Navigating the Next Spatial Frontier of Storytelling: VR, AR, MR and Spatial Computing

This Thursday the Mediterrane Film Festival explored the ever-changing world of VR, AR, MR and spatial computing in a dynamic panel titled ‘Navigating the Next Spatial Frontier of Storytelling’. Moderated by Michel Reilhac – Curator of the festival’s Future Visions Programming Strand and Head of Studies for Venice Biennale College Cinema and Cinema VR – the panel featured industry experts including Joel Kachi Benson, award-winning documentary filmmaker and virtual reality content creator; Stephen Dullaghan, developer at Rupture Studios; Francis Ghersci, Head of Creative at Stargate Studios Malta; Craig Quintero, sculptor, installation artist and award-winning immersive storyteller and Neville Spiteri, co-founder and CEO at WEVR.

The session started with the panel acknowledging how a lot of the media attention that VR has received in recent years has died down, with everyone now talking about AI. They broke down this new technology and what the future holds, and noted it takes a lot of faith in knowing we can find new ways to relate to each other and that this is fundamentally what storytellers do – help us make sense of our reality.

The panel delved into some of the challenges when crafting immersive stories, one of which is the difficult business model currently in place – with there being no real market available and the serious hurdles surrounding all users requiring a headset and needing to learn this new technology.

The panel also discussed how, as with many storytelling mediums, financing also continues to be a challenge – as well as touching upon the importance of finding international co-production partners in this space and subsequent benefits on resources and bringing together creative talents from multiple countries.

The panel also addressed the metaverse and how it creates great opportunities to choose how you want to be represented, with everyone you meet also having chosen their own realities in this space. They debated around the future commercialisation of this space, noting that having to pay for this experience is imperative, a great sign of growth and creating more jobs, policies and opportunities, creating a sustainable ecosystem.

“Just go for it” was a sentiment agreed by the whole panel. When embarking upon creating immersive content they noted there has to be a lot of intentionality to it and that you will make mistakes, but it is about the research you do and the questions you ask, but the most important thing is to keep creating. They ended the lively Q&A section by noting it is a privilege to create in the immersive space as, unlike in other mediums, you have the audiences’ undivided attention.

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