Pre-Test Workshop
Our first experiment. A pre-test before the real adventure begins!
Along with my colleagues Alex Coulombe (designer), David Gochfeld (technical director), and Adrian Vasquez de Velasco (production manager/ editor) we set out as a team to run new experiments with actors performing live in VR.
Our actors had experienced some VR narratives but they had never been inside a VR universe where they had agency. Here was our first two-sided coin. The hardest part is getting actors acclimated to VR, and the most joyous part is getting actors acclimated to VR!
This challenge/joy is similar to putting new audiences through VR that have never experienced VR before. If the experience is technical with a high level of skill-learning to master, the audience will need time to adapt. At the same time, the audience will feel exhilarated because of the unbelievable ability to have such powerful agency (as one does in most room scale experiences).
This gamut of emotions ran through our actors. While most had done VR, never had they experienced this kind of freedom to explore a 3D environment and the ability to inhabit an avatar’s body. On the flip side there was a regular frustration using controllers to navigate around, the occasional crashes of our VR environment and acclimating to teleporting.
How I handled this first rehearsal:
I didn’t give the actors a lot of requirements because I wanted them to acclimate and explore. Most importantly I hoped for a sense of “play” for this first session in order for these key pieces to take place:
1) To get used to looking down and seeing an avatar in place of their body
2) To acclimate to their controllers and think of them as hands
3) To learn how to teleport through their environment
3) To feel unencumbered by all of this gear attached to their bodies
Even with the frustrations and motion sickness everyone left in high spirits. The most fulfilling aspect was that when the actors came out of their headsets they were just in awe. Everyone wants to return! I love that! If we can’t give actors a perfect reality, but if we can give actors a new sense of joy — that may be worth more than half the struggle.
OBSERVATIONS
A few issues we noticed:
1) Teleporting — felt very unnatural to our actors. The women in particular experienced some motion sickness after teleporting for longer than 10 minutes.
2) Everyone felt extremely fatigued after being inside a headset. One pair of actors ran a scene for about an hour and they couldn’t believe how much it felt like a full day’s rehearsal to them. This is interesting to consider — there may be additional mental fatigue.
OUR SOLUTIONS / APPROACH:
1) We will experiment with adding trackers to actors bodies to enable them to walk in their room scale environment in 6dof.
2) We will give our actors time to explore and play with teleporting and tracked motion; providing them with options for their scenes and their own inclinations.
3) We will make sure to schedule regular breaks to avoid physical and mental fatigue.
