Tenderclaws debuted The Under experience at Sundance that features live immersive actors from the Piehole theater troupe. Actors embody different characters within a storyworld that has free roaming, non-verbal participants, who need to use their body to communicate with the actors and each other. Participants can either roam around trying to discover actors to interact with one-on-one and receive fragments of the story of the world, or hang out in the central hub where there are a series of performances.
They’re planning on having a bit of a looping structure to the narrative, but with a twist where participants can time travel to different points of the evolution of the story. It’s produced by Oculus and is slated to be a release title on the Oculus Quest later this year as it uses the affordances of the 6-degree of freedom controllers.
I had a chance to run through the preview of The Under a couple of times at an offsite location from Sundance in Park City, and then talk with Tenderclaws co-founders Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizzaro and Piehole founding member Tara Ahmadinejad. We talk about how this project came about, some of the backstory of story world they’ve created, the challenges of fusing live immersive theater actors within VR, some best practices for dealing with trolling behavior, and some of the special tools they had to create that gave the actors moderation powers but in a way that concealed the usual body language VR users have when interacting with spatialized user interfaces.
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Music: Fatality
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. So one of the experiences that I was most looking forward to seeing at Sundance this year wasn't actually happening at Sundance. It was an experience that was produced by Oculus and was off-site, and it was this blending of immersive theater and virtual reality. So this is something that Jelena Rochesky has been teasing that they've been working on for the past year. She first told me that they were trying to work with these live theater actors within the context of a virtual reality experience back in Sundance of last year, as well as Oculus Connect 5. And so I finally had a chance to experience this fusion of immersive theater as well as virtual reality. It was a production called The Under by Tender Claws. People may know them from virtual virtual reality as well as 10 day are one of the most interesting and fascinating of VR companies that are out there really Pushing the edge of what's possible with interactive narratives. So Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannazaro as well as piehole They're a theater troupe that has known dinner claws for a long long time So they're collaborating on actually bringing live actors into a virtual reality experience they've created a whole world that you get to explore around and it is a fusion of immersive theater and virtual reality So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Samantha, Danny, and Tara happened on Sunday, January 27th, 2019 at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:41.984] Samantha Gorman: Hi, I'm Samantha. I'm the co-founder of Tender Claws. And I'm here with Paigel and Danny.
[00:01:49.567] Danny Cannizzaro: Danny Cannizzaro, the co-founder of Tender Claws.
[00:01:53.590] Tara Ahmadinejad: I'm Tara Ahmadinejad, and I'm one of the members of Pi-Hole, the theater collective working on this project.
[00:02:00.124] Kent Bye: Okay, so maybe you could give me a bit of a backstory for how this project came about.
[00:02:04.953] Samantha Gorman: Sure. So we had been very interested in some time. I have a little background in theater and we had mainly wanted to create a piece involving theater with Piehole. Especially we were all interested in this idea of like liveness versus like pre-recorded to some degree and what is that edge between those. and wanted to push and experiment with it. And what you're really seeing is actually an early run. It's sort of an early preview. So you're seeing this process live. It's a living, breathing thing as we're figuring things out. And we were very interested in narratives of looping time and repetition and how that could be broken. And originally, we had wanted this to be on a cruise ship. And we approached Piehole. And we're like, hey, let's use the cruise room. And they're like, oh, this sounds like a funny story we would work on. And it kind of evolved from there.
[00:02:52.703] Kent Bye: Yeah, maybe you can talk a bit about Piehole and the background of what Piehole is, where it's coming from, and then how it started to think about doing these types of immersive experiences within VR.
[00:03:02.757] Tara Ahmadinejad: Yeah, so this is Paiho's first time working on a VR project, but we've been a company for 11 years, and we've worked in a lot of different formats, but we've often incorporated elements of different media and worked with artists from different disciplines. And yeah, so a lot of times the audience might be seated in one place, or we have the audience moving around, but there's always a focus on trying to draw attention to the live experience, and knowing what the form is, and trying to create the perfect form for whatever story we're telling. So we've been working in parallel with Tender Claws for a decade, like we've known each other this whole time, and we have a lot of shared sensibilities, a lot of shared, like, senses of humor and interest in just, like, strange experiences. So when they approached us to work on this, we were really excited. Yeah, like Samantha was saying, we were like, oh yeah, that sounds like something we would make a show about. So it's just been a lot about trying to figure out how to bring liveness to this VR world and what that even means, especially in an animated setting.
[00:04:06.143] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I'm curious about the decision to have the players that are going through the experience be silent in the sense that they can't talk back. Because the first whole one-on-one scene that I had, I was having a whole banter, and it took me to the very end where she was like, I need to have you say something. And then I realized, oh, she can't hear me at all. And I was engaged in this LARPing dialectic. But I'm just curious if you could talk about if that was a technological consideration or more of a design decision. the trade-offs of having the avatars be silent versus being able to actually talk and communicate.
[00:04:37.677] Danny Cannizzaro: Yeah, no, it was definitely a design decision. And it was actually something we knew pretty early on that we wanted to do. And there's a couple of reasons. One of them is by accepting that constraint, we kind of forced people to be more creative and playful with abilities we do give them to communicate, which in Motion tracked VR is like actually quite a bit like you can be very expressive with your gestures and then we are enabling people to snap and have some degree of like ability to like do different types of snaps and we feel like that becomes almost a gameplay element where When you're exploring the under and you're trying to get access to the green room and see what the actors are doing backstage, it might require coordination between two or three players and you'll have to find ways of communicating how to do that by using just the props you find around or the... Limited means we get to do. And then I think the other big reason is story-based. And that ultimately, there is an overarching story to this experience. And we didn't want to have to incorporate the story of the individual players. The way that a voice gives the ability for each player to kind of really bring their own story and their own being into it and into it for all the other players that are networked with them. there's something freeing in that not having voice. It frees you up to be less inhibited as you perform, as you gesture, and to be more immersed in the story that we are telling as creators.
[00:06:02.364] Kent Bye: Yeah, I found myself wishing that I had more communication ability in different parts, but also noticing how when there's objects and a person, an obvious thing you do is start throwing objects at them or have this more trolling behavior. So I'm just curious, like I noticed that it is live and because you want to prove that it's live, there's certain things that you try to either disrupt to kind of really test those boundaries. But I could imagine as an actor, if you're just like in there doing live things and people are just kind of trolling you all the time. I'm just curious to hear. like how you either try to guide things or react to that, given the sort of limited things that they can do, how to react to the major types of temperaments that you start to see.
[00:06:41.872] Tara Ahmadinejad: Yeah, well, and that's actually something you hear about in immersive theater too, where, you know, like you hear stories of people going to sleep no more. And then there's just like jerks, like, you know, I heard about someone like spitting on one of the actors or something like that. Cause in sleep no more, for most of it, the audience doesn't speak and is silent. And the performers don't look at the audience until you get a special one-on-one encounter with the live actor. They're all live. It's theater. But in this case, it's a whole different thing because there's more tendencies towards trolling and gaming and all of that. So there's a couple of tactics. One, there's things like putting a player in the cage that can kind of punish them in a kind of playful way that's not like the worst thing in the world. So it kind of creates a space for rogue elements that doesn't fully shun them, but still teaches the players like what kind of behavior will get punished or rewarded, like that becomes part of it. And then the other thing is the fact that the players can't speak also does add to giving the actors a little more agency and ability to kind of level the playing field a little bit. And then the other thing is that Tender Claws has developed these tools for the actors. So while those actors are improvising live and being responsive to the players, they have all these abilities like they're cueing the music and the sets and the props, but they can also teleport the players and put them in the cage as an example of one of the things that they can do. And they can transport them to another dimension. They can do all sorts of things. And so that set of tools allows them to, again, be able to kind of set some structure and boundaries with the players. And then the last part of it is wanting to reward that discovery process and curiosity. So as long as you're acknowledging that someone is leaving or being crazy or whatever, then they'll know that they're being seen. And that's important to that element of liveness and being responsive. but then they shouldn't extend it into a power struggle. So then at some point you just let them go because that's also part of the experience. So you can either be a good boy or a bad boy and it's fine. That's one of the, the live host refers to them as like, you know, being a good little baby and a bad little baby. That's what it is.
[00:08:52.636] Danny Cannizzaro: We've actually found from watching the run-throughs of the last couple of days, some of the most compelling experiences and moments and dynamic things have happened when players start out maybe throwing chairs or things in a little way, and then I've seen them get put in the time-out cage for a little bit and then brought back. I think it adds to it. When it's handled right, it can add to the experience. And like Tara was saying, we on the back end have powers to do things both in the experience, but then also could even just hard ban someone from the room if it becomes way too much of a distraction.
[00:09:28.781] Samantha Gorman: We have a series of layered safety mechanisms that can fall back for different players in different scenarios.
[00:09:38.762] Kent Bye: I noticed that the most visceral moments for me were these one-on-one interactions with the live actors. And so I spent a lot of time searching for them. I had two one-on-ones in the first experience, and then another one in the second. But as I was walking in, there's somebody who's pointing me and guiding me to go. And the first time, I just followed the directions. And I could tell that it was real and live, though, just by the quality of the voice and how it just felt present, which was like, oh, this is really interesting. But at the second time that I came in, I was like, Oh, this is like a real person. I'm going to like play around with a little bit, but there's a little bit of starting to, you know, do things to make them angry. And it's a bit of like using the improv actors, emotions as a gameplay mechanic, and then trying to then diffuse it and be nice. And so it was sort of a weird trying to like bow and like give some reconciliation to me just being a jerk with them. So, but I found that, you know, when I was walking away, there was a bit of like, I guess, a deeper ethical, considerations for like, this is a part of the constraint of the experience, but then, you know, how do I feel about how I just acted there? And like, it was sort of like, we both wanted to have an end on a positive note rather than me walk away with him being angry. So anyway, that was just kind of like an interesting, like dynamic of going through it the second time after I knew what it was all about, and then starting to play with what's this mean to have a live person and to go through these different arcs of either building rapport or doing things to make them angry.
[00:10:59.975] Tara Ahmadinejad: Yeah and I mean there's a rich history of like cabaret performers and drag performers who contend with all kinds of audience members who will react in all kinds of vocal and unexpected ways and there's this really wonderful performance artist Taylor Mac who talks a lot about this where it's like you have this rogue element in the audience and if you try to like combat it then it's not gonna work it's gonna win And if you try to ignore it, you can't. It's gonna become the loudest thing in the room. So what you have to do is kind of get close to them and like join their spotlight so you can acknowledge it and kind of move forward and kind of scoop it in so that you will always end up being at the center of whatever's happening instead of trying to like reject that thing or act like it's not there. And I think it's a very similar thing of what you experienced in that one-on-one.
[00:11:49.948] Kent Bye: It's almost like they kind of validate and make your trolling behavior part of the story part of the narrative And so you're always you're never at odds with what's happening your behavior becomes part of it Yeah, and notice how the actual world was set up is that there was a little bit of a central hub where you could default to and Have things happening and that if that's the only place that you went to you might still have a really rich experience with maybe some live interaction, but that for me I've done a lot of VR so I sort of explored around and had a couple other one-on-one interactions and it seemed like that you've taken a very similar approach to the virtual virtual reality where you're giving the player a lot of agency to explore around and If they miss some of these live components It's a bit of that discovery process by like finding something and you know I went to the ship a couple times didn't find anything, you know, so it was sort of like a searching around for something that's going to really engage me into that live experience. And so I'm just curious how you were thinking about designing this world to give those different temperaments balance of people who wanted to just be at the central hub or give the ability for people to explore around and discover things.
[00:12:58.046] Samantha Gorman: I think that's actually a really key component for us is the ability to address both those needs. So we have actually kind of a very strong narrative experience at the core that you can go in and out of, but then in the peripherals, it's all about fleshing out the mythology, the world, and the details, and having people make explicit and implicit connections to the environment and the story, both stories that run simultaneously in these two different spaces. So there is a central narrative. There's a hub space. It's actually the thing I was going to say is that it is structurally similar in some ways to VVR in terms of VVR does have that hub world. And there's like Chaz in the cage. And there's different interactions with him. which you know I'm thinking about like storytelling structure and device so there's some parallels there. In this case one of the narratives of the time loop that gets sucked up by this MC type of character that he offers as an act in an entertainment is this ship called the Ekman and basically the story is about the last ill-fated months of the research vessel and the 10 characters that inhabit it in a survival narrative. As the player is able to go around the world, follow different characters, threads, and narratives, and maybe or may not change their fates, see who survives or not at the end, and influence how time operates as well. So how they can scrub through these stories and combine them, as well as work with past versions of themselves to find different narrative moments.
[00:14:29.623] Danny Cannizzaro: And I think this is something we do in a lot of our projects, which is try and reward player exploration. And we do that by usually, or we maintain some control over the overall plot by having some bits and onboarding a middle sequence that's kind of guaranteed to happen. That gives it enough structure that the exploration can kind of fill in the other parts and reward individual guest decisions.
[00:14:52.776] Kent Bye: Yeah. And I'm curious from the immersive theater side, because a lot of times from the immersive theater experiences that I've seen as an audience member, I've pretty much been a ghost. Like I've been invisible and sometimes it will dress me, but it's on their terms. And I feel like in virtual reality, there's a bit of a leveling field in terms of people that are immersed in a virtual reality actually want to be a participant in some different ways. And it feels like that with some of these different tools and with VR, there may be new pathways of exploration for how to engage with the audience that may be either too risky or different or more challenging within a real world. So I'm just curious to hear your experience of what's the difference between interfacing with real life immersive theater with people that are co-located and embodied versus something that may be in a virtual world.
[00:15:40.228] Tara Ahmadinejad: I mean, I think the biggest difference is what you were alluding to earlier, which is that when people are in a video game, they're less respectful of the performers. And so I think that becomes a big thing in terms of negotiating how to engage with them. But there are, I mean, there are a lot of theater experiences that are more interactive and where the performers do talk directly to the audience. And there are situations where the audience are asked to speak and participate. There's shows where the audience becomes the performers on stage. So, I mean, it really runs the gamut in theater and performance. depending on how you're handling your audience, there's a certain amount of kind of reading them that you have to do. And that's the same in VR. And in this context, it's just the kinds of clues you're picking up on are a little different. So they can tell when they're in there and there's like, oh, there's a real like troll in there who's like, all over the place, or like, oh, this audience was really, really playful, or oh, this audience was very warm and fuzzy, and they were all just hugging each other all the time. So despite the fact that the audience can't speak in their abstractions, they're doing just the same thing that they would do in theater, which is reading them, and picking up on clues, and knowing where to steer the situation based on the feedback that they're getting. It's kind of amazing how much feedback they are getting from talking to the actors. each round.
[00:17:10.172] Danny Cannizzaro: Yeah, and just one other bigger point I wanted to make about this experience is that it's not trying to recreate immersive theater in VR, and it's not trying to just be like a traditional game in VR. It's trying to draw from like histories of different experimental theater and games and all. And experiences. Yeah, and to create like an experience that is kind of wholly unique to this medium. That's something we always do at Tenerife, is we try and compose for the medium specifically. and be aware of what the limitations and what the things are. So when you're talking about those moments or feeling like you're a ghost in an immersive theater experience, that becomes one of the central things we're interested in exploring. So we explore that by not just having it always be live or always be pre-recorded, but by letting the player feel that difference of what is it like when a character that's been treating you like a ghost all of a sudden looks at you and you have a moment with them like a beat and so that moment and those kind of like juxtapositions I think are what really were one of the launching points for us in this project.
[00:18:16.103] Tara Ahmadinejad: And I have to say that that kind of shifting of frames of the audience is a ghost and now the audience is there and I'm looking at them is something that exists in theater and it's something that exists in film and it's something that exists in novels like every medium has played with that but the language for doing it is a new one that, like, we have to figure out in VR. It's just, in the same way, it's a completely different language in theater to kind of break the fourth wall than it is in film. But they exist. It's just a matter of figuring out how do we do this in this medium. It's got to be a totally different approach.
[00:18:53.835] Kent Bye: Yeah. And I'm wondering, uh, as you start to launch an experience like this, if it's going to scale up to the point where you're going to either have a troop that's doing these live shows with a handful of people, just like the normal constraints of immersive theater, or if you foresee that there's going to be some users that wants to actually play a role. And then, then there's the issue of like, okay, well, how do you then allow people to take that power of authority and then How do you manage if they don't start to act abusive to people as well? So like, I'm just curious how this moves forward if it's always going to be like the pie hole theater troupe actors in a experience that can scale up since, you know, VR can transcend the limitations of space and time. You're able to have the resources to have the throughput of something that'd be much larger than you would if it was actual physical location. So I'm just curious to hear like where this goes and what you're thinking about that.
[00:19:45.338] Danny Cannizzaro: Yeah, I think that's something we've been thinking about from the outset, and the reason it's not location-based is because we are very interested in making something that can scale up. We're currently not thinking of the players as being who we would give those powers to, but we are encouraging through the multiplayer thing a type of sharing of knowledge. So someone that has been in the experience for multiple hours and knows most of the secrets of the under, probably will have a mask that looks slightly different and can act as a guide to show the newer players, oh, this is how you get into the... I don't know, this secret tunnel underneath the ship that leads to the sweepers, kind of like Hathaway. And so we want to reward that desire of really loyal guests to teach others what they've seen and the secrets they've found. But we'll keep control over the actors and the powers the actors have. Though I think one thing with Pile is right now they've been kind of generating the roles and actually writing some of the characters. And there will come a time where we have to codify that a little bit more.
[00:20:44.862] Tara Ahmadinejad: Yeah, like at some point, the piehole actors won't be able to be the ones doing it and they won't, and certainly not the only ones. So as it scales up, we're going to have to find a way, like Danny was saying, to codify it and be able to like teach it to other actors. And also, although they're improvising, it still takes rehearsal to do. I mean, I think I'm learning through this process that not everyone realizes that when things are improvised, it still takes like practice or maybe even more time to practice. And the other thing is the tools, the interface that the actors have, takes a lot of time to get used to. So when you get a really great improviser into the headset with the tools, they might at first sound really stilted because they're focusing on learning the interface. So then once they get more comfortable with the interface and they get used to just being in VR, because that's a whole thing too, just being in that world is very overwhelming. And then once they develop that confidence, then they can draw on their improvisation skills. getting used to the characters and the world of the under and Samantha wrote like a whole little under Bible so that all the actors can kind of draw from that and it gives them a little bit of like a backstory to be able to improvise within. So those are all things that take time to learn and rehearse and so couldn't be something that a player would just slot into and they would be paid, paid actors.
[00:22:07.662] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I know that after seeing the experience that it was pretty seamless of feeling like there was an actor there. And so I felt like that wasn't something that just happened. It's a lot of process and iteration that you had to go through. So what were some of the biggest hurdles or challenges that you had to overcome or solve in order to get this experience to the point where it is today?
[00:22:26.166] Danny Cannizzaro: I could tell one thing, which is the first actor interface we made for the actor build, we required the actors to use some of VR's traditional best practices for interface, which are spatialized things. But we realized when we were looking at playback that you could kind of see the actors' bodies pressing buttons midair. And there would be these moments where there was a pause, and you could clearly tell they were trying to trigger a power and they would stop gesturing. And so we had to create, we've iterated on this multiple times and we will keep iterating on it multiple more, but trying to allow the actors to be powerful in the world and have control over a wide range of things while keeping full expressivity of their gestures and movement, because ultimately that is like, we're not doing facial capture, we are using the body and the voice as the main means of expression for the actors.
[00:23:18.789] Samantha Gorman: Maybe for me it was trying to translate my experience between being in the sort of field and theatre and trying to communicate the importance of like almost learning controls as a sort of dance and a sort of rehearsal in itself and then the importance of actors needing that rehearsal time on the other end and trying to navigate and negotiate these spaces and weave different vocabularies together.
[00:23:44.648] Tara Ahmadinejad: I mean, that was also our big thing too, was like communicating the need for rehearsals and the time it takes to get used to it. I mean, when you're talking about incorporating live theater into VR, you're talking about the actors. And so the actors, it's like so much comes back to what they need to feel 100% prepared to do this really crazy thing that they're doing. And so that's like giving them the tools, giving them the practice, and giving them whatever permission to kind of control the players, let them go, you know, and navigating that line of what will make the players feel like they have agency, and at the same time, helping to guide them forward through the experience.
[00:24:28.033] Danny Cannizzaro: And another thing that's kind of different or unique about this is it really isn't like other projects I've done in the past where it kind of releases and the content's locked, but what you saw today could be considered like an early preview where like, like when a show goes in previews and you're still working out what's working, like we need that time with like, with people outside of our bubble that are coming to it fresh to really just like let the show find its rhythm and like let it,
[00:24:51.662] Tara Ahmadinejad: Yeah, and actually, now that you say that, when you were talking about how you started talking for a while, like, I think the goal would be to create that interaction and keep developing it to the point where you wouldn't feel like you needed to speak for very long, you know, so that the interaction would work and be tailored to a non-speaking player. So that's something that I think will continue to keep troubleshooting and figuring out, you know, how to make that absolutely clear that that's part of it.
[00:25:19.952] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you each think is the ultimate potential of this fusion of immersive theater and virtual reality and immersive entertainment? And what am I able to enable?
[00:25:33.526] Samantha Gorman: One of the things I study or think about is the idea of presence. And you know, I mean, we all in VR, we all talk about presence and it gets thrown around, you know, as a buzzword. But I'm interested in how having a live being in that space gives different shades to the definition of presence, such as being with somebody, being present with someone, and how that may parallel being present within a virtual world.
[00:25:56.881] Danny Cannizzaro: I think creatively I tend to almost leave some of the bigger questions aside and focus really specifically. This is something that's happened with a few of our projects where we've made something and we get asked questions about the bigger applications of it and from my perspective a lot of the things we're making are very specifically tied to our story and the narrative and all the things that are interesting to me about the presence and the actors do feed back into both the story side of the specific instance. And so I don't know if I've actually put as much thought into what the implications would be for a wider project than this.
[00:26:32.441] Tara Ahmadinejad: For Piehole, coming from our theater background, we often think about creating experiences that are transcendent, but then dropping the audience back into the real reality or the room we're in, and that kind of interplay between those two things. So I find it really interesting to be in VR in this experience because I don't come from a VR background. So for me, I always hear about VR as the empathy machine or VR as like a thing that's like realer than reality, like a search for the real. And this experience, I love working on it because it's not really trying to create something that's just the same as reality. It's actually inventing a whole other world, and there's so much abstraction in the design, and it's so much about immersing the player in this other world, and I feel like that allows for that possibility of transcendence, but then the presence of the live actors as a way of being that kind of puncture that brings you back to the live moment, and that interplay is the thing that Paiho's always Thinking about in lots of different ways and so it's only through the process To getting to this point that I understood that this project was also working at that level Awesome.
[00:27:38.973] Kent Bye: Great. Is there anything else that's left and said that you'd like to say to the immersive community?
[00:27:44.517] Danny Cannizzaro: I think our rehearsals end up being pretty funny because we've been bi-coastal and so we've actually been using the experience as how we rehearse. And so you'll see like a bunch of skeleton and dancing cat outdoors.
[00:27:56.227] Samantha Gorman: Talking to each other and being like, well, I really like the way that arm moves.
[00:28:00.750] Tara Ahmadinejad: It really it's really kind of heartwarming because there's like, you know We're in New York and they're in LA and and then Alice was there and Sam was there and we were all there Just like having a rehearsal as if we were in the same place, but we were also were like cats and skeletons It was just really it felt really nice Awesome.
[00:28:19.275] Kent Bye: Great. Well, thank you so much for joining me. So, thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks. I So that was Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizzara, the co-founders of Tender Claws, as well as Tara Madinashad of Piehole. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, I do think that the live component of having live theater actors interact with you within these virtual reality experiences makes a huge difference in terms of social presence and that live moment of you doing something and somebody being in virtual reality reacting to you. there's cultivating a whole dimension of both language that you're going to have to use your body to try to communicate rather than speaking and so you have to be really inventive for how to in some ways create your own levels of sign language or figure out ways that you're going to communicate with other players to be able to do things that you can only achieve if you're working with other players. In this first demo I didn't necessarily try to collaborate with any of the other players I just kind of went off on my own and was searching for these one-on-one experiences. So that's interesting to hear that that's going to be a part of it is trying to encourage these people who can't speak to communicate with other players in order to achieve these different goals. The other thing is that it's interesting to see the different dynamics of a video game world and how it's different than, say, a normal immersive theater experience. So when you're at an immersive theater experience and you're walking around, let's say like Sleep No More, an actor has the agency to be able to take your hand and pull you into like a one-on-one experience. And so you have this transition from being a ghost into now all of a sudden you're being seen and you have this intimate one-on-one interaction. And so that is a key component of what they're playing with here is that dynamic and dialectic between being invisible and being a ghost and actually being seen and being interacted with by one of the main characters. And there's a mechanic where you essentially like shake the hand of the actor and then you transport into this other part of the location. And then you have this whole one-on-one experience. Well, I was going through it the second time because they have a number of different main shows that they're running. And so I was able to see both iterations of that and kind of explore around and go through different paths. So there's a mechanic where you're actually shaking the hands and that is what triggers this one-on-one experience. Well, the second time that I went through it, there was another person that was also experiencing it that like tried to cut in front of me and like grab the hand as they're reaching out the hand. And so I was just like, wow, like that would have never happened within the context of an immersive theater piece. And so I was starting to think like, wow, this is going to be gamers trying to get this one-on-one interaction. It could get really cutthroat of, people really taking the gamification of things like sleep no more to the next level. So there's a component of that that I think is there and so like overall I see that there's different dimensions of active presence and social mental presence and embodied presence and emotional presence and so they're really dialing down the speaking and so there's no language and so You're not getting the sense of social present by talking, but you get the social presence by having your embodiment and the way that you're expressing your body in order to communicate as well as you taking actions and you expressing your agency in different ways. And so with a live actor, you could decide to start throwing things at them. That's like the sort of the most, uh, simple thing that you can think of because there's things there and you want to interact and try to get a reaction out of the actor and so I started to do a little bit of that and so I think the challenges that they're gonna run into is how to cultivate and reward positive behavior rather than the more trolling like behavior because Just from my two times going through it, I did find that there's a live actor there and you want to try to prove to yourself that that's actually a live actor. And my experience of that was that I started throwing things at the actor the second time around, and then I started to feel bad. Like, wow, I'm kind of like acting like a jerk. And so after I made that actor angry, I tried to like do things to give some reconciliation and ask for forgiveness in different ways. And so. It was kind of like this interesting journey as an audience member because there is this element of you're in the constraints of a narrative and you want to figure out how to find ways that you can interact with these immersive theater actors. In most immersive theater, you're treated completely as a ghost because it's just very difficult to Handle the full range of agency that you might be able to be dealt with and you know You kind of really do need these moderation tools to be able to deal with bad actors And so in the context of a video game, they're gonna allow you to actually participate more with your body but at the same time they still need the powerful robust moderation tools and one of the things they had to figure out was for anybody that's been in the VR chat and you can be talking to somebody and they want to like go to another world then I you could tell like they kind of bring up their hands they're looking at a palette and then they're start pointing at things and it's very clear that they're using some sort of virtual interface that you can't see but they're having access to and so they wanted to pretty much eliminate that completely because that breaks immersion of you were talking to an actor and all of a sudden if they start to go through this spatialized interface then it just breaks the illusion that they're in front of you doing some sort of performance and so they need to be able to either teleport or do moderation tasks with different individuals. So there's a whole range of things that they can do as an actor, but they need to be able to do it in a seamless fashion by doing these different gesture interfaces and pushing these combinations of different buttons and whatnot. they've had to develop their own language in order to do that. The other thing that Samantha Gorman said is that they've actually are bringing these two worlds together of the theater world and the virtual reality world and each of those worlds have their own language and so one of the themes that I'm seeing in the larger VR industry is that VR is like this melting pot that is facilitating these interdisciplinary collaborations between these different communities where they actually have to figure out ways to collaborate with each other by finding a common language between them. And I think that in some ways the common language is the human experience, but there's also a little bit of like mashing up of making sure that when you say presence in VR, is that the same of what you mean in presence in theater? There may be things that are similar in that way, but there's also a whole layers of different jargon that you have in the VR community. that the theater folks have to use and learn and then the VR people have to be able to seamlessly be able to understand both desires and needs of the theater actors. To me it was interesting to hear how much rehearsal was required because when you're developing a virtual reality experience you don't necessarily build in this needing to have time for rehearsals for the live actors and so as these types of experiences are being generated, then you have to do this whole world building. So it sounds like Samantha wrote a whole Bible to describe the whole backstory as well as the larger narrative threads. And so it sounds like that the piehole actors are in some ways embodying these different characters. And as they're embodying these characters, they're kind of fleshing out the different temperaments and the different things that they're going to say in different aspects of the narrative. The other thing that I found really fascinating was that typically in an immersive theater piece, there's pretty simple linear unfolding of the story. Like you don't get to see very much branching or really complicated aspects of the narrative. And the advantage of doing something in a virtual world is that you have the ability to jump around in the time scales and it sounds like that you as the Participant are gonna be able to have control over the time and the narrative and you're gonna be jumping in between different time slices of this world and Based upon your interactions with the characters. You're gonna understand more and more about the story. So it sounds like I The Under is going to be a lot about trying to piece together this overarching narrative and that you're going to unlock these different secrets and find different aspects about the story. And so each one-on-one interaction that you have, you're getting a little bit more of a fragment of the story to be able to understand what the overall experience is. And from a theater perspective, there's a large aspect of the theater actors having to be able to read the audience and sort of judge the temperament to see, are they going to be desiring a lot of high agency? Are they going to be really expressive in the way that they're using their embodiment? Are they going to be just really passively receiving the story and listen to every single word that you're saying? Or are they going to go off and try to disrupt the narrative in different ways and try to make it more of an interactive experience? Or are they going to want to try to communicate with all these sort of abstractions of symbolic communications and try to see if they can establish some sort of deeper communication with some of these actors. And so I think each person as they go into this experience is going to want to explore different aspects of their embodiments, of their agency, of the communication element, or listening to the deeper story that's unfolding. It sounds like that they're going to be paying the actors for some amount of time. I'm not sure how long, but with the launch of the quest, it's going to be a little bit like a theater run where there's going to be a time where you're going to have an opportunity to see this experience live. And then who knows what happens to it after that, but this really does require these paid actors in order to embody these different characters. And so you're going to be both exploring the world, but also learning about the world through these interactions with the characters. who are these paid actors, which kind of reminds me of Neil Stevenson's Diamond Age, where they have these Ractors who are paid actors who are doing exactly that, which is getting paid to be acting and interacting with characters within the context of these worlds and these experiences, and that science fiction dream that Neil Stevenson thought of in the Diamond Age is actually coming to pass here with The Under. It's also interesting to hear Tara from Piehole talk about how there's a whole set of established best practices from cabaret and drag queens and certainly comedians as well who have to deal with disruptive people within the experience and that the goal isn't to just completely ignore them because they'll start to take over but to acknowledge them and to witness them and to let them know that you see them, but don't let them hijack taking control of the narrative so that you are able to still maintain the integrity of that narrative and to include them, but to do it in a more Aikido fashion where you're letting them in and then sort of letting it go away as well. So you're satisfying that need of being seen and being interacted with in some way. And finally, it was fascinating also to hear Tara from Piehole mention that in every single medium, there's the aspect of breaking the fourth wall, which is you're reading a book and then all of a sudden the book starts addressing you as a reader or you're watching a TV show and then the TV show starts talking to you in different ways. And also in virtual reality, what does it mean to break the fourth wall and to engage with you as a participant? And I think this is in some ways, I think the virtual reality medium is going to have the most success of being able to actually interact with you as a participant within these experiences, because it has the highest level of fidelity of you being able to communicate in different ways. I mean, there deliberately not allowing you to speak and communicate because they really wanted to explore like pushing your level of using your embodiment the quest as a technology platform is using your hands and your headset and so they're really asking you right out of the gate to use your body to communicate which i think is brilliant because it's actually like you're using the affordances of the technology to be able to do things you can never do before And so you're going to be able to do this level of embodied communication that up to this point have never been able to be possible before. And they're going to be having a whole narrative that's unfolding and all these other moderation tools, you know, has this great blend of you as a participant, being able to make choices and take action in different ways. But also they have a structure by which that you have the periphery so that if you want to explore out, you use your agency to explore, but then you're able to find these one-on-one interactions. And so you have these payoffs by. having a reason to go explore because you may have these serendipitous interactions with these live theater actors. But also if people want to just be present in their body or listen to the story that's unfolding, you can just go to the Central Hub and kind of receive both theater experiences as well as these different performances that are happening. And then maybe as you're just kind of receiving and wandering around, then you'll have these one-on-one interactions as well. And so you're going to be able to have these one-on-one interactions whether or not you explore whether or not you stay in the central hub and there's also going to be dimensions of collaborating and coordinating with these other players that are experiencing it as well where you're going to have to find ways to communicate with other people and be able to go out on these different quests and adventures And there's going to be a whole layer of different secrets that are going to be able to be unlocked. For anybody that watched a Bandersnatch on Netflix and then saw the level of community that arose around that, it was really quite amazing to see both the way in which that people wanted to find all of the secrets of Bandersnatch. And so they went through and they were like unlocking all these different things, like finding these QR codes and. typing in JavaScript code into a window to be able to see like the whole structure, like whenever you go out of like a linear narrative format, and you start to play with these nonlinear branches, then it becomes a game for a community to figure out, okay, what is the structure of this experience and it's going to be up to you as to whether or not you're going to want to discover that on your own or whether or not you're going to participate in trying to unlock these different secrets and participate in these different Reddit communities to be able to try to map out what this narrative structure actually looks like. So I expect that after watching what happened with Banner Snatch, this sounds like this is really geared towards cultivating that level of community. And there's something about shared experiences that when you have a shared experience, then you're able to then talk about your own direct experience of that. And so there's a little bit of allowing each of the characters to have their own direct experiences. And I think that's the magic of immersive theater is that it's going away from these purely authored stories and they're creating a context in a world for you to be able to have your own experience so that you have your own stories to be able to tell. your own elements of serendipity and synchronicity and having something that was happening within your internal state. And then with that live component, it's opening it up for these magical moments for you to have aspects of the narrative land in ways that you exactly need in that right, precise moment when you experience it. And I think that's one of the key underlying philosophical elements of that liveness of live immersive theater is that it allows you to have that serendipity and synchronicity within yourself and be able to interact and participate and have it react to you in your agency. And so it's this perfect blend of your active presence, your social and mental presence, your embodied presence, as well as emotional presence. So that's all that I have for today. And I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends and consider becoming a member of the Patreon because this is a listener supported podcast. And so I do rely upon your donations in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
