T H I R D E Y E
VR A NEW, I MMERS I V E WAY TO T E L L S TOR I E S BY E L I Z AB E TH T I TUS
At the fifteenth annual tribeca film festival® held in April in New York City, audiences had a chance to attend TFI Interactive, an all-day immersive event supported by Time Warner Foundation that showcased the brightest thinkers and innovators from the worlds of media, art, gaming, technology, maker culture, and activism for speaker series and interactive programming that included Virtual Reality, or VR, experiences. So what exactly is VR? In the simplest terms, it is the use of computer technology to create a simulated environment where the user is placed inside an experience, instead of just passively sitting in front of a screen. Through stimulating the senses, such as vision, hearing, touch, and even smell, the computer becomes a gatekeeper
to an artificial world. Devices like the Oculus Rift and Samsung’s Gear VR enhance the experience. “Through TFI Interactive,” Opeyemi Olukemi, Senior Director of Interactive Programs at Tribeca Film Institute® (TFI), the year- round nonprofit, explained, “we offered creators the chance to reimagine the world we live in. As technology is ever-evolving, we gave speakers and audience members alike an opportunity to generate new ideas, collaborate, and conversate.” At the 2016 festival, 18 VR projects were gathered in a space at the festival hub downtown called the Virtual Arcade. Individual experiences included swimming with whales, riding a dragon, becoming a rabbit, and flying by Pluto. Most exciting, though,
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