Sundance Film Festival will virtually beam you to space to watch movies and party.
Feel like escaping Earth right now?
The following written content by Joan E. Solsman
Later this month, the Sundance Film Festival will unlock a virtual portal to ascend beyond the Earth’s atmosphere to a space-garden simulation. Your new next-door neighbor — the International Space Station — floats serenely beyond the dome of glass encircling you, as you both orbit the planet rotating silently below.
For decades, the Sundance Film Fest has packed movie lovers into the snowy mountain hamlet of Park City, Utah. But with the coronavirus pandemic forcing Sundance to transform into a (mostly) remote affair this year, the fest needed a new virtual venue to re-create its arty, festival atmosphere.
“It’s Zoom meets Fortnight meets Legoland,” said Shari Frilot, the chief curator of Sundance’s New Frontier program, the fest’s tech-heavy branch focused on cutting-edge storytelling.
To build the virtual environment, Frilot and Sundance joined forces with Active Theory. A company that designs digital experiences, Active Theory helps make those annual Spotify Wrapped curations of your listening of the past year; it’s also the puppet-master behind Coachella’s livestreams, and it built an interactive 3D Hogwarts for Harry Potter fan site Pottermore.
I got a demo of the Sundance environment the day before New Year’s Eve, when the the prospect of putting 2020 in the rear-view mirror brought growing anticipation for a happier 2021.
I’d really like to escape Earth and get back to that space garden now please.
Sundance in Space
The space garden is a single-user orientation space. There, you can set up your avatar and get accustomed to the mechanics of moving around in this virtual world. Based on WebXR, you can access it through a simple Web browser (I was told to use Google’s Chrome), moving yourself around with arrow buttons or simple point-and-clicks in the space. But it’s also accessible with virtual reality headsets for a much more immersive feel. Your avatar is simple floating geometry, topped with a circle that features your uploaded picture. Read more from Cnet.
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