In 2017 our Future Reality Lab spent several days at the Future of Storytelling festival putting on a live theater event with everyone — both audience and actors — walking around wearing untethered VR headsets in the same physical room. The story was inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.
We put a lot of work into making sure that everyone’s location in the virtual room matched their location in the physical room. We felt that correspondence between real and virtual was essential for people feeling that they had been transported together into another world.
We did a lot of technical tests between shows, to make sure everything was working before the public came in. For the most part, things worked, thanks to the hard work of our awesome grad students.
But during one of our tests, in which I was in the experience with our art director Kris Layng, something went really wrong. We were hanging out in Alice’s virtual drawing room, and the tracking failed us.
All of a sudden, Kris and I were floating upward. We soon found ourselves hanging out around the chandelier, abut eight feet off the virtual ground.
Thinking back on it now, it kind of reminds me of the I Love to Laugh scene from Mary Poppins. Except, of course, that we weren’t watching it up on a screen — we were inside it.
And it was totally awesome. Of all of my memories of that virtual experience, that moment is the most vivid and powerful.
Sometimes the best way to create a vivid experience of an alternate reality is to break the rules of reality.