Transcendence

A part of Doc Edge’s Immersive Exhibition, Transcendence is not a film as most people would recognise, but a complete virtual reality experience.

The project follows Maggie, a Pākeha woman in her mid-60s navigating the challenging terrain of dementia. Spending her days in front of an old television set, she is visited by her granddaughter, Maia. As Maggie’s memories fade, Maia guides viewers to interact with key objects from Maggie’s life that transport the viewer to past times.

It was important for Adams’ that her project had a connection to Christchurch. She also wanted it to have a strong emotional drive, because of the powerful way virtual reality (VR) can change a viewer's perspective.

Due to her experience working at Otago University for the Brain Health Research Centre, Adams had seen up close the challenges of patients affected by Alzheimer's and dementia. With almost 70,000 Kiwis living with dementia today, she knew this would be a relatable story.

Transcendence is a prototype experience developed for her master's thesis in Master of Human Interface Technology at the University of Canterbury. Adams created Transcendence largely on her own, with the generous support of her supervisors and HIT Lab NZ’s in-house programmer. With this help from the university’s centre for human interface technology, she was able to dive into the world of cinematic virtual reality (CVR).

Unlike traditional filmmaking, the immersive films Adams is interested in creating come with a unique set of challenges, she explained.

“When making anything in 360, there is no longer a square frame. So as a director, you can’t direct people’s attention very easily. You can’t hide the crew or the director. And because it’s so immersive, your audience is now part of the story.”

Other challenges include cyber or simulated sickness. Similar to how one might experience motion sickness when flying or driving, people can experience feelings of sickness when using virtual reality due to moving around too quickly.

“And then it's things like tension and pacing. In a film or a movie you can use your cuts to help drive the pacing in your story. But in virtual reality, when you change the location you totally tip the world upside down and inside out. So it's quite a big break in what we call presence and in the storytelling.”

“What I got really interested in was whether we could use some of the more impossible kind of things that you can do with virtual reality as a way to cut. I started looking into using portals, and portals are something that have been around in video games for quite a while. And it's basically a parallax window where you can go through into the next level while seeing it in front of you. And I wanted to know whether this would be a way for someone to step through scenes in CVR.”

Transcendence premiering in Christchurch is a special moment for Adams. Her love for the city she calls home comes from a balance – between a lifestyle that allows her to mountain bike and ski in the day and go to concerts and great restaurants at night, as well as the exciting work opportunity.

“Nationally I would say that Christchurch is probably the Mecca for VR because HIT Lab NZ is here, but there's also a couple of local extended reality companies too.”

“I think that the South Island and the natural biodiversity that we have here is just incredible. There are so many stories that you can tell and in New Zealand we have some of the best conservation stories in the world. Climate change is another that would be really good to target stories with VR and how we can have a positive effect on our climate.”

Visit Doc Edge Festival 2024 for more information about the festival, including the full programme.