In this month's feature piece, Michelle Cortese and Andrea Zeller share what they have discovered about combatting harassment in VR, drawing solutions from body sovereignty and consent ideology to propose new controls, gestures, and codes of conduct.
"As VR designers, we hold the unique opportunity to imagine worlds unbound by reality’s constraints," they write. "When approaching the responsibility of constructing new social environments — regardless of how surreal they may be — we should remind ourselves to treat virtual embodiment with the same respect given to physical bodies."
This theme of building better future worlds—or learning from dystopian ones—threads throughout this issue:
In her Interface Everywhere column, Jessica Clark discusses the implications and intricacies of Neal Stephenson's latest sci-fi novel Fall; or, Dodge in Hell with transmedia producer Caitlin Burns.
In Beacon, Ingrid Kopp features a clutch of future-focused makers and collectives, including Abandon Normal Devices, Honor Harger, Ian Cheng, Gabrielle Jenks, and Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC).
Researcher Paulien Dresscher takes readers into Sacred Hill, a "multi-year investigation in the shape of an endless speculative city under construction," which considers the question: “What would it mean to live in VR?”
A second piece in the series Virtual Realities: Immersive Documentary Encountersanalyzes what nonfiction VR works from 2012-2018 can tell us about the future of the form. "A straightforward conclusion to draw is that 360° video-based VR nonfiction has passed through a bubble of rapid early-adopter interest and is now beginning a period of rationalisation. CGI-based nonfiction content, on the other hand, has displayed a slower but fairly consistent growth, and may well be the main source of growth for the medium over the next few years," writes researcher Chris Bevan.
Philippe Bédard takes a spin through the VR exhibitions at Festival du Nouveau Cinéma (FNC) in Montreal. "Cinematic VR seems to have moved on from the gimmicks of years past," he observes, "in favour of more subtle strategies for immersing viewers in spaces that would otherwise be inaccessible to them."
Alex Book of production studio Arcade walks us through the construction of a charming physical and augmented reality experience inspired by Leoš Janáček’s opera, The Cunning Little Vixen, created for the Welsh National Opera (WNO).
In other Immerse news: We're pleased to welcome Ruthie Doyle of the Sundance New Frontier Lab to our editorial advisory board. Learn more about our other illustrious advisors at the bottom of this newsletter.
Want to join the conversation? Please get in touch if you have news, projects, or events you would like us to consider: editor@immerse.news.
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IDFA runs from November 20 - December 1 in Amsterdam. We are particularly excited to check out the DocLab line-up which looks fascinating and eclectic as always.
Immerse is an initiative of MIT Open DocLab and The Fledgling Fund, and is fiscally sponsored by IFP. Many thanks to our other funders: JustFilms | Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation.
