“If the Content is Sh*t, It Will Still be Sh*t in VR and AR”: Virtual Reality and Hard Truth at the 2018 FilmGate Interactive Media Festival

The Virtual Reality Portal at the FilmGate Interactive Media Festival, which this year overlapped with Art Basel in downtown Miami, featured a wealth of new discoveries alongside some stellar high-profile projects. Among the three-dozen or so interactive works on display were a pair that made for great companion pieces. The first was Lynette Wallworth’s “psychedelic documentary” Awavena, an inner trip that I’d just missed experiencing at IDFA DocLab (and which made me wish that every VR experience came with a hammock). The second, Eliza McNitt’s Sundance-premiering outer trip Spheres, also had perhaps the widest target audience of any of the pieces represented. As I waited in line, watching a little boy who looked to be having a ball participating in this Darren Aronofsky-produced “songs of the cosmos,” I noticed an elderly woman in a wheelchair chatting amiably with the project’s creator. (I later learned this was McNitt’s 90-year-old grandmother, who’d shown up to don a headset for the very first time and experience her granddaughter’s Florida debut.)

To read all about my own Miami trip visit Filmmaker magazine.