Tango-Tiger

Later this month, the Sundance Film Festival will unlock a virtual portal to ascend the Earth's atmosphere to a simulated space park. Your new neighbor - the International Space Station - silently floats over a glass dome that surrounds you as you both quietly orbit the planet below.The decades-long Sundance Film Fest has gathered movie lovers in a small snowy mountain village in Park City, Utah, but with the coronavirus outbreak forcing Sundance to turn a distant (for the most part). This year, the festival needed a new virtual venue to create a beautiful festival atmosphere.Sundance often takes place in snow-covered Park City, Utah. Much of this year will happen from afar.


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It's Zoom meets Fortnight, meets Legoland," said Shari Frilot, chief curator of slotxo Sundance's New Frontier program, a heavy technology branch of the festival focused on cutting edge storytelling.To create a virtual reality environment, Frilot and Sundance have partnered with Active Theory, a digital experience design company Active Theory, to help provide you with an annual Spotify Wrapped for your listening over the past year. It is also the puppet master behind Coachella's live streams and has created interactive 3D Hogwarts for the Harry Potter Pottermore fan site.I was given a demonstration of the Sundance environment on the eve of New Year's Eve, when the prospect of putting the rearview mirrors in 2020 gave rise to more projections for a happier 2021.I want to escape from Earth and return to that space park now.


Sundance in space

Space Park is an orientation space for a single user. There you can set up your avatar and get familiar with the mechanics of moving around in this virtual world from WebXR, you can access it through a simple web browser. (I was told to use Google's Chrome) Move yourself around with arrow keys or point and simple click in the blank. But also accessible with a virtual reality headset for a more immersive feeling. Your avatar is a simple floating geometric figure with circles showing your uploaded images.From the space park, you can enter one of the festival's three main community areas: Film Party, Cinema House and New Frontier Gallery.Film Party is the only one to turn the circle of photos in your avatar into a live webcam feed. It's like wandering your zoom window as you explore the space-filled art bar.

With spatial sounds, you will hear people more clearly as you approach them. This is where Sundance is happening," Frilot said.Film Party has six post-premiere movie parties held simultaneously. Each party can accommodate up to 250 people, but when movie parties reach the maximum capacity, they have new room for all the additional guests. (For the seasoned Sundance player: yes, that means you won't have to wait outside in 20 degrees because the party is already full before it starts.)Users, Natalia Almada's film, is the 2021 Sundance Film Festival premiering for the festival featuring a VR headset in a virtual Cinema House.


Natalia Almada / Courtesy of Sundance Institute

Cinema House is the only space in an environment intended for people using a VR headset only, re-creating the concept of watching movies together in a cinema. Participants can hang out there and socialize for 10 minutes before the movie, and then communication will be closed while you watch them together on the big, virtual screen. After screening, each participant will be sent to the Cinema House post-screening party, limited to 250 only, first come first served. And will show movies such as Users, a movie about "The ruthless movement of technology" and international shorts specially selected from the festival program.

Finally, the most freestanding community space is the New Frontier Gallery, which is like a walk through a space art exhibition. If you look at the right spots, you'll get a perfect shot of the International Space Station hovering over Earth. The gallery is home to the festival's New Frontier project in a state-of-the-art project. Like many other locations, it has a capacity of 250 people at a time, but the gallery can be rotated an unlimited number of times whenever the last one has its maximum, making the New Frontier's capacity endless.

This year's New Frontier program includes web-based experiments that anyone can try regardless of the technology they have in their homes.The others are virtual reality pieces available to people with a headset to take the plunge. Going into demand, the other parts also relate to the elements of the live show by placing them in a defined grid.The hidden experience inside is a gateway to virtual social experiments, an unstructured playground that makes live video communication like zooming within a much more fun interface. Instead of a Brady Bunch-intro square face gallery, you and your friends can chat with a webcam.