CAVE

Shared VR Narrative Experience

ROLE:
Director, Designer, Creator

DURATION:
1 Year

MEDIUM:
Shared Mixed Reality

TOOLS:
Photoshop, Cinema 4D, Unity

AWARDS:
SIGGRAPH Best Art Paper, Tribeca Film Festival

PARTNERS:
NYU, Bose, NVIDIA, Google

SUMMARY

CAVE is a 6-minute immersive VR experience shared by 30 audience members at once. It’s a coming-of-age story about a young shaman in the Paleolithic period, who creates cave paintings that magically come to life. Initially a research project at NYU, CAVE has since premiered at renowned film festivals around the world, captivating and delighting audiences worldwide.

APPROACH

I created CAVE with the goal of revolutionizing the way audiences experience immersive entertainment. My aim was to combine the social magic of theater with the spectacle and special effects of cinema. The production took 6 months, during which I contributed the following:

Conceived original vision and led story development.
Created concept art, character designs and environment illustrations.
Designed set environment and staging.
Designed the audience experience and physical installation layout.
Directed actors in motion capture performances.
Led a team of a dozen individuals, including actors, technical artists, composers, and computer scientists from inception to completion.
Authored research papers related to the experience.

RESULTS

CAVE made its technical debut at SIGGRAPH 2018, attracting a crowd of 2,000 individuals over three days. Later that year, it was selected for the esteemed Tribeca Film Festival. In 2019, CAVE won the Best Art Paper Award at SIGGRAPH. Today, it is recognized as a trailblazing social mixed reality experience.

CAVE Trailer

AUDIENCE EXPERIENCE

I designed CAVE as a way for dozens of audience members to share immersive content simultaneously. CAVE uses the capability of 6DOF VR to create the illusion, for an entire audience, that they are experiencing a live theater event together, even though the content is actually prerecorded. This creates an experience that is fundamentally different from VR for an individual viewer.

Each audience member both sees and hears the story content from their own viewpoint in the room, as they would when attending traditional theater. In the shared virtual world, audience members also see each other as avatars, whose movements correspond to their own head movements.

A family wearing Google Daydream Mirage Headsets at SIGGRAPH 2018

Original Concept Illustration of Campfire by Kris Layng

SET DESIGN

My theater and film set design background influenced how I approached the physical space, animation and digital design. The cave set's size was inspired by classical architecture, specifically the round opening in the Pantheon's dome, to create a sense of importance and grandeur.

Inside the cave, the audience sits around a thrust stage, surrounding the performance space on both sides. This setup creates intimacy between the audience and Ayara's performance. The performance was blocked like in traditional theater, using different areas in the space to give all audience members opportunities to be close to the action.

The virtual space slightly differed from the physical space to enhance the experience. For example, the central aisle between the audience groups was wider in the virtual world to allow the mammoth to pass through during the climax. The space between rows of audience seats was also wider and appeared slightly sloped upward in the virtual space to avoid obstructed views.

STORY AND INSPIRATION

I embarked on a journey to redefine communal experiences of immersive art and entertainment. Drawing inspiration from a fantasy about cave paintings and ancient storytelling around a campfire, I imagined a cave illuminated by enchanting animal paintings, similar to those in Lascaux and Chauvet. In this story, the paintings come to life in the firelight, suggesting the earliest form of virtual reality.

The tale revolves around Ayara, who, amidst her tribe's famine, seeks spiritual guidance and discovers her powers to communicate with the spirit realm. To enhance the mythical ambiance, I utilized iambic pentameter and subtly integrated audience members, representing ancestral spirits, into the narrative. The story was structured to build up to a climax with the entrance of a giant woolly mammoth spirit, using traditional "stage magic".