That I Wake

An interactive virtual reality film using a mixture of handdrawn, cgi and live action.

Increasingly, we find ourselves lost in our virtual worlds, living virtual lives. With the recent advent of virtual reality, the gap between our virtual and real lives seems doomed to increase. In my past few years working on virtual reality at Google and the MIT Media Lab, I have become committed to the project of finding intersections between reality and virtual reality in order to connect the two in more human ways. This project explores how this new artistic medium transforms one of the oldest human traditions, that of storytelling, and enables stories that would be impossible to tell in any other medium. Through a sense of presence and interactivity achieved, storytelling transforms such that the content is no longer static but instead reactive to each and every viewer in a way that is very much reflective of our reality: your presence within the world of this story has a direct effect on how the story is told, and as a result, no one will experience it quite the same way.