Vielen Dank. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Kepala Kepala Kepala Kepala Kepala Kepala Kepala Kepala Kepala Thank you. Hi, welcome to the Expanded Animation Symposium, Glimpses of a Hybrid Horizon. Welcome you at Ars Electronica Center. This is the 10th edition and we are very happy to see so many people that have been involved in expanded animation since 2013. So it's quite an old small symposium and I would like to take of course the opportunity to give you a short insight what we did in the last 10 years and we've prepared some slides. Before I will do that, unfortunately we are a little bit late because we are waiting for a Gerfried Stocker artistic director, so maybe if he is coming in the next 10 minutes we will get him on stage. If not, then maybe tomorrow. The Expanded Animation Symposium is an initiative of many colleagues at the University for Applied Sciences Upper Austria, where I'm teaching animation with my colleagues and all these intersections to interactive media and games. And we came up with this idea to spend some money inviting excellent people from all over the world. So it is a collaboration with Ars Electronica, but it's also a collaboration with other institutions already. And let me give you some glimpses of this 10-year journey. So we started as a very small event with a lineup of 10 speakers. Jurek is here with us, he was one of the speakers. John Jarrett, he gave a speech yesterday at the Francesco Carolinum, was also on stage. Just some impressions. Susan Buchan presented the book Pervasive Animation that was published in 2013 and she was the keynote speaker and of course she emphasized She was the keynote speaker, and of course she emphasized these old pioneers that are around within expanded cinema and animation. And of course we tackled the topic computer animation, animation in the context of media art since the beginning of Ars Electronica. So we had this great privilege at Ars Electronica to listen to pioneers, Stan Van Der Beek, who coined the term expanded cinema. And we started with the topic mapping an unlimited landscape, this journey, with a lot of guests. Friedrich Kirchner, who is also with us, I met him yesterday, was talking about this intersection to gaming and puppeteering and it was a success so we continued this approach exploring the vastness of art theory and play. So you see the second edition already tackled this very nice intersection animation and games. The third edition took place at the Centrale Forma Cinema and we had this privilege to expand to a bigger event under the umbrella of Ars Electronica Animation Festival with the pre-forum so presenting the prize winners in the category computer animation and also with screenings, so bigger audience with special screenings, fancy analog devices and this is an image discussing the current positions of computer animation in the category with Alex Furhust. She's also a speaker today with Boris Labé and Martina Labén. All three got Golden Nika in the category computer animation and it's also great to have Helen Starr here with us. She was on jury and had the privilege to moderate the brief forum last year. We also invited our students from the University of Applied Sciences to give insight into their productions. We continued with every year an overarching topic. The alchemy of animation was very close to the overarching topic. The alchemy of animation was very close to the festival topic, Radical Atoms, the alchemists of our time. And we continued with special insights, hybrid technology in animation, looking at these hybrid things that are going on with game engines, et cetera, and also new interfaces. We had for instance and I cannot show you all the speakers but we had this privilege to have Lev Manovich on stage who is of course involved in Asset Electronica many many years. He talked about image culture and artificial intelligence in 2015 already and we had with the Ars Electronica animation festival the possibility to feature the winners of Prius Electronica in screenings, but also to develop special events for Deep Space if you haven't been there, downstairs in the YAS Electronica Center, it's a huge place and a playground where you can do a lot of things in terms of expanded animation. So this was produced by Kuba Meld specifically for the Expanded Animation Symposium. Interfaces in Motion, virtual production was the topic a year later and in 2019 it grew again. It took place at the Post City, a huge venue with a lot of great possibilities and we had already done a little homework and we produced a recap of the first six editions and we published the book Expanded Animation, Mapping an Unlimited Landscape. It's available downstairs if you are interested to buy it. There is also a possibility on the archive. I will show you at the end of my presentation. It's online so there is a PDF and you can use it as a reference of course. It is with an introduction of Gheffrit theoretical chapter, artistic perspectives and when someone is asking me what do you what is expanded animation there is a section of I think 40 projects that are good answer what is expanded animation. Another highlight we had the privilege to invite people crap he is not an animator, but he's doing everydays since 2007. And he got very famous two years ago because he sold the most expensive NFT. And we had him already when he was not that famous. And he did an everyday life with the audience and presented his first 5000 every days at Deep Space. So this conjunction with the possibility of expand images and animation that was great to have this ongoing collaboration with House Electronica. 2020 was of course very challenging. We started to stream everything from the real hub at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria and we streamed it and we had a big opportunity to invite more people because it was cheaper. We don't have to spend money to bring them to. So this was the only advantage because of course I don't have to mention the effect of virtual conferences. And we continued with a virtual and hybrid event last year with some guests in our studio and talking with people and also connecting people virtually and talking with them. A last highlight, we had this great privilege with Eric O. He was on Jury a couple of years ago. He already knew the possibilities of deep space and what is possible and he developed an piece opera Specific for 8k projection with the bottom projection and we had this privilege Yeah, the world premiere of operas Eric. Oh last year so this year is In a real space we are still streaming so welcome to all the guys following on YouTube stream. But it's great to be back and we have of course an excellent lineup with a lot of speakers. A little bit less compared to the virtual, you know I told you about the budget. But it's great thinking about what we did in 10 years. We have a lot of speakers invited in a very broad field from industry, art and research. And when you look at the program, you will see some programs like art and industry, artistic positions and some specific topics. In total, we've already invited 193 speakers. That's great. And we have a very talented team at Hagenberg doing a lot of things. The trailer was, for example, student production. But also the website is already a huge archive and since the beginning we are recording everything and for instance Wigel Wittrich's talk at the first edition is online and you can watch it and of course there is this great connection to the biggest media art archive, the Ars Electronica archive. If you don't know that, please visit archive.arselectronicacenter.at. There is also the print version of this book available as PDF. possibility to see all the videos for instance Rose Bond's keynote at the conference Synesthetic Syntax which is a great collaboration with the University for Creative Arts great partner Birgitta Hosea is with us and also Rose Bond and since, we are hosting the conference as in Static Syntax. So it's on Sunday, the third edition, and everything is already online. And if we have time in the winter times, maybe there will be a publication in the next weeks, months, years. we'll see. Yeah, and such a nice journey is not possible without a big deal of support. First, thank you to all the speakers, former speakers, and thank you to the current speakers. A big thank you to the team at Hagenberg. It's great to have a lot of students involved. They are learning how to produce trailers and to do streamings, et cetera. Thank you for the Ars Electronica team, Maria Neffrelli, Emiko. a big, big thank you to Gerfried. Next time he has to be right on time. And also a big thank you, or the biggest thank you, to my co-organizers. I will not mention them all, but I will, Alex, one of my first co-organizers and initiator, actually, will introduce the next days and the program. So, pass over to you. Yeah, welcome. Yeah, Jürgen mentioned mostly everybody who was involved in this production. Lastly, I just can say also thank you to the audience that is showing up here every year for all your interest. Otherwise, we couldn't have done all this. Thanks a lot. So, let's have a look together on the program, I would say, because you mostly know the most things. Let's have a look together on the program, I would say, because you mostly know the most things. We start today. Welcome took a little longer than we expected, but next up will be Martin Reschitzeker as the first speaker in the Art and Industry panel, followed by Paul Pamesberger and Corsa Creations. We are very happy they found the time. They are all here and we will all be live with them. We are very happy they found the time. They are all here, and we will all be live with them. Then we have a short break, depending on our delay today, where we have the big luck that we could get Rashad Mewson, who's the winner of the Golden Naked Desert, to a kind of keynote and talk. So be around to see this here exclusively. And then at the afternoon at 15.50, we start with Alex Werhurst, and then followed by Joni Gutmann and Robert Seidl. It's a big program, so I just say go to the expandedanimation.com. There you will find the program, and you can see everything in detail. And then we continue tomorrow on Saturday would you like to say something about it? Just a brief insight we will start again with a little delay probably at 11 o'clock and we have a new collaborator the C4 Austria Forum is part this year with a selection of great speakers and we will continue with the topic games and art and next slide please we will also tackle artificial intelligence and the creativity within animation and what does artificial intelligence, what is the impact in the future. And this is great that we have Deep Space presentations. Rashed Newsom's Golden Eager project will be screened. And we also have Martina Scalbelli screening at Deep Space. Sunday is a little bit more complex, so I pass it over to you. Let's see. So, yeah, important thing for Sunday is there is a pre-forum, but if you look at the homepage, you see that all these slots are very following one after the other, maybe sometimes at the same time. The reason for that is that there is a big part at the Yotka U, Johannes Kepler University, which is the main campus for Ars Electronica. So the brief forum where the winners are talking will be there. So try to study the program on our homepage to find out where to go. We here in the Skyloft will have out where to go. We here in the Skyloft will have the Synesthetic Syntax Symposium that Jürgen already mentioned with a very, very long program, super interesting talks, so be around if you're interested in this topic. Also I want to mention that even on Sunday there will be screenings in the Deep Space. There is a special compilation of experimental animation which also contains the new work of Robert Seidel who is a speaker at the Afternoon today. So don't forget it, 12 o'clock in the Deep Space if you're interested in that on Sunday. I will point it out later on as moderation. So yeah... And the pre-forum. And the pre-forum is at the JKU, so yeah. It's a little confusing. Okay, so in Static Syntax, I guess this is more your... your... Jose? We are starting at 2 o'clock and we will end at roughly 5.30. Yeah. It's a great pleasure to kick off the symposium, and I will hand over right now to my co-organizer and colleague, Jeremiah Diephaus. Thanks, and enjoy the talks. Okay, I have a bit of a challenge, and I need to introduce our first panel and our first speaker, but I need to give our first speaker some time to perhaps start setting up his laptop. And I have to keep it short because we're a little bit behind the time. Juergen gave us a really good introduction to the symposium over the past 10 years, the different focuses that we've had. And it's always quite difficult to come up with a topic that encompasses the zeitgeist, the current topics that are going on. This year's topic, glimpses of a hybrid horizons, trying to basically tackle a couple of different issues. One of them is this idea of co-creation. So being able to work together with audiences, to create work, to work together with artificial intelligence and machine learning, but also this idea of having a festival and an event that is both a hybrid, both a virtual and a real events like we've had in the past with expanded animation. Our first panel, Art in Industry, is actually one of the oldest panels that we've we've had and the idea is to basically invite creators and artists who are working in industry to show us their approaches, their workflows, their challenges, and their current works. And our first speaker, Martin Retschitziger, has an Austrian connection, which, by the way, this entire panel has an Austrian connection in some way. It's a bit of a coincidence. Martin Rettestegger is originally from Upper Austria, but moved to Berlin and started a studio there called Mbox. And he's going to talk to us today about navigating hybrid workflows for moving images in space. So with no further ado, please Martin, start off with a short round of applause for his talk. Thank you. Hello, yeah okay. Thank you for inviting me here. I feel really completely honored among all these speakers and the history that was presented here so that I myself and our studio, I can present here some insights into I call the talk navigating hybrid workflows. So for us, or for me, hybrid workflows is mainly the challenge to work with classical animation tools and with real-time tools. And we are in a field that works really with both in a similar way. And it will be kind of a personal journey that I will show here. So it's also a bit historical. But I think it's interesting to see how we progress there. And also, we are developing our own tools. This is also an important part of our workflow, and I will talk about that. Also, the reason I'm here is I will show you at the end that we also have a little show at Deep Space in the next day. Okay, shortly I got introduced already. I'm actually from Upper Austria. I started here in the 90s as a self-learned 3D animator, motion designer, and also worked for many years as a DJ-learned 3D animator, motion designer, and also worked for many years as a DJ, electronic musician, so this is also an important background for me. And nowadays I call myself creative director and also creative technologist. But actually I'm also in my workflow a kind of hybrid person. I'm mainly involved in all parts of production and creatively and technological, but also in the production side. After being in Upper Austria, I went to Berlin and we started a company there. It's called Mbox. It's a studio for design and production of spatial media stagings and interactive installations. So we really work in the field of expanded animation, we could call it. We started actually as a pure 3D animation motion design company, but we got really quite quickly into the field of working in spatial installations. And so nowadays we are really focused only on that but our animation background is a very important part of our process. So some short facts and it's founded in 2000 we are around 10 to 15 people in the company and it's based in Berlin. Okay so first I will show some like quickly to go through some projects we did the last 10 years to give you some idea what we do and in which field we work. So I said we make big media stagings, or small ones too, but some typical things is projects for expos. We started actually in 2000 with some projects at the expo in Germany. But we had, for example projects at the Expo in Germany, but we had, for example, at the Expo in Shanghai 2010, two very large installations, one for the State Grid Pavilion, which was a very immersive 10-minute show in a, like we call it, 720-degree LED space, so it's a six-sided LED cube, and we had a six minute pure animation there, very abstract, combined with more realistic elements. At the same time we did the Saudi Arabian Pavilion, which was also a very interesting space. It had a very curved screen where people were going through an electric pathway through the projection. And we made a six-minute movie, a loop, which was a very, I would say, abstract journey into the Saudi Arabian world, which was actually one of the most immersive installations we ever did because of that physical transformed juryspace and this very abstract space and even this other project looked more immersive this was the most immersive project we did. At the moment like a very new project is the Swing Experience in Dresden, which is a full immersive museum. So we did there a couple of installations that tackle the history, the architectural history, of the Zwinger. There were some very classical 3D animations, but all in immersive formats, some abstract mappings. And as a highlight, there is also very tight immersive space that shows the term. Let's say there was a marriage in the 18th century that founded this palace. And so we reproduced this marriage with lots of character animation and animated horses. And also we did a VR installation there, where you could travel to the time zones on VR bikes. In projects like this, we are not just doing the content, we are also designing the space. So we are working like a full, in all levels of the same expanded animations. We do like smaller installations for museums. We basically try to do as abstract as possible, so in projects like this, it's also a historic installation, but we had the chance to work in a very abstract way with lots of mirrors and small screens and LED stripes, and we made a 12-minute animation. And all these projects I showed so far are what we call typical linear installations. So they are produced in a classical way with motion design, animation, classical tools, with Maya, After Effects, and everything. But we also do a lot of projection mapping. And projection is one thing that we did from the first project on. And we do very commercial projects, like the Daimler half-hour, which was a very large stage that had to have the silver look, which they couldn't produce with normal materials. So we went and developed with them a projection mapping that simulates this surface. And as we did this large projection mapping, of course, it was then used for using it as a way to show stare-in representations. We did smaller ones, like for the Hornbach, the Stiele Ort, which was a very advanced toilet scenario. It was a very fun installation. We designed the whole space. And in the center of this toilet was this abstract projection mapping, where you could see a three minute abstract animation that highlights the experience in this space. Yeah, we also do artistic projects whenever it's possible. We did a lot in the early years of, let's say, just pure abstract animation, also in a collective we call Monkey Man. But nowadays we're trying to do, if we do artistic projects, we try to do it in our field. There's the Luminale in Frankfurt, which is a very famous light festival and we did actually yeah very great cooperation facing extinction about yeah you know the topic actually this thing got cancelled the day after the first rehearsal because of Corona so we had the luck to build it up there and document it, but it was never really shown to the public, unfortunately. We work, besides all these linear projects, we work a lot in interactive spaces too. We do, at the moment, a lot of digital showrooms and as well working in the field of museums. This is also a very typical project for Deutsche Telekom, where we build a quite interactive showroom. We also designed the whole space and did the media concept. But this is also not just here. Also, we mix everything. We did some intro movies. But there's also a just here. Also, we mix everything. We did some intro movies. But there's also a generative and interactive system where people could then work in that space, bring their work up onto the screens, and they have generative backgrounds. And so we build the whole system there so people can use it. Yeah, like a current project as well is a showroom for the Bertelsmann Stiftung, which is also an interactive presentation platform in a larger space, which has gesture control, data-based daily news they can experience there. At the moment, and this helped us good to the corona phase, we do a lot of museum projects. So we did very many interactive installations for trade fairs and car manufacturers, which helped us or helped us very good to come more into the field of museums. And there we do mainly spatial installations, but also a lot of typical touchscreens in larger formats. OK, this is a bit of an overview. And now I want to go to some single projects that more or less show the journey that we had from being just an animation or classical-based company going into a more interactive company, as we are at the moment, or being both. And this is very interesting from the point of view that I think this journey is still going on, because when there is the biggest aim for us, that one day we are doing mainly real-time animation, real-time installations. But this is still ongoing journey, and this is a thing I want to talk about a bit. So our first ever glimpse into real time was actually in 2006 when we did a VR installation for the Deutsche Telekom, which at that time was of course super challenging because there were only military manufacturers and also software wise there was not much available, but there was this software called Quest 3D. We only did, I think, one project with it. This was mainly for architectural visualization real time. And we had like two mums going from just a pure animation company going into doing a real time project, which was challenging. But we did two versions of it. And this also was an interesting thing. We thought, OK, how can we bring what we can do, what we know, into this space, into this real-time environment? So we started doing something. Let me see. That's not playing. OK, this one's playing. Anyway, they're both playing. So yeah, at that point of time, of course, you had to do a lot of prepping in Maya in this case. And you were quite limited what's possible in real time. So especially on the right side is a good example. So we thought, OK, if you're working in something like VR, you don't really want to go into an optic that's completely bound to the medium. So like in the second project, we thought, OK, how can we bring cutout animation style into this real time thing? So we made a quite texture based approach and tried to do like a simple cutout animations in there in this, we are feeling. The whole thing was already stereoscopic and, but it was of course very hard challenging and most of the project of the show were really challenging for us and were also quite risky to do but it was yeah, the first step into it and it made us optimistic that this is a way for the future and and if you work in a field of Commercial spatial installation. This is very technology driven area Not only on the production side side but also on the technical solution on site so which was always something is very important if you do the visual part you have to take care of it that it's working on site and so we always had were not only on the digital side doing the stuff we always were on the site to realize the stuff okay this was then the like the We always were on the side to realize the stuff. OK, this was then the next big project we did as a real-time project. It was also a big challenge for Expo in Zaragoza. There was the idea to do a real interactive space. So we had eight projectors on the wall and floor. And the whole space should be interactively approachable. And I will talk a bit about the technology later. But first, the important thing is that we also try, in this case, working with real-time technology. But we didn't want to show it, so we went for a also very, let's say, artistic, painterly look. And thanks to the great art direction of Claudia, which is also here, we achieved that look quite well and brought it into that was also very special. I will think of a movie shortly here. So we had this idea of having interactive parts and animated parts. So it was like a 12-minute installation where you were transferred from one scenario to the next one. And each scenario should be as fluent as possible. And in each interactive scenario, you had the possibility to interact on the floor. And in between, then we had the possibility to interact on the floor. And in between, then we had the animations that were going directly into each other. And the most simple thing always worked the best. It's like interactive water. People always just like to play with that. But it was a really huge challenge. I think nobody ever did that before, because we had this. There were possibilities to do with one projector, but to like an eight projector needless interactive large touchscreen Was almost yeah, I think not done before so and at that time We started working with Yeah with I will talk about shortly, but with a team that and with a software that gave us new opportunities, it was really, let's say a very technical digital challenge, but also very physical challenges that are always involved. You really have to take care of everything, not just the software part, but every cable and the interfaces, this infrared tracking. But we started to use V4, it wasn't the first project but it's a very important part of our history and it is basically a node-based toolkit that can give you visual tools but it also gives you a lot of possibilities to interface with all technology. It is developed by these guys. Jorik was mentioned already. It's originally founded in the MESO group, but now run for the V4 group. And it's tightly now tied to the history I will continue to show in our projects. And yeah, let's go to our next project. So another challenge we had then, so we did a couple of projects already before, and I will just pick out a few ones. There was this idea to do projection mapping on moving objects in 2012, I think, which also was rarely done before. And it was only for one show, the car reveal, which is a bit crazy to develop all this technology and test it. So it was also a very challenging project. So there was this idea of moving parabens that were slide-up performers and little objects that were placed in new stages. And at the same time, you have a show that's running on these objects. So we started to work with a Canadian company who's doing light tracking based on motion capturing technology that then were placed on those objects that were then put on a timeline. And all this mapping, which is also very special that you map on moving objects. We had to develop software for that. But again, it was a very classical animation workflow still because you can see up there we're doing all these animations for the show, but we had to simulate the show in real time. That was done in the software, but the whole content actually, besides a few things, like simulate the show in real time. That was done in the software. But the whole content, actually, beside a few things, were done in animation tools. So it was, again, a step which is very much an animation in space in all senses, but combined with classical animations. And at a certain point, of course, it became more and more obvious for us, or more and more interesting, to bring real-time image generation to the projects, especially specifically for events. It's quite helpful. And also, this was then a project we did for Mercedes, which was a good opportunity for the first time to do the whole show as a real-time thing. It was not really a show. It was more or less the stage background for a lot of cars and a lot of presentations. But it was an ever-changing dynamic screen. And it was like the possibility possibility based on the stage design to do something that's entirely generative based. Also there was this very many different cars moving around and they need to be tracked in real time. I don't know what is second video never plays. And we didn't even play it. Maybe I'm too. Just not working. Oh, yeah, no, it's working. So here we had a lot of, based on the architectural design, some development of real-time graphics. And you can see the cars, we tracked them with laser tracking. So because there were so many different combinations of cars going on the screen and they need to be tagged, that to produce the whole thing as classical videos would be a nightmare because you would have to do lots of videos. And also we thought it's much nicer to have an ever-changing visual appeal. And yeah, that's why we then. So it was like one of the first projects where we really said, OK, the whole image generation went into real time. And at the same time, we started, OK, thinking about our own tools. And we did this in-house MWall project, which was the first try to do, based on before, to do something that is more than just a custom project we do every time. So we thought, okay, we have this wall on our screen, and we just start building small blocks of animation tools that can be used in real time. So at some point for events or for everything or even for installations, we can reuse them. But the whole thing was still done in a way that it's never got this flexible in the sense that the real goal was actually for me, for us, that we use this technology, this very complicated node-based programming tools and give it back to the artists that were more used to work with classical tools, with classical animation tools. So we had this version of our tool for a while, and then there came up another project, which again, were quite challenging, and it was also for Deutsche Telekom, a very large projection mapping, 360 degree. And with all these physical builds called trick cells on the wall that need all to be mapped perfectly. And we only had like one and a half month to produce a lot of content for the full day. And again, it was the point that we said, OK, we should try to do as much in real time so we are flexible with this mapping. Otherwise, you have to render all the movies ahead and if they don't fit, you have to redo them. And at that time, we started using Tardix 11, which is most of maybe you know, it's just a game engine framework for Microsoft, which had much more opportunities than what we used before, like TiredX 9, which was the... And it had this opportunity to mix things in real time. And this just gave me... Yeah, for me, it was a really important experience. Because then suddenly something like a classical workflow came back. We could just layer things on top of each other and give somebody this idea of a mixer. And then it sounds kind of boring, but it is a layer and preset-based workflow that's suddenly showed, OK, this is a possibility that everybody can use, not just a programmer, not even just the classical trained After Effects because it's so simple. You just have parameters and a layering system. So we started to build a new tool based on that, which we then called mControl. And it's, I can show here the first iteration. No, again, I should not click here. I have to click. Yeah, OK. I have to click. Yeah, okay. So especially if you then work in a real shader-based workflow, it means you have a lot of real-time opportunities. And suddenly it showed up, you can really mix 2D, 3D in a way that we are not even used in the classical workflows because you have the possibility to create 2D stuff, put it on 3D, use it as displacement. Everything works in real time. So we were just limited to these eight layers, and we're limited to the modules. But we had stuff like instancing. You could replicate millions of objects. And everything you're doing worked in real time. And all these ways to do parameters. So everything was built on V4, but it was like the first software on its own on top. And generally, I mean, as a small studio to develop such stuff is challenging and time consuming. But we thought it's definitely a way into the future. OK, I think I have to wrap up a bit. So another project then, which was a free project, made us do the next step or use this tool in a way which was also a next step for us. Because this is a very small object for 3D mapping, but very intimate. And we thought, OK, in this case, we could do it really as a pure real-time project. So we used our tool to develop just sceneries. And we thought, OK, now we could use the real-time technology just also for doing the inszenierung, or the staging on-site. Because we decided we will not do a timeline before. We just make modules and on-site, we then put the show together, which is also something that, I don't know this. Something you can only do in real-time, not to decide before how exactly the show running time is and on an artistic installation we could do this in a way. That was another interesting experience for us. The mapping again was very physical and hard because we had real snow there on the Snow White and we're sitting there and even just two project, but fitting the 3D object was, yeah. I can show you a bit of the results here. But again, it's this idea of having 2D animation on a virtual 3D object. You can bring it on a real 3D object. That is, again, always fascinating for us. And this is also the main thing, let's say, I'm aiming for with tools to bring in real time, and 2D and 3D workflows. and like technology like displacement and instancing like everybody knows can take a lot of time and rendering but if you use this in real time it's much more fun and it's much more artistic working in this real-time tools because you can iterate in such a different way and you are challenged as an artist because you waiting for rendering sometimes gives you breaks and stuff, but to just just iterate in real time is Yeah, very rewarding. Okay, I will go a bit to the next slide So we went on and did a lot of projects with this tool. I mean, it's kind of shown as an artistic tool, but we really used it for larger commercial projects, which means you have to add a lot of functionality that's not so obvious. For example, that you can use it with 10 synchronized machines is a big challenge to do, for doing like large scale projections and For this so and we also added a lot of CMS functionality But the whole project got quite complex. I mean such a patch is Very hard to handle it takes a lot of time to start and it's and in the way it was programmed It was not really that flexible. We could not add another layer or something. So it was limited, which is always sometimes good. And also, I said it before, working with a node-based environment is very technical and only a few people can really do it. So there came Corona, which actually gave us some time. And also there came a new version of V4, which is the version Gamma, which is an entirely new programmed version of V4. You can compare quite well the old particle system and the new one here. And it's also based on an open source game engine. And it gave us suddenly the ability to build applications, real applications. You can start like a normal application, not within the software. So we redid our whole system and kept on doing this idea of doing this layer-based project where you can stack things on top of each other but we added a lot of functionality in a way because it's much more object oriented and we added and that comes now to the point where we talk about this little installation we're doing here at the Deep Space. There came another project, again, which is an artistic project that gave us something like a deadline or something, a goal, where we can go to our next step. So it's this uncontrolled performance I'm doing together with Daniel Kohlmeigner and Kat Jimmins. It's a project that is together with Ableton ARS and Instrument of Things. It's tracking, MIDI tracking devices for dancers and we use those to control the visuals and the sound. There is two more shows today and on Saturday and there is also artist talk after that. But for this project, doing live visuals is not a typical thing you do a lot in commercial jobs, but we added a lot of performance tools to the system and this is again, I want to maybe show you a little bit of the software and of the approaches that we take there. Okay, again, I click too often. of the approaches that we take there. OK, again, I click too often. No, still not right. Back. No, it's right. Especially one thing in animation, I think, is also lacking a lot in abstract animations, especially that you have a physical experience doing the animation, especially when you work with all these parameters and software and rendering. So we went for a very performative approach, which is more like working with a music synthesizer and having LFOs, having live inputs, having audio input. And you can map all these parameters to any parameter in the system. So you can use any kind of inputs. And we have a timeline there, but we never use it because it's really a much more dynamic way to work with generated parameters and put them onto a system. And now I think we are on a point that still it's a bigger journey, that this tool, which is still my biggest dream, is something I can put any team member in his hands and just create stuff. And in a way that you don't need to know anything about how it works, you just put stuff together. And there's no way to break the system or anything. And the preset-based workflow is also on a very high level here. On every level, you can go in, save everything, load everything. And so it is also that here that you generate a pool of tools that everybody can reuse. And yeah. OK. So anybody more interested in the software can talk to me. And I can also demonstrate that. It's our pure in-house project at the moment. There is no intention to rightly raise it. But yeah. in-house project at the moment. There is no intention to write to reset. But yeah. Yeah, that's actually it. And yeah, Isaac, thank you. Thank you very much, Martin. We're going to do a short question and answer session, even though we're a little bit behind. If I could ask you to come over here, we can move on to our next laptop switch. Try to cover it with a question and answer session. For those of you who are listening in from home, basically, I actually have my phone with me, so I can check to see if there are any questions. We can also take some questions from the audience. Just raise your hand, and we'll send a microphone to you. I'm going to start off with a question while we're doing that. And that's specifically about these immersive projects. You had some virtual reality work that was there. It would interest me to, because the projects that we've worked on, oftentimes it's difficult to get people to actually put the headset on or for them to share the experience. You guys mentioned that you were also responsible for the environmental design in the rooms and the spaces. What types of things does Inbox do to make those spaces accessible and enticing to the people that are visiting these spaces? I mean, for us, we do immersive spaces for quite some time and immersive media installations. And in this field where people come together, there is always, especially specifically, we prefer to do spaces you can experience without any devices you can interact in. But if you really want to bring in people into a more immersive environment, like we are, I think specifically on the project we showed you at the Leipzig Tristan we've designed these bikes we designed an interface that gets people so like interested in the whole thing and and also gives them a very pleasing experience because everybody knows how to ride a bike and and and also it's avoids you Much to get VR sickness So so it's specifically the surrounding the environment how you sit on it and how you experience we are that I think is very helpful For these kind of experiences and it encourages them to really interact. They actually have something They can't see that you don't have to think a lot. You just pedal, and it works. Yeah, that's it. That's cool. All you have to do is raise your hand, and we'll send a microphone over to you. We've got our first question here. Could we send a microphone over to here? And then we've got our second one ready to go. Hello. Thank you for your fabulous talk. Thank you. I'd just like to ask you if you could share any tricks on reducing VR sickness. Actually, just what I said at the moment, providing a physical interface, a physical object where you can hold on, sit on, and that helps a lot in this case. And of course, all the classical technical tricks that are known are doing the proper frame rate and do not too fast movement and everything, of course. But for us, definitely physical interaction. And that helps a lot. OK, our second question. Yes. Just wondering, all your works are very abstract, like you mentioned. What is your own relationship to the theme of abstraction? Is there something you can personally say about it? Actually, my personal opinion is that the most immersive experiences are usually the most abstract ones. And this is something that we are exploring a lot. I mean, we do this like real, real photorealistic 3D environments too, but I always think if you work in abstract way and specifically with music, which is very important factor on all these things, people can have much more immersive experiences if you don't overload them with images. And so there's, this is a thing that's very important in our way of working but it's always you can see in our project we have a quite big range of style we are as a commercial company that's not selling itself based on one style we are that quite flexible but if we have the chance and if we we go as much as much abstract as possible. Okay, we've got maybe one more question here. Thank you for an interesting presentation. I was wondering, you were talking about working together with quite commercial companies, big players like expos, but you also talked about that transition to working more with museums. I assume that there is quite a gap budget-wise between those different customers. How do you work around that and how do you try to provide the same level of quality for those different... It's definitely challenging at some points. I mean, there is museum projects that have okay budget, but there is a... But it's... I mean, from our point of view, it is much more... Because the content is much more solid, so it's a bit more fun in other direction, and you have much more time, usually. That's a big factor, which, of course, can also be expensive, but it gives you the ability to... Because commercial projects, like on trade fairs, they have also this very tight time schemes most of the time, so that makes it even more expensive. So that's a factor that helps in that. But it is not an easy transition, and as general, like in the last years, the commercial projects in the field of live communication just went down completely. So it is something. But a project like the one in Dresden is a very big project, actually. But you have to look more into an international market to make these projects once in a couple of years. OK, I think in the interest of time, we're going to move ahead. But Martin will be here for a little bit afterwards, if you'd like to ask him a question. And please attend one of the two presentations that we have in deep space of UnControl. And let's just give a warm hand for Martin before moving on. Thank you very much. Our next speaker flew all the way from Vancouver to Linz. Actually, he's originally from Austria. If I've understood correctly, currently between jobs. From animation supervisor to head of animation at Sony. He's here today in a private capacity to talk a little bit about the importance of visual consistency in stylized animation. Thank you very much. Hello, welcome. Thank you. Welcome to the talk. I'm going to talk about... It's a long title, the importance of visual consistency in stylized animation. Basically, what I want to highlight in today's talk a little bit is bring more opportunities to what people think they can do when they want to make a movie, when they want to make animation. Specifically, with my background working at Sony currently, it is a little bit of a more sort of industry approach. It's a more mainstream media approach and less of a more underground art approach. So we talked about in the previous talk, it was about stylized animation for VR, for experiences, immersion, deep space experiences, all those sort of things. But there was still an element sometimes of narrative, of course, that is always a big part of what we want to do in animation. And there's always a need for stylization, partly, and what I say here, as a tool and opportunity. So as a tool, because it allows us to do certain things that certain media, certain formats, wouldn't necessarily allow. In the previous talk, for example, it was a 2D cutout approach for a real-time environment. That makes sense, because obviously, that allows youD cutout approach for a real time environment that makes sense because obviously that allows you to do a lot more with the fidelity instead of going hyper real. And hyper real used to be the goal of what we want to do in CG for way too long. With art, not as much. Abstraction was always a big part. But with more mainstream media, more narrative, more full CG features, games, like the more industrial, the more commercial products, hyperreal was always seemingly the goal. And what I want to talk about today is just opportunities that we actually have in the media of animation that we're working in that allow us to kind of maybe there are elements that we should question a little bit more, that we should change, that we shouldn't just take as, oh, Unreal Engine looks cool, has bloom and cool depth of field. Is this actually something that you want in your project? Or is there something else that you can do with those tools? Especially in CG, we have control over every pixel in theory. So we can actually really question all those elements that make our images and make our narratives. So I already got introduced. My name is Paul Pammesberger. I am originally from upper Austria. I studied at Hagenberg which was a very good foundation for me. And after a couple years working in Vienna, I made the jump over to Sony Pictures Image Works in Vancouver. And I started as a small animator on the first Angry Birds movie. That was pretty fun to work on. I don't know who saw it. Doesn't matter. It was a really good experience to work on it. It was my first environment in a big, big studio. And there was always this need, even in the first project that I worked on, a need for stylization. When we talk about stylization as animators, it is always about movement. And it makes sense. We're always trying to capture emotion, capture performance, but there's always an element of design that comes from the art direction, from the character designers that we need to hit as animators. And with that come a little bit of rule sets of what we can do in our movement. And we think about those things a lot. After the movement stage, after animation, there's a whole other pipeline, of course. So what I want to do a little bit with breaking up some of those points that we should question a little bit more is bring animation and the rest of the visual pipeline a little bit together and maybe question the concepts of, hey, what are we actually doing in animation? And question it in a more holistic approach. It's not just about movement when we talk about an animated movie, even though the animation department might be a little bit their own kind of engine in the movie making process. But the other departments are equally important, and it's very, very important that those departments communicate with each other to sort of work towards a more unified and more singular vision in the project. A lot of it, and I've seen that before, a lot of it happens in the pre-production where everybody wants to go stylized. And we can go look back, way, way, way back to one of the first, I think it was the first animated movie, CG animated movie by Disney, Bolt, I think it was the first. If you look at early animation tests or early concept art, it always has a very painterly approach. And it was very highlighted. So, oh, yeah, we go for a painterly approach. It was very cool. And there were papers on it. And there are with Paper Man and stuff. There were other papers on it. A lot of development was done to create a more stylized approach, a more kind of going back to traditional media kind of approach in the visuals. But in the final animation, in the final movie, you can barely see those elements. And it's always very sad to me, because those elements could be used as storytelling elements, as character-defining qualities, and also to kind of set yourself apart a little bit to make it feel very, very different than any other CG animated movie. I need my slide. There you go. So as every tourist, because I'm in Vancouver, but I made my trip to Austria a couple weeks ago. You can probably hear my accent coming back more and more. Each day it gets worse. But as every tourist coming to Austria does, I went to the museum. I went to the Albertina and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. And I ran across, this is one of my favorite Picasso pictures in the Albertina. The woman with the green hat. And it's fascinating. It's a very typical what you would think of like, OK, that's a Picasso image. It's oil on canvas. It has the typical kind of break up that Picasso is known for in his later phases, where it's like a broken up image. It's clearly a classical portrait, in a way, with the posture and the framing and everything. But obviously, there's a layer of stylization here. If you don't see it, then I can't help you. But then, and a room, a further apart is by Paul Signac, is Venice, the pink cloud. And it's also oil on canvas. I'm pretty sure they used very similar brushes. They probably used similar pigments, but it is a vastly different experience. If we look at them side by side, yeah, it's basically you could say it's the same medium that they are working in, but the stylization of what we're looking at is vastly different. The experience is vastly different. What they are trying to convey is vastly different. Obviously one is a study of light and the environment and one is a portrait, but the medium itself is the same, but the stylization is the same, but the stylization is vastly different because they try to convey something different. Picasso wants to show a holistic image of this woman. Paul Zinnak wants to show how he feels, how this environment makes him feel, how the light affects him emotionally, right? So there's a lot of consistency in those pictures. In each picture there's a lot of consistency, and if you would put a woman like this into this picture, it would fall apart. Most likely. You can use it, of course, as a tool. But the consistency in those artworks is very, very important. It makes the whole thing feel more coherent. You can choose sort of a vision or a specific feeling that you want to convey or a specific, maybe we'll get into a specific style, like more of an industry term when you say, OK, it should look like a comic book, or it should look like a moving illustration, or like a picture book or something. So you can choose those elements that fit your project, that fit your vision of what the project should do, and really stick to it. And take a holistic approach in your project of what needs to be changed, done, and rethought a little bit to bring those pictures, really, to make it a consistent style throughout the whole experience. Because I feel like in animation, and as great as this is, it's Rembrandt, of course. It tries to capture realism, right? And that's where we were for too long, I think, in CG, especially in feature animation. It was always like, make it look real. Make it look more higher fidelity, more tiny hairs on the face, more wrinkles if you get a real close-up. The only thing that was always stylized is the traditional Disney character design. Big eyes, smooth shapes. But it rarely really transformed what was seen in the background, what was seen in the environment, what was seen in plants, how the hair moved. Like all of those things were always very much, well, it needs to look real because otherwise you don't believe it. But that's not true. We can look at these images, those paintings that we looked at earlier, and we understand totally what we're looking at. And it has a very deep connection because of the stylization that comes through the artist. And in our classic animated features, a lot of times we just arrive here. We arrive at trying to capture realism versus trying to capture holistic vision. As we heard in the previous talk, sometimes the style that we are working in is highly dependent on the medium that we are working in. Obviously, when we talk about feature animation, you have to be able to keep the audience in their seats for 90 minutes. So if you go too extreme, too abstract, you might overload the audience and they might after three minutes they are done. It happens. As immersive as abstract art can be, what we're usually trying to do is really tell stories. So we have to be a little bit careful of not overloading things. But we are definitely pushing the boundaries. And by we, I don't say Sony. I mean the whole industry is definitely trying to break out a little bit more with each project that comes. And I think our most recent project, Spider-Verse, or not most recent project, but one of the more recent ones that was famous, was one of those projects that really tried to push the medium a little bit and did things that were not traditionally done before in CG, animated feature. Not all of it was new. A lot of it was already seen in more short movie, short film contexts, in games sometimes, or in a lot of times in cinematics, in shorter-term formats. But it was never done on a big 90-minute movie. And I was really proud. I wasn't, full disclosure, I did not work on the first Spider-Verse movie. But I was obviously in the same office, and I was a big part of it. And I was heavily involved in the second one until recently. So the goal with that movie was really to make it look like a comic book. And with that came a lot of challenges. A lot of R&D needed to be done to make that vision a possibility. Because with a comic book, suddenly, first of all, a comic book is not a movie. So they are very different things. A comic book panel has its own rules on how the time warps through a panel and how dialogue works. If you ever read a Spider-Man comic, one panel can have 15 lines of dialogue, and he can be all the quippy Spider-Man that you know. But if you do that in a movie, suddenly you have a problem, because then he's just in one pose swinging for 25 seconds because he has to say three sentences. So there's things that you don't even think about that are suddenly like, oh, that's a problem. If he should say all these things while swinging, how do we even do that? Visually, there's obviously a lot of things that we had to think about, like motion blur. It's still got to be motion blur. Comic book generally doesn't have motion blur, especially not the older Spider-Man or Marvel comics. They were all very sharp. So a decision was made, we are not going to be motion blur. Comic book generally doesn't have motion blur, especially not the older Spider-Man or Marvel comics. They were all very sharp. So a decision was made, we are not going to have motion blur. But with not having motion blur, suddenly you have potential issues of strobing, potential issues of fast motion doesn't actually look good anymore. Also, you have to be way more careful what you do with your characters because you can't hide in the blur. But then they also made the decision to make it on twos most of the time, to go more to a traditional 2D approach to get that feel back of that rawness. And a big concept was comic book. And another big concept was also to deconstruct the image, to make sure that we see a little bit of the artistry behind it, and to make it that we see a little bit of the artistry behind it and to make it feel like a more traditional animation. But it all came with caveats and a lot of R&D had to be done. But we were not the only ones. If you look at Arcane recently, which hopefully most have seen, I have actually not seen it yet. Also the bad guys, but Dreamworks or even think, the upcoming Puss in Boots. There's a lot of very cool stylized elements to it. Sometimes it's effects that are drawn on top of it. Sometimes it's characters that are animated on tools. But when I see those things, it's always just one element that does it. There's all the effects in 2D. And it's cool, but it's kind of just like, there's more to it. We can do a lot more. And Spiderverse tried to be very holistic with its approach. And I feel like a lot of other studios and a lot of other projects are not quite courageous, maybe, enough, or it's also a lot of work. And a lot of times, just pushing the boundaries is always difficult. But I think we should, and especially being in a more artistic space like here, and with students being interested in this kind of topic, I think there is opportunity here to really question some of those foundational small pieces, those atoms that make up our images. So back to the slides. Our styles always evolve. So they evolve because we have to work within the limits of the medium. So if you say real time, then suddenly you won't be able to do all the nice and fancy things that a pre-rendered image will allow you to do. You suddenly can't do real super fancy depth of field effects or crazy motion blur because it will just have fragments or whatever. But we're getting there. The new engines are really, really good. Our graphics cards are getting more and more powerful. So suddenly you can actually do it. But then you should ask yourself, do you actually need it? Do you actually want it? Is it actually the right thing to do? Because if you put a blur on a 2D, if you have animation on 2s, for example, and you put motion blur on it, then every other frame of your character is blurred. That's going to be very obviously just wrong. So this is something, okay, you suddenly have to then remove it. And a lot of times that's actually harder to do than not because the game engines are built for realism. They're built to do all those things. And also, obviously, looking back at the paintings from earlier, the style evolves because we want to express ourselves. And that, for me, is the more kind of relevant part of this whole slide, because the medium and the limits are getting more and more pushed back. So we don't need to stylize as much anymore if we don't want to. So it becomes more of a choice rather than a necessity in our projects. And the need for further expression or to express something more specific or something different suddenly becomes way more interesting to me. And currently working on the sequel to Spider-Verse, there was a lot of discussion. What can we push and how can we push it? And those are the really interesting kind of discussions that I like to see happening in the industry more and more. So yeah, I've just listed some limits that were traditionally happening, like poly count. A lot of the aesthetics of low-poly games comes because originally it was a limitation. And now it's a style. Now it's a choice. A lot of indie games go low-po comes because originally it was a limitation. And now it's a style. Now it's a choice. A lot of indie games go low poly. It's easier, it's faster, it makes you... It opens up doors to iterate faster, to do more within your game because you have to spend less time doing high quality models. But it becomes a style. And if you do that style, what should you then consider to maybe include in that aesthetic, right? Or like just resources, colors, frame rates is something that a lot of times isn't really questioned. Or just like obviously the time, how long it takes to make something. And yeah, we need further expression to really push the storytelling potentially. So we want to tell something, but it's really difficult to convey if everything just looks real or it looks like we're used to seeing animated movies. Visual clarity is a big one. If you want to really highlight things, you can push the visualization. And a lot of those things are done even in movies, but they're done in a small, small kind of encapsulated element. For example, lighting. Lighting is super expressive. If you watch movies nowadays, you can look at the timeline of the movies and how the lighting changes and how the the environments affect the whole feel of everything and it makes sense. But it's just lights. We have so many more tools in CG that we can use to really convey the classical hero's journey or changes in emotion or to visualize abstract concepts. If somebody feels pain, we don't always have to do it just with the performance. We want to do it with the performance, but why not use color? Why not use the frame rate to show a change in emotion? All those possibilities are there. Are they always the right thing to do? Should we always go crazy with everything? No, probably not. Because it just still needs to be a thing that connects with the audience. But there are things that we can definitely play with and should play with, or at least should make a decision about. So for visual storytelling, yeah, I basically talked a lot of those things already. But you really want to make sure that you use the right tool for your job. So obviously, if you want to make an animated nature documentary, maybe a super highly stylized low poly thing with crazy frame rates is not the right approach, because you might want to tell scientific details or whatever. But it could be that through stylization, you can really focus the audience's attention on the right things. And also, really, don't just follow the status quo. Make a choice when it comes to those elements that you have control over. And with a choice, just question it for a second, and the answer a lot of times is very clear. And most of the time, the answer will be will be, oh yeah we just do how we always did it because we know it works and there's nothing to do here. But every now and then there might be something where you can really like, oh this is actually doesn't quite work with what I wanted to convey, it doesn't work with the vision that I had. So if you say comic book for example, if this is your kind of like overarching idea, I want to have an animated comic book movie, and then you start using depth of field, the whole stylization goes out of the window because it doesn't work. It completely destroys all the handcrafted painterly kind of like ink detail or whatever that you are used to from a comic book. So when it comes to depth of field in Spider-Verse, what they did or had to do was find a different approach. And in that case, it was just maybe using offset print techniques. Basically CMYK is printed, but a lot of times it's a little bit offset, right? So it gives a very similar feel to a depth of field. If you just, if something is out of depth, you just pull those layers apart a little bit, or you just print it more often with a little bit of offset. So it just, you still have the clarity. You still have to feel that it is an inked drawing, or it still has that quality, that feel that a comic book has, but you don't lose the tool of using depth of field as a filmmaker, which is, but you don't lose the tool of using depth of field as a filmmaker, which is obviously something you don't want to use because we want to be able to draw the attention of the audience into the right things. So yeah, the right tool also could mean that it's cheaper or make something possible that wasn't possible before. So going back to VR, frame rate is very important. So you have to be very efficient with what you can actually portray. So you won't be able to go hyper-realistic. So you have to stylize. And then you can really choose a style and then maybe even stylize some more elements with the same kind of concept in mind to really make it super performant and to make it even better than it was before. More visually clear, more consistent, and faster, more efficient. And yeah, it can further the concept. And it also, like efficiency, can breed the style as well. Limitations help, right, even though they are getting less and less. And yeah, and this is just, you have to really make a choice, not just to do something different, but it can be a part of that. Like you set yourself apart. You have a visual style that maybe comes with your project. You present a consistent vision, and that is, for me, the more important thing. And also, make sure you really use it as a storytelling tool when you can. So I just have some examples of things that I sometimes see, and I'm like, ah, why don't we make it different? And this is all just basically just to get the head spinning a little bit and to give a little bit of like, oh, I never even thought about this maybe. And I'm sure there's lots more than this. But it could be like optical effects we touched upon, right? Depth of field. If I have a low poly, right there. If I have a pixel graphic aesthetic that I want to hit, what does this mean for ath of field. If I have a low poly, right there. If I have a pixel graphic aesthetic that I want to hit, what does this mean for a depth of field effect? Do I just blur my pixels? Maybe. It can look cool. But maybe there's another approach. Maybe I can draw the more blurry pixels bigger. Or I reduce the whatever, the saturation in them. Stay in that kind of mindset of pixel graphics. What does this mean? If I paint a beautiful pixel graphic picture, how would I paint things that are out of focus? How would I paint motion blur? Do I just draw more pixels? I don't know. There are so many concepts. Lens flares, all of these optical effects or a lot of those are artifacts of a physical object that we are moving in real life and that reflects light in actually ways that we don't want generally. A lens flare is never something that anybody asked for. It just happened. And now it's part of our language of movies or film so we feel obligated to include it. And a lot of times we just take what we have and we add a lens flare because it's what's supposed to be there. If you play any first-person shooter game, you have lens flares. Why do we have lens flares in the first person? I don't have lens flares in my eyes, you know? It's a thing that makes it maybe more cinematic. It gives you the feel like, ooh, this has higher production value, but maybe there's something to question there, you know? It's a thing that makes it maybe more cinematic. It gives you the feel like, ooh, this has higher production value but maybe there's something to question there, you know? Distortion, chromatic aberration, all those things, you can use them as stylistic choices of course. But if you are, for example, in an environment, right? Maybe black and white, then obviously you can't do chromatic aberration. But there are maybe effects that you can use that give you a similar feel, that give you a similar kind of idea or a similar kind of aesthetic just in a completely different context. Or grain, like all of those things are basically artifacts that we generally wouldn't have wanted. We only have them because it is the way it is. The medium, already we covered a little bit. Definitely think about what are the requirements for the medium that you're in. If you work for feature film, for example, yes, you have to be careful not to overload your audience. Because it is a 90 minute experience. So if people are visually fatigued after 10 minutes, then you're not going to have a good movie on your hands. Because people won't be able to take it. VR, AR, XR, all of those have very specific requirements. Frame rates, you don't have a camera when you move around in VR, right? You cannot cheat something to camera. If it's interactive, it needs to feel snappy, it needs to feel good. You can't just do your animations in 12 frames per second because it's going to feel real bad to can't just do your animations in 12 frames per second, because it's going to feel real bad to control. But maybe there's something you can do to still kind of bring those aesthetics or those concepts into these sort of environments without completely breaking either. Yeah, color. Frame rate is a big one that we are playing a lot with, or we did play a lot with in Spider-Verse. And it's a really fun topic, but it comes with its own challenges, of course, because you cannot just do everything on twos. Dynamic range is something that is rarely even thought about. Stereo would also be a good one in here. And also transitions. Cuts work in a comic book, but a crossfade, probably something you want to avoid. Yeah, and just consider those things for stop-motion feel. What does it mean to feel like a stop-motion animation? What does it mean to have a traditional animation look, right, or a feel? And how do you do, for example, a traditional animation, a 2D animation, something like Cuphead, as a game, is very interesting to me because it is very much a 2D kind of Saturday morning cartoon. And I apologize for anybody who doesn't know what Cuphead is. But it's basically a very classical, like, 50s cartoon animation, but it's a game, which has a big challenge because you have to be very, very responsive, especially in that type of game. So the animation quality actually might be something you fight in your game design. But yeah, what would that mean for VR, where you have to have even higher frame rate, for example, to make it not dizzying, right? And yeah, of course, as an animator myself, animation techniques are very, very important and should be questioned. This is something that generally happens, because animation in itself is a very kind of encapsulated department generally. And animators generally have to think about those things and get excited by it. Or maybe that's just my bias, because I'm, first of all, an animator and always surrounded by animators. But smears, multiples, motion streaks, all of those things, how do they affect, or how can I create those in the style, in the vision, in the concept that I want to work in? How can I use those to further push that specific vision rather than, oh, I just want to use a smear because it's cool. Is the smear the right thing to do? Yeah, and we can use those effects, including line works, backgrounds, traditional materials, just the quality of the image. How can we use those to work together in conjunction with the narrative of what I want to see, with the visual style, with the overarching vision of the project? Can I show character development in how much motion streaks they have? I don't know. Maybe. Probably. We did it a little bit with frame rate, for example. So it's something that we can definitely play around with and really kind of think about. So we have all these arcs, usually, that our characters go through. We have emotional impacts. We have big turning points in the story. Why not show it by using a different technique or changing the technique a little bit? Yeah. And obviously, there's so much more. Again, in CG, we have control over all the pixels. We have control of all the elements generally. Some are easier to manipulate than others for sure. Some might require R&D. But a lot of times, you'll see by stylizing certain elements, you'll actually make it easier for yourself while also furthering the specific narrative, the specific vision that you're working towards. So yeah, when you look at those elements in the future, just make a choice. And the choice is not always make it do it different, but the choice should be at least a thought there, right? So thank you. Thank you very much for the inspiring talk. We're going to move over here just a little bit so we can start with our transition. I am certain that there are questions in the audience. Please just raise your hand. Again, we'll have a microphone sent over to you. We've got one question over there already and one in the back, so we can have our two microphones moving out there. Maybe just really quickly, we talked about this before we started the session, the importance of, in the Spiderverse, for example, the environments and the abstraction is there. But even though they're very abstract at times and you have these very long shots, there's a lot of emotion that's conveyed as well. How is that communicated in such an abstract environment? JOSE ANDRES CHOIRIZISIOSA- Yeah, so that is one difficult thing that you face, especially when we talk about long format movies or full CG features. And it kind of goes back to you have to capture the audience and hold them for 90 minutes. And you really have to make them feel connected to the characters, which is oftentimes a little bit difficult when we talk about higher stylized media. So the more abstract you go, the more it becomes a feeling, and the less you see the characters. So for the first Spider-Verse, and again, I didn't work on it, but there was a lot of development being done in really making sure that the performances and how the characters behave in those emotional, more emotional sequences, that they feel really, really grounded and really real through this lens of deconstruction that visually happened, through this lens of comic book. But the acting choices, the facial expressions, and how they behave had to be extra realistic in a way. So we didn't use motion capture or anything like this. It's all key frame animation, but there was obviously a heavy use of referencing, just filming ourselves, sort of filming other people that are good with those characters to really capture them, and to have a very, very naturalistic kind of approach to the motion, especially in the acting scenes. Once it goes into crazy action mode, obviously, then we went all out with crazy distortion and snappy poses and stuff. Okay, we have our microphones in place. We'll start with our first question. I was just wondering, you mentioned comic is a medium on its own, like we all know, you need a lot of experience to become a good comic artist and work out all these restrictions to come of it. So Spider-Verse kind of used a lot of these segments, but on the other hand, I was wondering how much time did the producers in West or the art department in West, to be more clear, in get the right feeling about comic and also did they involve comic artists? This was a question that went to my mind, if they really tried to understand this medium. Yeah, I can't speak too much about the sequel, of course, and I wasn't part of the first one, but it was definitely, even on the second one, we had a lot of expertise come. There's definitely comic book artists that are working directly, but it's a lot of the concept artists also are comic book artists a lot of times, especially the ones that were more relevant for our project, of course. But there is a lot of research. When it's more animation-specific, it lands on us as supervisors or leads to really do the research, to really find those elements that are important. And for us it was always like, it is a movie, it's not a comic book, but it should feel visually as much as a comic book as possible. So what does that mean for performance? What does it mean for camera? What does it mean for the overall flow of a sequence and those kind of things. So we definitely had a lot of, there was research done. We had a lot of visual guides, of course, and a lot of visual references just by looking at posing, looking at the characters, how they look in the comic, how do panels frame action. They sometimes break out of the frame. Is this something we can use? So there was a lot of like looking at panels, looking at poses, looking at characters in general. And then obviously there's always the legacy of the characters because people are fans. So you have to know what you're doing. But people were always very careful with that and try to really capture what make the characters the characters, not just in their emotion, not just in their arcs, but also in their poses, in the style they are drawn. So there were always specific artists referenced. So OK, this guy should look like this era of comic book and needs to be drawn as if, or drawn, it's all rendered, but needs to be handled as if he were drawn by this artist or by this artist. So there was a lot of visual references and guidance and then always a little bit of like, OK, but how can we plus it? And how can we fit it into a movie context versus a comic book concept? Because they are different, but a lot of the choices that we had to make were pretty obvious ones. Like some are pretty simple. Like it's like, okay, this doesn't work in a movie, so we have to do it differently. But penalization, bringing in text bubbles, and like playing with with these extreme poses. That was all something that came from, okay, we have these comic books, they only draw extremes. So of course we want to make sure that we push those really hard and spend as little time as possible in the in-betweens that are maybe not as important. Which also brought us back to maybe working in twos, or threes even, in some sections. I have a question there too actually. Can I borrow your mic? Sure. Can you confirm, I had heard somewhere that there was a, you keep mentioning frame rates in doing animation in twos. I had heard that actually there was a technique where different characters were getting different frame rates? I can neither confirm nor deny. No. If you look at the movie, yes, there are elements where this definitely was a thing. And it's a concept that when I joined the new Spider-Verse, it's something that was very, very important for me. So I really tried to push for a really like, kind of like what this talk was like, just please make a choice when it comes to frame rate. Don't just put it on twos because you think the movie should be on twos. That's not right. There are moments that need to be on ones, but there are moments that should never be on ones because it doesn't feel right. So there is definitely that. And if you've seen Spider-Verse, then you know there's different characters from different universes and they come with the different visual styles. They come with the different visual styles. So including frame rate and including all the smears and all these techniques that come with animation is definitely something we try to bring with each character. So if you have a character that is, I don't know, anime inspired, like what's her name? Penny, I think. Penny Parker in the first movie. She obviously has different sensibilities than somebody like Miles, who is more traditionally a Spider-Man from the comics. So it's definitely something that is thought about and used. Okay, I think we've got time just for one more question. We have a microphone positioned at the back. As a question, because you work with a lot of animators as leader of a big team, how do you handle the inconsistencies that just happen? Because each animator, of course, animates differently. How do you get all those inconsistencies into a common stylized version for a feature film, for example? By setting up the rules and by giving the right notes. It's basically, it's like a hierarchy everywhere, right? So as an animator, you try to hit all the things as much as possible, but you might not be as trained yet for the specific characters. But your lead should be obviously the next position. So he or she might have to just direct you in the right ways to hit the poses, to hit the acting beats and to identify what's wrong. And with adding all these elements to different characters or whatever, it obviously becomes more complex. So a lot of studios, including ours at times, install what we call character leads. So you have a person that is very well versed with a character that might have been involved early on in the character, doing a lot of the performance tests so they know what the directors want, what the vision is for the character, not just from the animation side, but also from the performance side. And those people are usually the ones then that have to give a little bit more feedback or give maybe a masterclass internally where I say, okay, this is the character here, the do's and don'ts. Use the pose library so you hit at least the basic shapes that are on model and look correct. But it's always a problem we are fighting and if I look at the movies that I worked on, it's vastly inconsistent sometimes how the characters look and you can clearly identify which sequences were done early in the movie versus later because throughout the production you learn so much about the characters and they evolve, the style evolves while you work on it. So after half a year in a movie, you look back on the first sequence and it's like, oh my god, it's all wrong. What are those eye shapes? Oh my god, it's a cross-eyed. Or whatever. There's lots of those things that happen. And they will always happen. You can't avoid it. But pre-production is very important to really define those do's and don'ts. If you're lucky, you get a lot of artwork from the concept artist or from the character designers. And the longer the movie is in production, the more you have to actually look at. So you can reference back to shots that were done before that are good. And you can say, OK, what was done there, maybe I can steal some of those ideas or try to bring that back into my shot so it feels like a more coherent character that has the same kind of tics and traits or, I don't know, facial expressions throughout the movie. But it's always something we fight, but it actually works somehow. There's no real rule for it and how to do it. But yeah, it's a lot of leadership and a lot of experience that you as a team, as a whole, kind of gain throughout the production. Okay, thank you very much for the very inspiring talk. Paul will be around a bit later. If you want to ask some questions, give him a round of applause. Thank you very much. So in the interest of time, we're just going to continue with our final talk from the Arts and Industry panel. I'm very happy to introduce Ben Vahr and Brian Main from Casa Creations. They're going to talk to us about art education and immersive entertainment. Thank you very much. Good morning, everybody. We're Cause of Creations, Ars Electronica, Juergens. We're very grateful and thankful for the invitation and happy to be here. We're two of the co-founders of Cause of Creations. My name is Brian Main. I'm a 2D artist and animator from the United States. And this is? I'm Ben. I'm going to read a slide, which you're not supposed to do, but I'm going to do it anyway. We are a Vienna-based studio in the 6th District that aims to enrich audiences by challenging their assumptions and breaking boundaries. Our work represents a wide range of formats, from digital games, indie games, serious games, to immersive XR experiences, to a host of educational games and other experiences. Our team has a background in commercial, performing arts, entertainment, indie games. So our team brings a lot of experience from several different fields together. The company was founded, its current iteration was founded in 2019, but Causa Creations has been around since 2014. So we have a long history of working together on several projects, and we finally formalized it together. That's not my slide, but we formalized our collaborative teamwork in a company in 2019, and we've been doing quite well. We've even grown during the pandemic. and we've been doing quite well. We've even grown during the pandemic. Let's see, maybe that, no. So my slide is not, our slide is not on the screen. Have you tried turning it off and on again? There we are. So this is our team currently. Quick overview of our work. We're probably best known right now for our 2017 project, Path Out, which is an autobiographical game about a young Syrian artist, Jack Goodman, and his story as a Syrian refugee fleeing from the war-torn country into Austria through Syria, Turkey, Greece and other countries. We currently collaborated with UNHCR so the UN Refugee Agency to make a classroom version of the game. It's an RPG game. And so currently, right now, as schools are starting up, it's going to be featured in classrooms all throughout Europe. And we were recently asked to make another translate, two more translations, Swedish and Norwegian. So Danish or something. Some Norwegian languages. Norwegian. Norwegian. Okay. We, the way we work is we work from a concept, we work backwards from a concept. So and we hop between different mediums. So our studio doesn't really have a focused platform that we do our work on. This, for example, was an immersive theater project that we did with Vienna's Volkstheater. So it's a mixed media, on-site interactive game that works with AR elements and screens. And since this project, we're actually doing some more work kind of based on this concept. Also, as a side project, Georg, our narrative and game designer and producer, in conjunction with another partner we work with Gold Extra and an art collective in Salzburg designed a board game that plays with tarot cards so it's like a solitaire game there's also now a multiplayer version or a two-player version and last year we had a Kickstarter campaign we worked with two edge two artists Viv and and Elliot, Viv Tanner and Elliot Baum and they designed the full tarot card set as well as the game board. We had a Kickstarter, very successful Kickstarter campaign next last year and we're currently finalizing the fulfillment of that project. project. Thank you. Another project was Die Andere Stadt, which is based in some more uncommon areas in Vienna. It's a collaboration with three different artists. And it's an AR project, location-based AR. So you have to go there to play it. You have to be at the actual location. It's three very different stories, one sci-fi exploration on a planet played in a park in Vienna, then a delivery service simulator and a story about the bombings of Ueppenplatz in Vienna in World War II from the perspective of a child. And another project we did this year was Glasfäden. It's an interactive motion comic about the former Vietnamese contract workers in Soviet era East Germany. And that one is also free to download. Everyone can try it on phones if they like. And why we're here right now is because of our project Holy Fire. It's a virtual reality experience that looks at the seductive and destructive forces of nuclear energy. experience that looks at the seductive and destructive forces of nuclear energy and we're currently making a prototype of this for the quest 2 in VR. So how did we get to start with this project? We had some friends who did a theater piece about Chernobyl and they wished to extend it, the format. And at the same time, a funding from the Bundesministerium für Kunst und Kultur popped up, and it fit quite nicely. So we teamed up and had a good opportunity to create a completely new project with an interdisciplinary team and bring theater and XR together. and bring theater and XR together. So our friends, Geraldine Massing, short hiccup, and Teresa Daryanova did the theater piece in Vienna, in Einberg X, I think, called Chernobyl, Eine Chronik der Zukunft. And we watched it and we liked it really much. And they reached out to us if we could join together. And we also had a team member who already visited Chernobyl in 2014 and did some hands-on research there for another project. And after we received the funding we teamed up with Bobble Sound to do the game audio and sound effects and music for the whole game and together we started to explore the huge topic of radioactivity that has been so popular right now throughout the 20th century and with all the aspects that are intertwined. So what's it about? An exploration of the human relationship to magical technology in general, but more specifically about the past hundred years and our relationship to nuclear power and atomic energy and the science thereto. So this is basically exploring that theme in an elemental sense. We use the term holy fire to kind of represent this Promethean energy, like Prometheus's fire, a technology that, like fire, you can use to cook and be productive with, but also can burn you. So this experience basically carries you through a series of vignettes, historical and personal, to try to contextualize that technology. We start every project because our work, our studio, because we straddle the line between serious games and entertainment, our work, our studio, because we straddle the line between serious games and entertainment, our work has a very social political focus, so we have to put a lot of research in at the beginning of a project. So we all are armchair scientists right now so we know quite a lot about the technology involved. We also did some other things Ben will explain. Yeah so we asked ourselves what are the promises of nuclear power or how how did the whole idea of nuclear and its promises evolve over time. And so we looked at books, TV shows, documentaries, interviews. We even went to Austria's Akavits Ventendorf to get some firsthand impressions how these things work and look like from the inside. For anybody who doesn't know, inside. For anybody who doesn't know, Spentendorf, if you're visiting Austria, is a defunct or never used nuclear power plant. So it's basically just sitting there. So we took a tour of that. And you can see all the places that are usually highly contaminated and no one can ever visit. So the left picture is actually in the containment chamber of the reactor. So left picture is actually in the containment chamber of the reactor. So that's something that is usually very not open. They even gave us a second tour. We got to see the places no one ever gets to see, the old offices where there's paper still on tables and things like that. So it literally looks like a place where they just left and left everything behind. So yeah, we teamed up with experts from Zwentendorf and also booked a workshop with Global 2000, who also have great experts about the topic of nuclear energy. And then we collected all this, all our research, in one huge, enormous whiteboard where you can see a glimpse of what it actually is. Takes about seven minutes to load. And yeah, we put all our mood boards, our references, our style explorations, our concepts and storyboards and the narration concepts in there. And then we started doing it and we chose the Quest 2 because it's the most popular VR headset at the moment with 15 million units sold since 2020. at the moment with 15 million units sold since 2020. And it's also the most accessible one with no cables attached, just put it on and you're inside. It's something else was very important for us that we were like space independent, hardware dependent, so that you can just take this thing with you and put it on and look at the experience. And how did we start to do it? We had our research done, we had our idea done, what we wanted to do, like not concept wise, like content wise. But we didn't have any story or gameplay or concepts that were fleshed out yet. So we started, we all met up, the whole team, and we did a two week workshop, a lab or a game jam, as you may call it, where every idea was valid. So we wrote everything down. We tried everything out, every scenario that popped up with anyone. And then we took all the results, voted upon them, iterated on them, and wrote a storyline. And we made one big project, a 30 minute experience about nuclear power, starting in the first beginning, ending with now or the future. And we made this big project, iterated over that, and then we took again small parts of this big project and made a short 15 minute version out of it or 10 minutes more rather and made this into a short glimpse that is still a coherent story and will give you an overview of what we are planning to do and to create a verdict slice or a demo or. Yeah, demo is also maybe a good word for it. And we would have liked to have more for you, but we had a covid summer. Everybody got sick. He's one of the last ones who hasn't gotten it yet. So we're going to focus on more on the development, I think. And yeah, and we took our demo further and to flesh out to a full experience. And we hope to release it in the next two months. And what is the narration about? So we tried to join the broad field of narrative VR, but with game elements, or interactive, but a movie, or not a movie, but not a game. It's a mix. And we really focused very much on the story, combining environmental storytelling with voiceovers from actors. And we took a set of scenes, like you're inside of the reactor and you watch it start up. You see how it actually looks like when a reactor starts up, something that only very heavily lead plate protected cameras have seen as of yet. Or you are on the rooftop of the reactor block for internobill shoveling graphite blocks off the roof as a liquidator, or explore the office of Mercury after her passing and how contaminated the whole office was, how all the things, the chairs, the papers, how everything is, like, basically killing you if you go in there. I'll take over. So,, we through this workshop, through this lab collaboration, we came up with some common themes and that's where I come in. So as we were talking about these settings, these forbidden places, For example, in Chernobyl, there's this one room under the reactor where there's all this material, the famous elephant foot. These were all things that we were talking about at the table. And so I go into my corner, I come back, and I try to illustrate these themes, give them some context so that it's complementing the dialogue that we're having. Some of the themes that we had were almost religious like in this past I was looking at things like cathedrals and religious settings together with Geraldine oh here another thing that we had was we had this idea to make the invisible visible visually. So we decided that we wanted to go with like a stylized reality. So we didn't want to have a photorealistic look. And we also wanted to avoid all the cliches that you see in VR because there's kind of a VR look right now. We tried the realistic look, though. Yeah. So this was, for example, we were talking about the idea of showing the nuclear waste that it doesn't show up on Google Maps, I think. It does. You can look at all of it. It's like a huge, like thousands of square kilometers of nuclear waste from Fukushima. So this is an example. I did a quick collage of some 3D elements and some photos to kind of play with how, where this waste is located in relation to the reactors. So alongside that, as I take it further, I'm playing with stylized elements to give it a kind of a look, so that it has a unique look when compared to other things. The big thing that we wanted to do was depict radiation, something that is there and it's around us all the time, but our senses cannot perceive it. So I worked together with Chris, our technical artist, to, here I did some concept art to show how radiation could be depicted, and then he would carry that into Houdini and Unity and try to fulfill these illustrations in an animated sense. At first I wanted to do something that looked very illustrative and almost comic-like. I put this on here because this ended up being a dead end but it nevertheless dead ends are valuable because they help you push away from a place you don't want to go so they're worthwhile experiments and the takeaway from these early experiments is that we all kind of liked this sketchy drawn style we thought first of all the black and white look was very good because it helped reduce the amount of information that the users were getting. We had a chiaroscuro effect, so very strong black and whites that help us to determine where the user's focus can be. determine where the user's focus can be. So I eventually spun this further into some more concept art, collaging some 3D elements with Photoshop work to come up with a look. Because everything is in 3D, I was also playing with textures and how these textures would be painted and applied to 3D models. So there was a lot of exploration and experimentation and a lot of voting amongst the team about which one we liked the most. And then Brian made some very neat concepts for me to model from. I made 3D characters of everything and sculpted them. We made the textures and then it resulted in the final look of the actual game in the end. This is the final concept art that we are bringing to the Engine right now. Also this. And of course, all of this did not come without challenges. We had several challenges. Some more in our control, some less in our control. The technical challenges coming with the Oculus Quest 2, which is a super amazing hardware device, but it, in the end, is still a powerful phone that works for you. And we wanted to work a lot with light and a lot with particles. And the Quest doesn't like that. So we had to struggle a lot here and limit ourselves as was neatly also illustrated in a talk before us. We had production challenges having an interdisciplinary team that never did anything like this before coming from theater being a set designer and a director, bringing all this together to form a coherent experience. And we had, I said before, a small COVID challenge that probably cost us like a month or two of work in the end. And now I am happy to show you some old working progress footage of the shoveling of the graphite on the rooftop. So here you can see, if anybody's seen the HBO miniseries or knows anything about the Chernobyl site, you can see in the background this giant plume of radiation effect. So that helps to visualize what was actually going on at the time when these liquidators had to go on the neighboring rooftop and eliminate all these graphite pieces. They were only allowed, I think, 90 seconds to do so. So our experience basically asks them to do the same thing. One of the bigger challenges was figuring out that damn shovel. Yeah, it's still a challenge. And thank you. And where do we want to go with this project? Right now, we have this short version, this pilot, and we want to get it out into the world, get feedback, iterate over it, see what we can improve, how it is received, and also look for additional funding for the final project. And join to production support or partners. So we can finance the whole thing in the end. Because artistic VR as a market is quite a difficult field because unlike VR games, there's no functioning market for narrative experiences yet. Because unlike VR games, there's no functioning market for narrative experiences yet. There are some exceptions like the Under Presents from Tender Claws. But most companies still follow the models that film and media production uses. So they make their experience, they go to festivals, they show it on the festival. And when the festival is over over the VR experience is over, it's gone, you cannot see it anywhere, only if you know the artist who made it. There is no revenue streams for VR experiences from festivals or from people with a filmic background. On the other hand there's VR games that are not shown on any festivals On the other hand, there's VR games that are not shown on any festivals that you can buy and play at home. But they are not as easily set in this film-based VR setting because you cannot control the environment, like in a festival where you can build an installation or set the scene for the whole thing. And yeah, we tried to fit somewhere in between as this rather humorous graphic from a colleague of ours in illustrates. He's more of a word guy than visual. And yeah, tomorrow I think we will also hear a bit more about this topic with the talk of Michel Granot, who is facing the same problem as a artistic VR filmmaker. There's a lot of interesting initiatives in Europe right now in this market. She'll go into more detail tomorrow. So this is our current work in progress, but we have some more projects lined up. We usually have two or three projects, I'm going through the points here. Our next project is a big, pan-European collaborative memory project, EU funded, and we're just about to embark on that. We're getting all the paperwork finished up. So it's a memory culture project, and our portion of it, with our collaborators in Belgium, I believe, is to... We'll be depicting the Marcinelle mining disaster in 1956. Also in VR. Also in VR. So we'll be taking a lot of the best practices and skills that we've learned from Holy Fire and applying it to this next project. And currently we just got funding and we're developing a mixed reality classroom experience that helps like tweens, early teenagers, in educating them about climate change. Here's a sample of the gameplay. And that's also currently in development. This one is also based on the Vienna Altamaras we did. So we kind of took the approach of having multiple teams figuring out problems in a social political topic and at the same time, educating them about the changes that are happening to our planet and what can be done or what is being done and how everything could evolve. And that's what we are developing right now for schools, right now only in AR. In the future we want to bring it to more devices. Yeah. Thank you very much. Okay, we can actually stay here, which is cool, because we're going to have a break afterwards, so we don't have to set up a laptop immediately. But we have a few minutes for some questions. So again, if you have a question, raise your hand. We'll bring a microphone to you. We've got our first question over there and a question from the very back. Why are you targeting VR specifically? And the reason I'm asking that is you wouldn't have to target solely VR. You can still create a VR game and then have it available as a PC experience. Is that sort of planned or do you want to avoid that market specifically? It's not about avoiding the market, but we really want to work with this ability to bring the user into this world and physically doing something. So we want to have this. and physically doing something. So we want to have this... Advantage? Advantage, thank you. The advantage of making the user do something in there, like physically grabbing an object or actually shoving, not clicking the mouse five times, and then the roof is clean, but you have to actually go there, and the stuff is heavy, so you have to to push it and you have to move in a space and we want to take the great ability of the medium VR to emphasize and also bring the users into spaces that cannot be seen like that. Also because in VR you have this relation to size. On a screen everything is, you don't know how actually, how big it is. But if you're standing on a 15 meters platform and around you it's just going down for 20 meters and all the stuff is happening, this is a totally different experience and we want to make use of that. Yeah, so VR forest is as a tool of artistic expression something very special. I think the experience of danger as well since this is a radioactive topic that it's different if you're actually in that space and you could be part of that radioactive field rather than if you're just seeing it on the screen. The short answer to the question is it's just more fun but also from a market standpoint this is a new field there's it's an interesting place to get a foot in because I think it's only just a matter of time before there's some really interesting device announcements from some of these companies that will really make this technology mainstream. It's already doing pretty well on its own, but I think it's going to be much more eventful in the coming years. So we like being in that place. Okay. I think we have a couple of questions from the audience. This first one there. I have a short question, and then I'll hand it over to you. Especially the last project where you talked about this climate change education project sounds, on the one hand, super interesting. On the other hand, I have the feeling that even the youngest persons are already well-informed about the problem. So do you see a chance that they maybe can involve their parents or grandparents? Cause I guess the problem is more there than at the children's education. The inspiration for the project was actually, we live in Vienna. In the before COVID times, if maybe you can remember, kids were taking Fridays off of school to have mass demonstrations around the world to protest the political response to climate change. It is true young people generally are more informed. The problem is information is its own problem. One of the more interesting features of the game is it adds a level of media literacy. Really quickly said, there's three teams. They're all getting different forms of information about one topic. If you click on a certain area on the globe, you may be, there's a hot spot that depicts an actual event that might be happening, like flooding or something like that. It tries to contextualize it, but the context is coming from different angles. Maybe a more conservative one, more business-oriented one, one that's more activist and one that's what we call techno-utopians. So this is more like the Ars Electronica crowd or more Silicon Valley types. And they're all looking at the same thing with a different information set. The real game is, and the real point of the game is to, there's no ultimate answer in the end. They have to navigate information and all the blind spots that comes with that. Because with algorithms and all the things that are controlling what kind of information we get and what we get, that's the more difficult thing to navigate in a world where there's lots of information, but to contextualize it, it's already been basically digested for you before you receive it. So we want to keep that more raw. And then the added effect is that if the kids learn enough, they go home and hopefully educate their parents. is that if the kids learn enough, they go home and hopefully educate their parents. And also to add to that, we have a very, very beautiful quote of one pupil. I don't know how old she was, but she said, I've learned more in one evening at Fridays for Future than I did in my entire life at school about climate change. So in schools, it's not really there yet, hopefully. I recently with one of our partners went to the BED conference, so an educational ed tech conference in the UK, and I can attest that climate change is becoming more of a topic in classrooms. So again, another place, a good place to be in as a wave of climate change education enters into these schools. OK, thanks. We've got a question from the audience. Yes. With thinking about the potential of educating and learning, there's the solo experience, someone who perhaps enters into this narrative, this game in comparison to collaborative and community based learning and experience that potential of sharing of exchange what is your relationship to that in thinking about your choices of platform your approach to game and offerings of these social education experiences well here we have examples of like the classroom game that we're doing and offerings of these social education experiences? Well, here we have examples of like, the classroom game that we're doing, that we're, is currently, we're kicking off, is completely collaborative. So the entire classroom gets out of their chairs, works on solving problems together in a classroom setting. And then, I mean, every project you're playing with, you're thinking very carefully about those things. You're thinking about code switching. You're thinking about, okay, is someone going to be carried through this VR experience? Maybe they should feel a sense of isolation. It's a very elemental and very quiet experience that they're supposed to go through. But we're perfectly willing to switch and make something that's more collaborative and exciting. I don't know, do you have any thoughts? Yeah, we did both actually, because we have, we did the path out for example, that is now brought to the classrooms which is to be an individual experience for the players to play, which then will be discussed in the classroom. Then we made Glass F the the internet motion comic about Vietnamese contract workers in the GDR that is also it's we specifically made it 30 minutes long so it fits in a one-hour school lesson because it was a commission for schools actually and it also comes with an educational paper that will also then lead to discussions in class together after experience the solo thing but we we annul tomorrow's and rising tide we are going a different like a different path it's it's like the pupils together experience it and they have their own discussions and there's no interference from the outside from teachers or maybe the discussion with the teachers will happen the next day because it takes a full hour to do or a full morning. So we're doing both. And I think both things are valid and have their benefits and their drawbacks. Feel free, yeah. Or just sort of maybe even kind of in a more pointed way, the use of technology. So the augmented reality, virtual reality, expanded reality, that's a continuing and evolving technology. So, for example, going to a mixed reality presentation, everyone has the Oculus headsets. And there's a three-dimensional experience where everyone's engaging with three-dimensional sculpture and can walk around it rotationally. And it's a real-time engagement. That's still yet to come to sort of really kind of see that become gaming experience and it's very intensive with equipment. But sort of with thinking about the game environment itself, thinking about multi-user, have you sort of been encountering this, approaching this, how is that working? you sort of been encountering this, approaching this? How is that working? Again, if it fits the concept, we're up for anything. Multi-user is also interesting for us. I think the ultimate thing with this is that they're using technology, they're using VR headsets, but the ultimate thing is they're gonna take them off and they're gonna be surrounded by people that they're gonna discuss with. So we're speaking to young people on their terms and everybody's playing video games anyway and this has even become even more clear during the pandemic and there was teachers that were conducting their classes on minecraft and things like that so basically we're trying to speak the language of young people, but we want to, the ultimate goal is to, we don't want to be adversarial with classrooms and teachers, we want it to be a springboard into collaborative learning. And I think that would be even better, it could be great as a multi-user experience in a game world. But in this particular case with one of our projects, the one that we're embarking on, it's about doing it inside of the classroom. The game starts, and then it ends with collaboration, real collaboration. But whatever the project needs, basically. OK, I think I've lost track of the microphones. Is there one more question out there? whatever the project needs, basically. Okay, I think I've lost track of the microphones. Is there one more question out there? Is there another microphone out there? If not... I mean, there was a question earlier I'd love to answer from another session, which is how you handle motion sickness in VR. We did a project. It was a pretty fun project, it's called Goblins Gone Wrong, where the point of the project of... We did everything in VR that you shouldn't. So the whole experience was to make users as sick as possible by making them hang upside down or not being able to move while the camera moves and stuff like that, or separating the eyes. You can take your eye out and look at yourself. So yeah, that was fun. We came to a point with our VR experiences that there's a lot of tools to make motion sickness less but you cannot avoid it. And people hate teleporting. So we don't do it anymore. Motion sickness will always be a problem. There's people that are sensitive and they will most likely not be able to enjoy it as the same as other people. That's why we are trying to limit ourselves to short experiences. Like 30 minutes is already super long. 10 minutes is super okay. Okay, so we are, I think, finished with our third talk in our first panel. Thank you very much. Thank you for your patience and sticking with us. We got off to a little bit of a late start, but we now have time for a short break. We're going to be starting back up here again at 2 p.m., so feel free to grab some coffee, use the bathroom weather. We'll be starting back here at 2 o'clock. Thank you very much. For those of you listening in on the web or later, thanks for attending, and we'll see you soon. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.