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‘The Key’ VIVE Experience Premieres at FIVARS Festival of VR & AR Stories

The FIVARS Virtual Reality Stories festival will premiere Elli Raynai’s experimental interactive piece ‘The Key’ for the HTC Vive Roomscale VR platform. The piece features interactive environments using DepthKit and photogrammetry.

The Festival of International Virtual & Augmented Reality Stories (phew), also known as the much easier to say “FIVARS” returns for its second year to its native Toronto, Ontario, smack dab in the middle of Toronto International Film Festival hubbub.

The three-day virtual reality and augmented reality festival is not limited to merely 360 degree immersive videos (of which it is showcase the largest collection in the world with over 30 official selections in 2016 including the world premieres of Lilian Mehrel‘s “Invisible,” Michealla Vu‘s glitch-art inspired “Neural Path” and others) but also includes an audio-only virtual reality audio chamber designed by David McKevy and Cinehackers‘ experimental experience for the HTC Vive “The Key.”

Cinehackers is the VR label for the work of director/producer Elli Raynai, best known in VR-land for his groundbreaking Oculus short story “I Am You.” In an interview with RoomScalist, he explained the design thinking behind the creation of his latest work:

“The Key is a narrative cinematic VR experience that allows the viewer to inhabit the perspective of the protagonist in order to explore a traumatic memory in their past. Through the narrative the viewer not only has ability to observer the memory, but must follow an alternative path that fundamentally changes what happened and as a result brings the protagonist to a healing moment.”

The experience is a blend of elements – using photogrammetry to build environments and Depthkit to capture real performances that are then composited in the experience, which fundamentally results in a uniquely styled interactive narrative. Raynai went to Berlin where he spent a month putting his ambitious idea together on an independent budget and sheer force of will. He returned to Toronto in September where he presented the production process to the Toronto VR community.

“This was the first time I attempted a room scale experience for the VIVE and it was very challenging,” Raynai says. “I’m talking specifically about how you tailor the story, which interactive elements feel intuitive to the viewer, but also not very obvious. I almost made the experience very fast, so, a lot of the feedback I get will influence the way I make narrative experiences in the future. This is the importance of demoing your experience and watching closely how your users react.”

The experience will be available to all festival wristband carriers, as opposed to the timed programme, so that a discussion may form about the new design concepts presented in Raynai’s evolving work.

“FIVARS is about experimentation and novel mechanics,” says FIVARS festival director Keram Malicki-Sanchez. “The Key represents the FIVARS mission to explore new possibilities and push the various technologies to their current limits in search of new forms for storytelling.”

The Key makes its public exhibition world premiere at FIVARS September 16-18th 2016 in Toronto, Ontario Canada.

For more information visit the official FIVARS site.

By RoomScalist

The RoomScalist is a VR enthusiast and programming hobbyist who is always on the lookout for titles to inspire and bend the rules. His favorite movies are Blade Runner, Dark City and Donnie Darko. He also thinks William Gibson, JG Ballard, Mervyn Peake and Neal Stephenson write good books.

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