CAVE at Tribeca

Today is the beginning of the Tribeca Film Festival, where for the next ten days we are showing CAVE as part of its VR program. This is particular exciting because CAVE is the world’s first (and so far only) immersive narrative for a collocated room-scale audience. Or, to put it a different way, a movie that transports an entire audience onto the Holodeck.

It was fun and exciting showing CAVE at Siggraph last summer, but Tribeca is a different thing entirely. Siggraph is a technical conference, whereas Tribeca is a major film festival.

To put it bluntly, the New York Times film critic is not going to show up at Siggraph. Which means that now our work is no longer just part of a technical conversation. It is now part of the cultural conversation.

What CAVE is really asserting in that cultural conversation is that a narrative experienced in VR should not merely be “a movie for one person”. Rather, it should be an experience that many people can share together, with all of the the age old magic that happens when people gather together to be told a story.

There have been some really supportive articles written about us showing up at Tribeca with CAVE. Here is one of them.

With any luck, the cultural critics who attend the festival will understand what we are up to, and will receive our work kindly.

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