MIND GOGGLING
Virtual reality to star at Tribeca Film Festival
The Tribeca Film Festival kicks off this week — so strap on your virtual reality goggles.
The New York indie film festival cofounded by Robert De Niro is making a big push into virtual reality this year, as organizers have beefed up the schedule with hightech talks and artsy demonstrations of socalled “VR” technology.
Oculus, the VR-headset maker that was acquired last year by Facebook for $ 2 billion, will present a six-and-a-half minute animated “experience” called “Lost” that will use the company’s Oculus Rift Crescent Bay prototype headset.
The segment, according to Tribeca’s organizers, “takes the viewer on a journey to a moonlit forest inhabited by an unexpected creature.”
Tribeca’s plunge into VR may be the most aggressive yet by any major film festival as it looks to create more buzz for the annual event, which sold 120,000 tickets last year.
The VR push has the support of Madison Square Garden, which took a 50 percent stake in the festival operator Tribeca Enterprises last year.
A 360degree filming of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” 40th Anniversary Special will allow viewers to shift the direction of the camera at will. Some have used the feature to train the camera away from performers like Jerry Seinfeld so they can ogle famous audience members like Larry David and Michael Douglas whispering to each other and fixing their hair.
“Maybe this is a little film-geeky, but VR is really challenging the language of cinema in a big way,” says Ingrid Kopp, director of interactive at the Tribeca Film Institute.
“It takes away the frame, it takes away the edits,” Kopp said. ‘ This is the time when the future Martin Scorseses are going to be testing the waters and showing some of their early work in VR.”
Indeed, the festival is looking to educate filmmakers about virtual reality and other new tech as much as the public. Last year, the bash managed to stage a handful of VR exhibits, but was limited by a shortage of content, Kopp said.
This year’s demonstrations may look farout to some. One, an exhibit called ‘ The Machine to be Another,” puts VR goggles and body cameras on a pair of participants at the same time, giving both the impression that they’ve traded bodies and environments with each other.
Still, analysts say it’s only a matter of time before VR becomes a booming business. Last week, advisory firm Digi-Capital forecast that VR and “AR” — or “augmented reality,” in which a subject’s field of vision is enhanced with animated graphics and the like — could be a $ 150 billion industry by 2020.
Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, will be demonstrating VR experiences at the festival that will include deepsea diving and playing quarterback in a football game.
“There’s no way to understand how persuasive and real and intense VR is until you’ve tried it,” Bailenson told The Post, adding, “Maybe you don’t want to watch horror films in VR.”