The best VR and AR from Sundance 2018, from haptic gloves to alien abduction

fThe Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier experimental section featured its first virtual reality experience in 2012, and with every festival, its projects have grown longer and more sophisticated. This year was no exception. The program included more than 20 virtual and augmented reality entries, ranging from simple mobile 360-degree video to multi-person performance art installations.

Many of these pieces came from well-known figures in the VR film and art world, attached to studios like Within, Felix & Paul, and Oculus. But 2018 also saw strong projects from relative newcomers, and a couple of absences, including Nonny de la Peña, who created the first Sundance-selected VR piece and has been featured at the festival multiple times since then. This year, people used familiar formats for more sophisticated storytelling, while others channeled newer ideas like multi-person VR and haptics into crowd-pleasing experiments. Here are some of the best.

Dispatch is a half-hour, multi-chapter thriller about a disillusioned police dispatcher named Ted (Silicon Valley’s Martin Starr) who receives a series of calls from people threatened by the same killer. Ted knows only what he can infer from callers’ words, and the film emphasizes this by sketching events in thin outlines against black emptiness, sometimes changing them as his understanding of the situation evolves. Writer and director Edward Robles elegantly blends these scenes with maps, email text, and a brief clip of live-action video, for an austere, expressive aesthetic.

The first section of a three-part story from Martin Allais and Nico Casavecchia, BattleScar is a straightforward coming-of-age tale about a Puerto Rican-American teen named Lupe (voiced by Rosario Dawson), set in an animated version of New York’s 1970s punk scene. It’s edited with unusual confidence and sophistication, using a combination of full-sized virtual environments and small diorama-like boxes that float in front of the audience. The piece puts forward an idealized vision of old New York, with an emphasis on female punk bands. It’s still too short to feel like a fully realized work, but it lays solid groundwork for future installments.

I was a fan of Tyler Hurd’s earlier works Old Friend and Chocolate, and the 2018 Sundance installation from the music-focused VR artist is a good example of how to create shared experiences that don’t rely on conversation or heavy interactivity. Chorus turns six people at a time into mythical virtual warriors of different species and sizes, reenacting a battle against ancient evil. Set to a pulsing Justice soundtrack, the experience lets people create visual effects with their hands and talk to each other, drawing on ideas from last year’s Life of Us. (Life of Us’ co-creator Chris Milk also worked on Chorus.) It’s more plot-driven than Hurd’s earlier work, but as much fun as ever.

Dinner Party is based on the story of Betty and Barney Hill, who reported the first widely publicized alien abduction story in 1961. The short film — written and directed by Charlotte Stoudt, Laura Wexler, and Angel Manuel Soto — primarily uses live-action video footage. But it eventually moves into semi-abstract renderings of the pair’s abduction memories, creating the impression of peeling away a façade to get at some deep, potentially horrifying truth. It’s a well-paced, self-contained little period piece about two people vainly trying to return to normalcy after a seemingly impossible experience.

Wes Anderson’s stop-motion film Isle of Dogs isn’t coming out until March, but its cast and crew worked with Félix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphaël of studio Felix & Paul on a remarkably clever VR preview. The piece is primarily the film’s stars (Bryan Cranston, Tilda Swinton, Jeff Goldblum, and several more) speaking about their work through the mouths of their animated canine characters. But the 360-degree video also shows what’s going on behind the camera, where people are building models and editing video as the “dogs” speak.

Artist Lynette Wallworth received the Sundance Film Festival’s first virtual reality film residency in 2016, and in 2018, she arrived with one of the year’s best VR documentaries: a 30-minute story narrated by Hushuhu, the first female shaman of the Amazonian Yawanawá people. Its 360-degree shots of the Amazon are effectively complemented by moments of artificially rendered color that represent the hallucinogenic effects of sacred plants, and Hushuhu’s story of intense training and dedication is genuinely fascinating.

Based on Neil Gaiman’s children’s book of the same name, Wolves in the Walls is about a girl named Lucy who’s convinced there are wolves living in the walls of her house. Hoping to stop them, she teams up with the player, who appears as an imaginary friend. It’s a place for newly formed studio Fable to explore virtual interactivity that’s deeper than what you’d find in a simple 360-degree animation or video, but less formally structured than a typical game. The first episode only offers hints at the full possibilities, but it’s a charming start to a larger story.

Spheres represents the impossible experience of watching two black holes collide through haunting music and stark, beautifully rendered environments. It’s part astronomy lesson and part art project, with moments of interactivity giving the impression that you’ve actually fallen into one of the holes. The piece is written and directed by Fistful of Stars director Eliza McNitt, and filmmaker Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, Mother!) serves as an executive producer. Distributor CityLights recently picked it up in a 7-figure deal, which is standard for Sundance’s indie feature films, but unheard of for virtual reality projects.

Sundance isn’t a tech show, but it usually has one or two projects that explore storytelling through experimental hardware. This year, that included a presentation from HaptX, a haptic technology company that created a tiny virtual farm using a Vive headset and custom force-feedback glove. In Experience Touch, you can grab a cloud dangling from a string and feel real tension as you pull it, or pick up a tiny fox and feel it walk around on your hand. I tried a version of this system last year under the name AxonVR, but it’s gotten a lot better since then. Experience Touch puts it into an environment that’s adorable and surprisingly immersive.

Studio Tender Claws is known for the game Virtual Virtual Reality, which affectionately mocks the more grandiose claims of virtual reality proponents. TendAR is a smaller project about the supposed magic of computer vision. It’s a mobile augmented reality game where two (real) people talk to a (fake) fish-based artificial intelligence that’s been designed to taste basic emotional states. The fish gets absolutely ecstatic when he “eats” happiness and anger, but he also isn’t all that great at recognizing them. When he doesn’t, he gets upset with you — the human being with an actual face and real feelings — for not matching up with his algorithms.

Correction: Chorus is an experience for six participants, not five.