Tag: Kaleidoscope VR Film Festival

News

A nauseating VR trip inside a famous Van Gogh painting

In 1990, on the hundredth anniversary of Vincent van Gogh’s death, the Journal of the American Medical Association posited that the impressionist had suffered from “Ménière’s disease and not epilepsy.” A disorder of the inner ear, Ménière’s disease is known to cause nausea, hearing troubles, tinnitus, and vertigo.  The JAMA’s diagnosis is widely disputed, but Mac Cauley’s VR tribute to Van Gogh, The Night Café, does little to downplay the idea that the artist suffered from vertigo. This may or may not be intentional. As I noted when previewing the interactive experience in May, Cauley set out to transform Van…
News

The Archer is bringing intertitles to VR, and it works

I experienced director Jessica Kantor’s The Archer on Samsung’s Gear VR headset, a $200 piece of kit that, if you believe its manufacturer, “lets you feel the world beyond your peripheral vision.” I did not experience the world beyond my peripheral vision, and was all the happier for it. Clocking in at a brisk 90 seconds, The Archer reimagines the aesthetic of early silent films for the VR era. It tells the story of a man who visits a female archer for lunch. She goes all William Tell and persuades him to balance an apple on his head that she can…
News

Where does VR go from here? A discussion

Let’s say you believe that virtual reality is the future of artistic expression. Don’t laugh; this belief is sincerely held by plenty of people. So, let’s say so you believe that VR is the future, how on Earth do you start to build towards that future? This was the evening’s main question when the travelling Kaleidoscope VR Film Festival stopped in Toronto on Sunday. While the event is unquestionably optimistic in its view of VR, it does not take the medium’s eventual dominance for granted. Indeed, one of its main purposes is to encourage artists and developers to start making…