The VR Penny Arcade and How to Successfully Demo an Immersive Cinema Experience
In March of this year, I attended the Istanbul’s Sonar Festival of music and technology as both a speaker and presenter of my demo. I presented something called The Public Domain VR Cinema which was intended for showing animated shorts (like Felix the Cat) released previous to 1920. From that experience, I learned a few things that might be helpful to those who might also attempt it.
The VR Public Domain Cinema was meant to recreate a period-specific (1919) cinema which had interactive objects, like a piano and Lucky Strike boxes, and it allowed users to teleport openly throughout the space. An in-world user interface allowed people to switch between films at the push of a button. Beyond the century-old setting, it didn’t offer anything that an IRL cinema wouldn’t.
My VR app was well-received — not that I’d say if it hadn’t been — but enough people struggled or failed to understand the work that I decided to build something new that will be available for future events. And so we have, the VR Penny Aracde.
(Teleportation) This time around I needed something appropriate for first timers, so I completely abandoned the teleportation field for a very limited set of teleport points — basically, one for each film. It eliminates the need for teaching someone to arch their controllers and later pulling them out of the wall.
(Limit Number of Behaviors) If you’re an early user to VR and seeing someone’s demo for a few minutes time, a bombardment of control options is less than ideal. For this reason, the VR Penny Arcade has only two standard actions: the aforementioned teleport (controller) and activating the film by peering into the film viewer (an organic interaction activated with a collider).
(Limit Duration of Needed Attention) The earlier experience had cartoons which ran in excess of 3 minutes, but users were distracted by the environment they found themselves in and spent little time engaging with the films it was meant to present. Viewers who did make an effort to watch got impatient in that short time. The VR Penny Arcade experience has (at the moment) five films that would have been viewed in a mutoscope and each of them is approximately one minute long. Whenever attention might lag in the experience, the film ends and the reset button is hit on their available attention span.
(Environment over Interaction) The five films of the VR Penny are presented in unique environments that are somewhat intended as a reaction to the film being shown. In a different ways, they reveal the potential for an immersive digital space, so visitors get a sense of awe as they’re enlightened as to the possibilities. Elements of color, sound, space, and movement are manipulated within the viewing area, so these works from the 1910’s are seen in a remarkable new way. (That said, a separate gallery shows the films (courtesy of the Library of Congress)), so people curious about the original work have access to it).
The VR Penny Arcade app is available on itch.io now for free. Please enjoy and share it.
