Dave Budge, Isobar NowLab Director, talks about Isobar’s Indigenous VR Project, Carriberrie
Back in May last year we started talking to ex-Isobarian Dom about partnering on a pretty dreamy project — capturing indigenous dance and song in VR across the breadth of the country. From the remote desert to the Sydney Opera House it would show contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture through performances that were alive and relevant right now, even if they’d been in development for sixty thousand years. Tonight we launch the first part of this project at the Australian Museum in Sydney: a 15 minute VR film narrated by David Gulpilil featuring the best of the performances.
Here’s the site: https://www.carriberrie.com
Isobar is committed to Australian arts and culture, and Carriberrie offered a great avenue for us to use our digital expertise in an innovative forum, showcasing a blend of traditional and contemporary dance pieces for the first time in VR. Working with Dom, we’ve been able to truly capture the performances in context, showing the landscape and the country as well as the dancers. For us it’s also a great example of what can be done with VR. We believe in the power of VR for storytelling, for immersion and for giving a sense of presence and of place. This project helps show that in a beautiful way.
360 video does have its strengths and its weakness, sometimes you might notice that you’re trapped inside a video ball, or you might get squinty because the resolution is still not quite there. But every one of those times is overwhelmed by the ongoing feeling of presence. None of those tech limitations matter — you’re there, you’re lost in a different world. This is why we felt it could work. That performances in beautiful landscapes are just perfect for VR. So with lots of back and forth between the DAN legal and finance teams we figured out how we could invest in a project that had the potential to be both artistically beautiful and culturally meaningful.
While this project is quite simple in its user experience, it was quite a brain melting experience to get it there. Our jobs are to imagine things to a level of detail not everyone can. Most of the challenge is just getting that detail out of our brains — in design, or code, or strategy or whatever — so that it can be made. While we’ve made VR content before, we’ve never really built something this deeply interactive. In any new medium its easy to make a confusing mess, but hard to make something beautiful and simple. We think we’ve got close.
We worked with production company Airbag to deliver the app that’s now on 70+ Samsung Galaxy headsets ready for tonight. Airbag have also brought to life the motion capture performance we choreographed to be the project’s opening and a motif to express each dance. Thousands of hours of render farm time have been spent turning a dancer from the Torres Strait into dust, very literally expressing the connection between humans and country.
From next week we’ll be finalizing the ‘full’ application allowing people to explore more than an hour of performance. We’ll also be working on bringing this to life in a larger scale installation — something not just trapped inside a headset.
Great work by all these legends:
Brett White — Creative Director, Mike Fraser — Executive Design Director, Anton Wintergest — Solution Architect, Kara Bombell — Operations Director, Adam Famularo — Client Engagement Director, Jessica Snell — Executive Producer, Xavier Verhoeven — Senior Producer, Veerle Verlooij — Senior Producer, Alberto Talegon — Creative Director, Oliver Brock — Copywriter, Jerry Scott — Art Director, Mathew Dodos — Senior Designer, Tom Stephenson — Designer, Mike Jones — Designer, Lindsay Dryhurst — Designer
INSTALLATION CREW
Kate Abell — Project Manager , Adam Lusted — Senior Front End Developer
Robert Maniaci — BA, Dan Treichel — Senior Experience Designer
