Virtual reality isn't just for gaming. It could be the next hub for immersive visual storytelling.
The Tribeca Film Festival featured 18 virtual experiences for attendees at this year's festival inside a Virtual Arcade ranging from mini-documentaries and short stories to animated pictures.
Most shorts required participants to sit in a chair you could spin around in to explore each respective narrative while a few invited you to stand and become a fully-active participant.
Here are the six best shorts we saw at the festival.
"Old Friend" put me in the center of a music video I never wanted to leave.
The first short I tried out at Tribeca was one from VR studio Wevr in which I was dropped in the center of a vibrant world surrounded by a circle of colorful, muppet-like creatures.
When you look down at yourself, you find that you're also one of these colorful characters with waving, wiggling arms and legs. You may as well be an inflatable tubeman. A drum major appears and the next three to four minutes invite you into a psychedelic, synchronized marching band dance party.
It was difficult to restrain from wanting to join in, and I found I couldn't help but have a giant grin on my face the entire time. Creator Tyler Hurd created a nonsensical space filled with pure joy.
"Holidays: Christmas VR" was an incredibly meta virtual experience.
Seth Green starred in one of the best VR shorts of the festival. When you first put the virtual reality headset on, you're in a theater watching Green's character in a screen as he tried to purchase a reality headset for the holiday. (Yes, it was very meta.) I won't spoil how he got his hands on one. Story aside, the best part of the short was the creative way in which Green's short made use of the technology.
Any time a character put on the fictional VR headset inside the video you became a person inside the virtual world. I was impressed how you were able to look down and see yourself as a person. Most of the VR experiences I tried either show you as a stationary object or as a non-existent, invisible spectator when you try to look down at your body. That ruins the illusion of being inside a virtual world slightly.
You were also able to turn around to see your head. Any time you did it, you could see the fictional VR headset's logo, UVU, and it's tagline. If you discovered this before the short's end, it gave you a hint of where the story was heading.
"Killer Deal" shows the potential of horror in virtual reality.
This was one of the few shorts I had to wait in line for. Anytime I walked by, there was always a gaggle of people surrounding it, so I had pretty big expectations.
I didn't realize until I tried it that the short starred Ian Ziering, of "90210" fame and the recent "Sharknado" films — something which made more sense knowing "Sharknado" director Anthony C. Ferrante was responsible for "Killer Deal."
In the short, you're a spectator in a hotel room during a machete convention. Ian Ziering returns to his room, but it appears someone else may already be there. He ends up going to toe-to-toe with a killer in a mask.
The overall experience was just all right. The dialogue and premise were a little cheesy, made moreso by squirts of what was obviously fake blood shooting out at you. To be fair, it seemed that was the point of the "over-the-top" horror experience.
There were definitely times I felt nervous and scared watching the short, especially when the light was shut off and you weren't sure what was happening in the room. There were two times where I held back jumping in my seat when the masked man came close to my face. (That's the weird thing about experiencing VR alone around a crowd of watching people. It's a little weird reacting and freaking out when no one else is having the same reaction alongside you.)
Still, the nearly 10-minute short showed a lot of promise for what others can do with this genre in the future.
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