SNAPlab

The second day of the conference had one clear highlight for me—Ola Røyseland‘s presentation. His contribution was called Frame/less, and I was surprised by how close his thoughts were to mine. Ola is a filmmaker who focuses on shooting short films in his doctoral thesis. He draws on two assumptions: 1. we watch films because they convey emotions to us through narration, 2. VR is associated with a lack of emotion and weak narration. His goal is to identify which formal techniques are suitable for storytelling in VR. To achieve this, he shoots each of his films in two different formats—classic film and 180 degrees. He then tests his films on audiences to find out what works and what doesn’t.

Olovy’s films are short, entertaining, and experiment with things such as narrative perspective and point of view.

I was thrilled by Ola’s presentation. He demonstrated exactly the kind of thinking that interests me in filmmakers and managed to formulate it as a research problem that he addresses in his work. I sincerely hope that this was not my last encounter with Ola.

I was also intrigued by Lukáš Hejtmánek‘s presentation on multisensory perception. Although it is relatively distant from my topic, I enjoyed the playfulness with which they carried out their experiment. In short, it was about verifying what sensory stimuli need to be simulated in order for a visit to the forest in VR to have a therapeutic effect. Surprisingly, artificial grass underfoot and aroma lamps are not necessary. Apparently, visual and auditory stimuli are enough.

The next day, I also realized that another great contributions by Oliver Kobián and Pavel Srp (yesterday) had something in common: both studied under Lukáš Hejtmánek.

I also found Marika Hedemyr‘s contribution extremely inspiring. She talked about her mixed reality project. At one point, she emphasized the importance of pauses in directing the attention of people participating in her project. She deliberately placed pauses after significant sentences in the audio guide’s speech (e.g., questions). She determined the length of the pauses intuitively, but not at first glance, and from what she showed us, the pauses lasted from a few to tens of seconds. 

And that was the ZIP-Scene Conference for me. I don’t know if the organizers will want to invite me back next year, but I will definitely want to come.