancy into its preteen years, assuring that equipment/headsets, powerful computers, and training programs are accessible to all, no matter your geography, income, gender, ethnicity, etc. We need to educate creators on the potentially troubling “virtual literacy” issues and ethics concerns inherent to this visceral medium; to the dangers of limiting our characters in VR to our own/current biases and roles; and to consider policies that hold VR/AR marketing, propaganda, access to the new currencies of the metaverse, and the use of public spaces in careful check with public interest needs.

A longer article will be published later this month on the implications of this work, my thoughts on the immediate challenges and opportunities, the projects we’ve set out to grow the movement in the next year, and ways you can help to support Community VR. Stay tuned!

Brookline Interactive Group (BIG) and Northampton Community Television (NCTV) launched this VR accessibility and literacy initiative at their community media centers in Northampton and Brookline, MA, beginning in April of 2016, and have expanded the Lab to grow a national network of Lab affiliates to work collaboratively to build a movement for Community VR. Please join us!

Become an affiliate of the Public VR Lab at your library, community media or arts organization, government agency, or newsroom, and be part of building the movement for Community VR.

Building a Community VR Movement: The Lab Featured in MIT’s Immerse Publication

By Kathy Bisbee On September 12, 2017 In 360 video, AR, augmented reality, Brookline, Featured, Immigration VR, Journalism, Press, storytelling, VR Education With No Comments Permanent Link to Building a Community VR Movement: The Lab Featured in MIT’s Immerse Publication

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The Co-founder and Director of the Public VR Lab, Kathy Bisbee, was one of several immersive storytelling thought leaders featured in a recent MIT publication, Immerse, in an article about Who is VR for? Kathy shares her expertise and thoughts about building a national movement for Community VR, a phrase she’s used to describing how community media and place0-based arts organizations can develop to create hyperlocal immersive stories, games, journalism, and experiences in VR by collaborating, co-funding, and partnering with media outlets, municipalities, libraries, community media arts organizations, film festivals, and universities.

https://immerse.news/who-is-vr-for-20b3f077a912

Virtual Reality (VR) in the Public Interest….

By Kathy Bisbee On July 31, 2017 In 360 video, AR, augmented reality, Boston, Brookline, Featured, Gaming, HTC Vive, Journalism, Northampton, storytelling, VR Education With No Comments Permanent Link to Virtual Reality (VR) in the Public Interest….

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Tomorrow we’re driving down to Games for Change in NYC. As usual, I’m thinking about VR-in-the-public interest and how we can differentiate gaming from the many other ways we can learn, share, create and teach VR. At the Public VR Lab, we’ve been teaching our community and beyond for over a year now to use new tools and equipment for community storytelling, immersive journalism, and documentary filmmaking in order to heal from trauma and to create awareness and action around the health of our planet. Here’s a few of this week’s highlights and resources we’ve seen so far in the space.

On the content creation side, our team is learning how we can deploy content, trainings and toolkits to our members, community of media makers and to share with other colleagues. While this may seem something drawn from the 1992 novel “Snow Crash” and its “metaverse,” it means the beginning of public creation tools and a door to many new social, creative and possibly economic platforms/spaces that are sure to follow for an almost ready VR-ready world. This might be the closest thing to Dreamweaver for VR that we’ve seen to date. P.S Snow Crash is a must-read.

Start Building Your VR Second Life in Sansar

Empathy-producing content can help us to understand what it is like to “be” a tree, or understand what it might be like to be in the body of another, and to feel “presence” that helps you to put yourself outside of your own experience. Feeling empathy inside of VR can even move us to action on issues like social and environmental justice in the “real” world.

VR-related technologies can help shape beautiful new ways we see ourselves, our current reality, and can shift our perception of what truth and reality are. VR can help us experience and understand many things from visceral perspectives that embody the experience of the “other.”

Tree, is a virtual-reality project that transforms you into a rainforest tree. With your arms as branches and your body as the trunk, you’ll experience the tree’s growth from a seedling into its fullest form and witness its fate firsthand. Tree elevates the concept of empathy in VR, helping the participant understand what it’s like to be a tree in the Amazon. I particularly love the redwood version of this created by Marshmallow Laser Feast (I so love this name!) with a haptic feedback vest that makes you feel like you are entering inside the tree.

And this project, RIOT whose filmmaker, Karen Palmer, will speak at our favorite festival for storytelling, the Future of Storytelling in NYC this October. According to FOST, she was inspired by the events in Ferguson, MO, following the shooting of Michael Brown, and created RIOT, an emotionally responsive, live-action film that uses AI and machine learning through facial recognition to allow participants to navigate though a dangerous riot. Palmer’s work challenges participants to understand other people’s lived experiences, and represents a powerful development in the emerging field of neurogames.

Another area of VR-in-the-public interest growth is in the health sector, and how VR can make us “think” differently and even heal from trauma. This New York Times had a great story today about the use of VR by therapists to heal patients from the fear and trauma of car accidents, the fear of heights, flying, spiders, PTSD, and other forms of anxiety and stress.

And lastly, the team at the Public VR Lab sat in on an insightful VRARA webinar a few weeks ago hosted with Robert Scoble as he shared his always intriguing insights about where tech and VR in particular is headed (here). Check it out!

Gateway Arts Visits the Public VR Lab

By Kathy Bisbee On July 24, 2017 In 360 video, AR, augmented reality, Boston, Brookline, Gateway Arts, HTC Vive, Northampton, Ricoh Theta S, storytelling, VR Ecohack, VR Education With No Comments Permanent Link to Gateway Arts Visits the Public VR Lab

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We’ve been super busy this month at the Public VR Lab and Brookline Interactive Group.

We’re hiring a new Assistant Director, have several summer multimedia programs (aka “camps”) for kids, launched new VR classes for adults, and co-coordinated Crowdsourced Boston to get ten other community media centers involved in re-creating Back to the Future! BIG’s talented members won three awards at the Alliance for Community Media‘s national Hometown Awards, and BIG won Best Public Access Station in the country! Woot!

We are laying our plans for our fall eleven-day film sprint, curating the immersive content and LIVE VR ART at the Northampton Film Festival for their September 27-October 1st, 2017 fest, in collaboration with our sister organization, Northampton Community Television (NCTV).

We’re launching a national collaborative on a VR project around immigration stories, and an affiliate program will be announced soon so that libraries, teen centers, arts and cultural organizations and media centers can learn to share VR with their communities, have the equipment and training they need to start a Lab on site and engage their communities in a conversation about the future of 3D computing!

Our VR demos are weekly, and recently we had Lead Boston, Brookline High School math camps, and the Gateway Arts program stop by for a tour and VR demos at the Lab.

Check out the cool vid of their folks playing for the first time in VR above!

Brookline Town Hall in 360 Sketch

By Kathy Bisbee On July 20, 2017 In Uncategorized With No Comments Permanent Link to Brookline Town Hall in 360 Sketch

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Two things to share today:

Google Expeditions

Excited to see this great tool for sharing VR experiences now open beyond education:

Google opens Expeditions VR education app to the public

In other news, our team created this super cool 360 illustration of Brookline Town Hall!

Brookline Town Hall 360° Sketch Video

Brookline Interactive Group is hiring!

By Kathy Bisbee On July 18, 2017 In Uncategorized With No Comments Permanent Link to Brookline Interactive Group is hiring!

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Brookline Interactive Group, one of the community media arts centers houses the Public VR Lab’s work in the Boston area, is hiring an Assistant Director, a new position.

While our work at BIG is in predominantly in community media arts, the AD will be able to participate in rolling out our new model of community media in the VR /AR space, providing public accessibility and digital inclusion in this still nascent industry, and will help us gain the capacity to grow our work in Brookline and beyond.

https://brooklineinteractive.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Assistant-Director-Job-Description.pdf

Applications accepted until July 25th, 2017.

Anyone with relevant experience in media arts facilitation/ non-profit operations will be interviewed by phone or in person.

DEADLINE EXTENDED: Immigrations Stories in Full Frame: Collaborative 360/VR Filmmaking

By Kathy Bisbee On July 13, 2017 In 360 video, AR, augmented reality, Boston, Brookline, Ricoh Theta S, VR Education With No Comments Permanent Link to DEADLINE EXTENDED: Immigrations Stories in Full Frame: Collaborative 360/VR Filmmaking

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Collaborative Immigration Project: Deadline extended to 9/18/2017

We’re building a national collaboration project around 360 filmmaking, immersive journalism, and community storytelling. You’re invited to apply to join our team, and we’ve extended the deadline to help more folks apply to the project.

Join our cohort to learn, share, and create a 360/VR documentary project on “Re-imaging Migration” together over the next year, as well as a create traditional media content for our local, regional and national networks. We’ll even have an app, and insights throughout the project experts on immigration messaging, history of migration in America, and on interviewing techniques.

To Apply:

Please email info@brooklineinteractive.org with the following information:

Contact info for applicants
A description of your work and your organization (media center, news outlet, library, arts org, etc)
Your interest in 360 video and immigration stories in your community
Capacity: Describe the technical skills and interest of your team, storytelling, and journalism, as well as describing the immigration stories that you feel need to be shared from your community.
Describe a current collaboration you participate in and your experience in it. Why do you wish to collaborate with our project? What can you offer your cohort co-members?
Do you currently own any camera equipment? Any 360 equipment?
How able are you to meet monthly on a call with the cohort?
Application date is now September 18th, 2017 at midnight

We’ll begin our work together in late October/early November and it will continue through the summer of 2018.

Requirements: Team collaborative calls monthly to share successes, challenges, and opportunities, webinars (optional), and training/tips on 360 filmmaking.

We’ll provide a 360 camera, an ambisonic microphone, training on 360 filmmaking, and on VR/AR technologies, and immigration interviewing techniques, and other topics and coordinate editing and submission of the final piece to film festivals as well as promote the work of the collaborative, locally, regionally and nationally.

We hope to together create a template for a strong immersive news/content sharing network, engaged communities, training programs, and collaborative, community-based VR projects.

We hope that we’ll find some best practices for how to work together as a national cohort group, developing our methods, techniques, strategies, funding, and distribution to create social impact in the area of immersive, empathetic immigration stories.

Hopes & Dreams 2017: A Community Storytelling Project in Virtual Reality

By Kathy Bisbee On June 2, 2017 In 360 video, Boston, Brookline, Featured, Journalism, storytelling, VR Education With No Comments

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[Click here to watch Hopes & Dreams, a community-based virtual reality storytelling project]

(Brookline, Mass., June 1st , 2017) The first publicly-funded virtual reality lab in the U.S. has launched a participatory virtual reality (VR) campaign titled Hopes & Dreams. The project allows viewers to access community-based stories inside a virtual reality headset, on the web and via mobile.

One goal of the Public VR Lab and this project is to reduce the barriers to entry and show that virtual reality content creation can be easily created and shared on 3D web sites using WebVR and the programming language A-Frame, an open source tool created by Mozilla.

Kathy Bisbee, co-founder of the Public VR Lab, said that the accessibility to mass media, and gaining access to equipment and training are issues that traditional community media and VR share, “The Hopes & Dreams project and WebVR help lower the barriers to entry in the virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) space bringing new creators and storytellers into our community media centers to use our 360 cameras, and take classes in mixed reality content creation.”

“VR/AR is still in its nascent stages, but it’s growing fast. Many creators and storytellers don’t have the technical tools or the new skills required for this new industry,” citing the need for public accessibility to be part of the VR conversation.“

Nir Darom, BIG’s lead creative designer shared how the storytelling works in VR: “In the Hopes and Dreams project we wanted to let viewers feel as though they were right there, inside the circle of people sharing their hopes and dreams. Once you’re inside the circle, whoever you visually “click on” begins talking. This immediacy is what makes VR such a great documentary tool.”

When Fasility’s co-founders heard about the Public VR Lab’s mission, they knew WebVR and A-Frame would be a natural fit. “WebVR has the power to transform human storytelling,” said Kathy Trogolo, Fasility’s CEO. “Creators and storytellers are sharing something precious. Thanks to VR, their words and emotions are almost as impactful as they would be in person; plus, the interactive experience allows the viewer to pause and reflect on the content more deeply. The Public VR Lab and the Hopes & Dreams project is a perfect match with our mission to empower authors to create 3D immersive and interactive webspaces.”

Top five reasons WebVR is a key to the future of accessibility in VR/AR

Works on the smartphone you already have in your hand
Anyone can be an author – no expensive software or hardware needed
Incorporates browser’s built-in accessibility features
Works across mobile, desktop, and VR equipment like HTC Vive and Oculus Rift
No app store!

Learn more about using WebVR to create virtual reality content at the free Boston Meetup at the Public VR Lab on June 8th, 2017 in Brookline, MA. Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/web-vr-and-you-tickets-34548544627

To view the Hopes and Dreams Virtual Reality project, visit the site below: http://brooklineinteractive.org/had

About the Public VR Lab

@PublicVRLab

www.publicvrlab.com

Over the past year the Lab has demoed over 90 virtual reality experiences at senior and teen centers, offered free bi-weekly VR sessions at its Boston-area labs, curated interactive content for film festivals, launched a VR Academy with free and low-cost classes, organized a regional virtual reality hackathon focused on climate change, and created the first private-public partnership for two location-based augmented reality community storytelling projects.

In its second year, the Lab is building on its long tradition of public access television, to provide increased accessibility and digital inclusion with an immersive media grant program, and teaching specialized classes at their low-cost VR Academy to support the production of experiential storytelling, immersive journalism, storytelling in games, and new forms of artistic expression in the public sphere.

About Fasility

@fasility_vr

http://fasility.com/

Fasility is a WebVR consultancy focused on education and user empowerment. Fasility helps their clients create web-based VR experiences that are easy to navigate, impactful, and play back on desktop, cardboard, and high-end VR devices. Established in 2016, Fasility prioritizes design, human factors, and interoperability to reach broad and inclusive audiences. Through studio projects and customized training, Fasility is bringing the power of VR to everyday content creators.