I am thrilled to share the details of this amazing event.
Thanks to our host & sponsor (Two Trees Management Co.) we have secured the perfect venue to have an evening of open demo's of the very best "Art in VR (and AR) in NYC. Below is our long list of demo's & special thanks to all of the organizations involved with helping to put together this event including:
HTC, The Glimpse Group, Jump Into The Light, Pop Up Gaming, National Arts Club, Great Bowery, Art F City, Made in NY Media Center by IFP, Art in General, & Dumbo BID
Tilt Brush:
Melissa McDonald
Congruence is an abstract VR music video experience created by Melissa McDonald in collaboration with Efrain Aguilar. Its original design was constructed utilizing Googles Tilt Brush with animations done in Unity. The work was made to EDM producer STRBXs song Congruence featuring vocalist ONEIRIC (Melissas own electronic music persona). The sculpture is meant to be a visual representation about leaving our world for a better one, one that may not be fully constructed but is always becoming.
Will Roberts
Will Roberts is a VR Director, artist & immersive experience designer at Augmented Pictures, a Harlem based immersive design & animation studio. Will will be performing a live VR Painting of a scene from "Blk Boy Joy", the prologue from his upcoming 2018 mixed reality exhibition.
His longtime interest has been exploring the intersection between technology, folklore & the human experience. Will holds an MFA in 3D Animation & Sound Art. He has worked in animation, VFX, film & in the technology industry for over a decade. In 2009 he got his start in VR as a entrepreneur, researcher & virtual world builder in the popular VR platform SecondLife. Shortly after that, while working at the intersection of technology & storytelling, Will was tasked with working alongside New York Times Bestselling authors to design interactive story experiences for the digital publishing industry.
LaJun McMillian
Clarity is a Virtual Reality experience exploring the stages of inner healing. The user is transported to an ethereal particle universe, where they interact with Clarity, a being of divination. LaJun McMillian is a New Media Artist & Creative Technologist from NYU's Integrated Digital Media Program. LaJun is currently creating art that integrates Performance, Virtual Reality, & Physical Computing to question our current use of technology & forms of communication. They have had the opportunity to show & speak about their work at, Dance on Camera at Lincoln Center, MakerFaire, National Sawdust, Liberty Science Center, Chelsea Film Festival, Creative Tech Week & Weird Reality. They are also the Lead Character Animator for NeuroSpeculative Afrofeminism which premiered at Sundance Film Festival & is currently touring at festivals including SXSW & Tribeca Film Festival.
Micah404
Micah404 is a New York based VR artist & member of the collective ART404, he gained notoriety in 2015 as a 2d illustrator with his instagram project @micahnotfound. He has since jumped headfirst into VR illustration, working full time in the medium over the past year. With the help of his collective ART404 he is pushing the boundries of VR painting as performance art. He creates loose narratives that combine elements of VR illustration, performance art & music festival style stage visuals, the end result being a rowdy first of it's type experience.
AR Art:
Doodlematic - Alfred Doyle
Doodlematic is a revolutionary app which enables a person to draw a game level on paper, take a picture of the created level, then play the level you created on your device. The app is primarily targeted for kids from age 6 to early teens. Because it combines the physical & virtual world, Doodlematic is the perfect app to introduce concepts such as color & shape recognition, spatial awareness & basic game design concepts.
Natalia Doster
ARtist viewer is a technology, allowing visual artists to exhibit their work in augmented reality: create site-specific exhibitions, technology-inspired installations or juxtapositions of art & its inspirations or references. It also allows potential collectors to preview artwork in their collections or interior design.
Charity Everett
Go Back Fetch It is a project about the origins of humanity & how we all exist today because of what our shared ancestry was able to accomplish long ago. At its core, what makes us all human is our ability to keep fighting & innovating while ensuring a future for the next generation.
Music:
Daniel Sabio
The Glad Scientist is an Atlanta-based audiovisual artist utilizing the HTC Vive to perform innovative live concerts. These range from conceptual movement-driven pieces on the theme of technological singularity to visually immersive pieces where brainwaves (EEG) control real-time game engines while he live composes a musical score in VR. His goal is to reveal a deeper knowing of our true selves through technology (specifically immersive ones), & believes that artistic expression is a major component of this process.
Michael Iannarelli
Endless Riff is the ultimate music festival - a networked virtual reality platform that allows music fans to escape & bond with their friends, from anywhere, while exploring the worlds music content & experiences. Endless Riff uses multi-player network gaming technology & VR tools to allow music fans to be present together in VR while co-consuming & sharing bonds around live, recorded, & user-generated content. We drive this initially with a standard template venue for artists & curators to create fully social, music optimized, monetizable experiences around content.
Other:
Alexandre Girardeau
Highway 101 is a VR-focused creative agency that represents visionary creators in NYC, builds a network of industry influencers, & actively participates in industry events/festivals.
Michael Deathless
Jump Into the Light is Americas first Virtual Reality Cinema Experience & Playlab. Located in the heart of Manhattans trendy Bowery, VR Cinema goers can view 360 virtual reality films, play immersive VR games in Oculus Rift & HTC Vive, & be 3D scanned into Virtual Reality for sharing on social media.
Looking Glass Factory - Nikki
A sci-fi dream just became real. Last month, Looking Glass, made up of inventors, engineers, & artists based out of an old glass factory in Greenpoint, released HoloPlayer One. This is the first interactive lightfield dev kit built for curious hologram hackers. HoloPlayer One is the interface we were promised in movies like Star Wars, Iron Man, Her, Big Hero 6 & Minority Report, through which groups of people can touch, transform & create interactive, floating, genuinely 3D words directly, without any headgear. Hope to see you in the future!
VRBar - Kishore Doddi
VRBAR is Brooklyns first virtual reality arcade. We love introducing people to mind-blowing VR experiences. We partner with creators to show & improve their work. We currently license over a dozen amazing room-scale experiences for the HTC Vive & have more coming soon.
PanoMoments - Dustin Kerstein
PanoMoments are a new short-form creative VR format that couple time & space. We see them eventually turning into the "GIF of VR". They can be captured either by a rotating camera, or by converting from 360 video. And unlike 360 video, they're "constrained" by this association of space which allows the creator to control exactly what the viewer sees. The resulting interactivity adds a new artistic dimension to explore - the viewer themselves plays an integral role in creating the experience as they move through both space & time.
Paul Rock -
Paul Rock is the greater of new YouTube series, CNN: Cartoon News Network. He will present & offer opportunity for attendees to make cartoons in VR. VR allows any individual to make cartoons without any animation or computer skills. While also using motion capture technology like in the movie industry to allow people to mimic & control the movement of characters through ones own body.
Theater:
Jenny Dorsey - Food Exhibition
All Together At Once is a VR meets immersive theatre dining experience that brings guests into a futuristic world where our everyday lives are constantly on "livestream", with no option for curation & editing. The guests & characters alike find themselves at the same dinner, interacting with edible representations of abstract problems such as economic disparity, racism & toxic masculinity. As the guests unravel the involuntary idiosyncrasies & hypocrisies of characters, they also begin to take note of their own default settings & accepted truths about themselves & society at large
Dave Lobser - Mixed Reality
Dave Lobser is a Director, CG supervisor, design, illustration, model, texture, animation, lighting, comp, code.Currently a Research Scientist under Ken Perlin at NYU's Media Research Lab. Flock is a location-based, multi-user, untethered VR experience made for large groups to interact in the same physical & virtual space. The experience is a lightly gamified music video designed to get people to move, shake & flock together. As they hunt & peck, participants become performers, both for each other & for the surrounding audience. It is the largest simultaneous VR experience ever attempted & the highest volume VR experience put on at a festival. We had over seven hundred participants in three days.
Andrew Asnes - AR App, Hamilton, Paul Taylor Dance
Round Hill VR is an immersive media company that creates, produces & distributes mixed reality content including 360 videos, virtual reality experiences & augmented reality applications. Clients & partners of the company include Oblix, CBS Interactive, Hyperloop One, Hamilton: An American Musical, The Paul Taylor Dance Company & the Children's Museum of Manhattan. Founder Andrew Asnes is also the organizer of the VR & AR Invest Meetup.
David Gochfeld - Hamlet VR
To Be With Hamlet is a live theater performance in Virtual Reality that allows anybody, anywhere in the world to have an intimate experience with Hamlet, one of the greatest plays ever written. By utilizing several groundbreaking technologies, the experience will enable audiences to walk the battlements of Elsinore Castle with Prince Hamlet as he confronts the ghost of his murdered father & learns of his uncles treachery.
