VR Festival Hopes to Alter Conceptions of Storytelling

It’s no secret that storytelling is not the same today as it was even a few years ago. The times have changed, and with it, so has our love of narratives. But Charles Melcher has understood the ever-changing culture of the storytelling industry.

Living in a media-saturated world, it’s hard not to face the fact that we’ve become so immersed in technology and our busy daily routines, we’ve forgotten the pleasure of a simple story. As the founder of The Future of StoryTelling (FoST), Melcher spent five years gathering innovators from the fields of media, technology, entrepreneurship, and communication to start conversations and experiences and figure out what storytelling in the digital age would look like.

A couple weeks ago, I ventured up to Spanish Harlem for the first time in order to attend Melcher’s annual FoST FEST. An invitation-only three-day gathering, FoST FEST merges the worlds of virtual reality and communication, bringing to life a mind-blowing, out-of-this-world, storytelling experience.

As a first-timer at the whole virtual reality medley, I was mesmerized just by stepping into the African Theatre, on 1280 FIfth Avenue, where the festival was taking place. Named as the FoST Playground, the venue had more than 40 different exhibits on display for everyone to participate and immerse themselves in.

Among those included Home: VR Spacewalk, where participants experience an unbelievably realistic spacewalk inspired by true experiences of NASA’s own astronauts; Famous Deaths, a multisensory recreation of John F. Kennedy’s final moments before he passed; and Late Shift, the world’s first interactive movie where you can change the plot of the movie as it runs continuously in real time.

All the interactions incorporated technology and software that celebrates either virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), or mixed reality (MR). Yes, there are different categories of VR.

“A lot of the regular Samsung-geared VR pieces are just straight VR. Just like watching something. It’s a virtual world. It’s a film world that you’re just watching,” Melcher explained.

“Augmented [reality], you can see the real world and you can see digital. You have a digital component so you can see both at the same time. Like Pokemon Go.”

“In mixed, you have those 2 things and you have multisensor. You’re adding other sensors, or sensory experience to it. It’s something where you’re getting a multi-sensorial as well as the visual, the audio… There’s a whole sort of mixed reality experience.”

Slightly confused by mixed reality, I asked Melcher if he could give me an example of an exhibit that demonstrated a mixed reality experience.

“This exhibit is one whole mixed reality,” he joked. “I think you can consider Home a mixed reality experience. Because you’re getting virtual experience and you’re getting other sensory stimulation at the same time.”

Home: VR Spacewalk was presented by The BBC & Rewind. It made its US Premiere during FoST FEST and was inspired by genuine experiences of NASA’s astronauts in space. Of course, I had to try it out. And let me tell you, it was unbelievable.

For fifteen minutes, I had headphones and a headgear strapped on and was thrown into space to fix a broken satellite on the International Space Station. Though I could hear the muffled noise of the exhibit in the background, everything else felt completely real. One of the organizers even told Forbes that a female astronaut came by to experience Home and commented that it felt “extraordinarily real.”

Another exhibit that made its debut during the festival was one by New York University student, David Lobser. Having experimented with VR within the university, Lobser created Flock: A Holojam Experience, in which participants strap on a headset and characterize themselves as birds in a forest. Hence, Flock.

A seven-minute experience, Flock takes groups of ten to fifteen people are placed in a single space, and diverge themselves into a whole other universe. In this other reality, participants are able to see each other as birds, walking around in search of “food”. In order for the exhibit to work and for participants to envision each other using VR headsets, Lobser used infrared technology.

Infrared cameras were placed all around the roof of the space, and infrared LEDs were placed on the top of the headset. The LEDs shine an infrared light into space that the cameras see as bright, ultra-reflective markers.

“These markers are seen by a number of different cameras that can figure out where they are in three-dimensional space. And then from that, they can figure out how are these things positioned and rotated in space, so then we go through the wifi, we transmit that information into the phone,” Lobser explains. “The phone says ‘OK, I know why I’m in space.’ So the camera will be in full run. And because the system recognizes all of the other insets to, it can show you representations of all of the other people in space.”

For the last two years, Lobser had been developing his research, called Holojam, in NYU, where he would have people walk around with VR headgear and see each other. Yet, his research had mostly stayed within the university.

“This [project, Flock] is our first public, like ‘Let’s do an actual proper thing out in the world,’” Lobser explained. “In part, it’s because it’s difficult and expensive. It takes a lot of people needed to make this stuff happen. So having FoST is the external for this. To put all of this up, it was necessary [to have FoST].”

But FoST FEST is more than just showcasing the latest VR technology.

“It’s also about analog experiences that fulfill our desire to be more than just passive audience members,” Melcher said.

Before FoST, Melcher ran — and still runs — a print publishing company known as Melcher Media. When the financial crisis of 2009 occurred, he faced his own personal crisis of having to possibly shut down his company. But instead of analyzing the consequences, Melcher looked to other platforms in order to continue doing what he loved — storytelling.

Unlike those that criticize the ubiquity of technology, Melcher found it as a resource to share stories and immerse his audience. He accepts technology as the new wave of sharing stories, and encourages people to connect with each other in his story world.

His tagline? “All the world’s a stage. Come be a player!”