Everything Immersive This Week (09/28/2019)
We’re on the case…
No time for chit chat, as this is coming to you from the Vancouver International Film Festival’s Immersed program, where we’re participating in the New Realities in Storytelling conference.
So, let’s get to what has been a very busy week…
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[It’s the end of the month, which means now is the perfect time to drop us a pledge. $1/month makes all the difference in the world.]
ON THE PODCAST THIS WEEK
Eric Gradman, CTO and Mad Inventor at LA’s Two Bit Circus meets up with Noah at their DTLA headquarters to talk about the technical side of immersive and their all-new story room Dr. Botcher’s Minute Medical School.
Head’s up: there’s cursing.
Bonus Podcast: Everything Else — Survivor
Survivor: China and Survivor: Cambodia — Second Chance player Peih-Gee Law joins NoPro’s Anthony Robinson (Survivor: Fiji) and Room Escape Artist’s David Spira for a talk about how Survivor is the ultimate immersive experience for its players, and their shared love of escape games and puzzles.
All to celebrate the premiere of Survivor: Island of the Idols.
Originally scheduled as part of our Everything Else livestream series, this bonus episode heralds the beginning of new podcast programming initiatives.
FROM THE WIRE: SHOWS, EVENTS, & EXPERIENCES
NYC: Rooftop Musical Society’s Into the Woods
Cleveland: Inferno
Minneapolis: Cabal
Chicago: Stay on the Line
Memphis: The Parting
Houston: Color Factory
Denver: Grimm’s Scary Tales
Portland: Grimm’s Scary Tales
LA: The Ballad of Lady M, I Love You So Much, SQUEEZE ME TO DEATH (Remount), Omniscopic, The Recital, Safehouse ’82
Tour: Broken Bone Bathtub
COMMUNITY
NYC: Join Everything Immersive in New York City for a meetup on October 9. RSVP on Facebook.
APPEARANCES
Find members of the NoPro team and Everything Immersive family in your neck of the woods
October:
Kathryn Yu — Indiecade 2019
David Spira — Escape Room Industry Conference in London, October 15 & 16. “The Player Experience: From Brain Teasers to Brain Trauma”
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Submit your show to us here or at pitches@noproscenium.com.
REVIEWS
From No Proscenium:
From David & Lisa Spira of Room Escape Artist:
Enchanted was a family-friendly escape game at Lockout Austin that offered up enough challenge and intrigue to keep our excessively experienced team engaged
STORIES
From NoProscenium.com and our Twitter feed:
Kathryn Yu, NoPro:
Fireproof Games, makers of the popular The Room series of games for mobile devices, have announced a sequel… but in virtual reality this time, as they try tackling the unique affordances of this medium. The newest chapter of this award-winning physical puzzler might end up becoming the great “escape room-meets-VR game for the home” title that immersive fans have been waiting for.
Content warning: sexual assault
Dear Visitor is an AR experience created by three current and former Stanford University students to reshape the site of Chanel Miller’s (previously known only as “Emily Doe”) assault on campus. The location has since been renovated and turned into a “contemplative garden,” but the administration refused to place quotes from Miller’s victim impact statement on a plaque at the site, despite a previous agreement to do so. Using an iPad, visitors to the garden can now listen to student perspectives, hear Miller’s words, share their own thoughts, and see the garden and plaques as originally envisioned, all using augmented reality.
From David & Lisa Spira of Room Escape Artist:
“Escape Room” was among the 533 new words that Merriam-Webster added to their dictionary in their latest batch of updates. Here we discuss the nuance around this definition.
From Michael Andersen of ARGN:
The Wild Optimists have a new Escape the Room in a Box game with Mattel, and I’m challenging players to organize a lycanthropic escape room double-feature for Halloween this year. Embrace the saga of Doc Cynthia Gnaw in a single sitting. You know you want to…
Chrissy Teigen got an “escape-room like mystery package” promoting the new Mystery Oreos flavor. What was inside? What’s the flavor? Who is Chris Saunt, and what are we to make of his bakery’s voicemail message? I have so many questions.
From Haley E.R. Cooper of Strange Bird Immersive:
Immersology, “Bandersnatch and the challenges of choice.”
A meta-review that examines the problems that arise when adding choice to immersives.
From Errol Elumir of Room Escape Divas:
This is a report that was just released this week (Sep 26) about every escape room in Canada.
From Kent Bye of the Voices of VR podcast:
Here’s my real-time reactions to the Oculus Connect keynote.
Handtracking on the Quest will enable more intuitive interactions in VR without needing to use controllers. Confirmation that AR glasses are being prototyped (but no demo footage shown).
I spent most of Oculus Connect 6 talking to people about all those things not mentioned in the keynote around the ethical & privacy implications of Facebook reading your thoughts & making 3D maps of the entire world.
I posted five interviews on VR pieces from Tribeca & Venice focusing on the theme of metaphoric storytelling trends of dream logic. Includes an in-depth interview with THE KEY director & lucid dreamer Céline Tricart unpacking the embodied metaphors she uses, as well as interview with the director of Punchdrunk’s VR/Immersive theater piece BELIEVE YOUR EYES.
NOW FUNDING
Broken Bone Bathtub is making a documentary of their tour.
The Story Engine
The Story Engine is a card-based storytelling prompt generator that Rock Paper Cynic cartoonist Peter Chiykowski has used to generate his postcard fiction project, The Shortest Story. Back the project at a high enough level, and you can subscribe to receive some of those story prompts in the mail as monthly postcards.
Daemonologie: Smoke & Mirrors
Boston: An immersive game theatre experience where you will decide a woman’s fate.
The Ode at Pint’s End
Chicago’s Birch House preps an immersive folk tale
CHICAGO: The Ode at Pint’s End, written by Lauren N. Fields and Janie Killips, is an epic folktale that features traditional Irish music and new music by Janie Killips.
PROFESSIONAL OPPORTUNITIES
Jobs, Grants, Gigs, and more
Sundance New Frontier Story Lab Applications
Deadline Oct. 1
i-Docs 2020 — Call for Participation
Following the success of five previous i-Docs Symposia, we are pleased to announce the call for participation for i-Docs 2020. Convened by Judith Aston, Sandra Gaudenzi, Mandy Rose and Julia Scott-Stevenson, and hosted by UWE Bristol’s Digital Cultures Research Centre, i-Docs 2020 will be held at Watershed in Bristol’s Harbourside on Wednesday to Friday 25–27 March. We invite proposals for papers, pre-constituted panels, case studies, posters and projects to showcase. In addition, this time we also want to encourage alternative and remote forms of participation — both to reduce the carbon footprint of the event and to include delegates otherwise unable to take part.
Deadline: Oct. 25, 2019
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