Venice VR Expanded:
Portland Oregon’s Satellite Exhibition
of the Venice VR Festival
In 2020 and 2021, Reflective Brands' Joshua Young, Nisha Burton, and I were responsible for organizing and procuring top-tier VR technology. Despite the challenges posed by the pandemic, we successfully provided over 1000 demos, ensuring a smooth and safe experience for attendees who were trying VR for the first time. This feat required extensive planning and adherence to museum protocols.
Designing the run of show demanded an intricate understanding of both the VR hardware and software. As the lead, I trained and guided a 15-person team through the process of facilitating the interaction between attendees and technology. Operating a fleet of 45 headsets for 7 hours a day presented many friction points, given that consumer VR hardware is designed for shorter sessions. Despite encountering hurdle after hurdle, we were able to overcome these obstacles with a calm and collected approach.
In addition to my role in organizing the event, I presented an interactive artwork during the exhibition. Titled XRXP, the piece was a projected interactive installation that greeted attendees as they entered the venue. After providing an overview of the exhibition, I will discuss the key components of our successful execution of this event.
An overview of the event via the Portland Art Museum’s Website:
For the first time in its 125-year history, La Biennale di Venezia (the Venice Biennale) is offering its programming both online and at select venues around the globe, responding creatively to the travel and in-person gathering challenges of the coronavirus pandemic. Venice VR Expanded is the official creative VR competition within the frame of the Venice International Film Festival (September 2–12, 2020). This year, since many audiences will not be able to come to Venice for COVID-19 related reasons, Venice will come to them.
Venice VR Expanded 2020, the creative Virtual Reality competition of the 77th Venice International Film Festival, will take place September 2–12, offering access to 39 immersive VR projects from 24 countries through virtual reality headsets in satellite installations, including the Portland Art Museum and Northwest Film Center in Portland, Oregon. Portland will be joined in this satellite network by prestigious galleries, museums, institutions and VR leaders in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Copenhagen, Geneva, Hangzhou, Modena, Montreal, Moscow, Paris, Taipei, and Venice Mestre.
Coverage via:
Fox 12 Oregon
The Oregonian
KBOO Radio
Consulting
Tech Production
XR Design
2020-22
This event operated all day with 4 HTC Vive, 20 Oculus Quest,
and 4 Intel Headets. Organizing protocol for this scale was quite the challenge.
Face masks without proper nose clamps tend to fog up headsets so we had blue medical masks on hand to remedy that problem.
Sanitation was obivously the top concern for this event. To clean the headsets inbetween demos we used a new product called the CleanBox. A uv light emitter designed specifically to clean VR headsets. Wipes, sanitizer dispensers, and gloves were also used for every headset transition.
XRXP .1
The First Iteration of a Long Form Piece
XRXP is a VR experience that I designed in 2018, and have been waiting for the opportunity to fully realize its potential. When approached by the museum to provide an interactive piece, I saw it as a prime opportunity to showcase a sample version of XRXP. For this exhibition, I presented XRXP in the form of a large-scale projection that utilized depth mapping cameras to augment itself as attendees walked past or near it. The piece underwent several updates throughout the two-week exhibition, with changes to its color, resolution, scale, and reflection. At times, the projection would include a reinterpreted reflection of those who approached it. The primary goal of XRXP was to serve as the first layer of interaction, preparing attendees for the VR experiences they were about to encounter.