XR Exhibition
Doc Edge XR Exhibition is a showcase of digital interactive storytelling featuring top international and local VR, AR, installations, and digital stories.
Storytelling is central to everything we do. Humans have been telling stories around campfires and kitchen tables from time immemorial. Our kaupapa is to celebrate, support and showcase documentary which includes bringing new immersive worlds to New Zealand audiences for them to participate in and experience.
XR, or Extended Reality, is an umbrella term for VR (Virtual Reality), AR (Augmented Reality), Interactive and Immersive storytelling. In a way, it encompasses anything beyond the traditional on-screen format.
Events
No further event is scheduled at this stage. We are currently working on the XR 2023 events so do sign up to our newsletter to keep informed.
Exhibition 2022
At the 2022 XR exhibition, over 20 projects were presented in a broad range of XR formats: Interactive VR, 180 & 360 VR Films, AI and AR Experiences, and Online Immersive and Immersive Installations as listed below. They were held from 18 June to 3 July during Doc Edge Festival 2022.
VR Interactive
Through mind-bending animation, explore the limits of reality and a true story of mental health and the power of gaming. Echo (narrated by Tilda Swinton) guides you through the many realities of Goliath.
Goliath: Playing With Reality
Director Barry Gene Murphy & May Abdalla
Producer Floreal Films
Country France, UK
Year 2021 Duration 25 mins
Award/Festival Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for Best VR Work at the 78th Venice International Film Festival.
Watch Trailer
This powerful virtual reality documentary allows audiences to experience the alarming events of January 13, 2018, in Hawai’i like never before.
Nothing Happened, Everything Changed
On The Morning You Wake (to the End of the World)
Director Pierre Zandrowicz , Mike Brett , Steve Jamison , Arnaud Colinart
Country France, UK
Year 2022 Duration 3 x chapters 20-60 mins
Award/Festival SXSW 2022 Winner XR Experience
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Rangi Tuwhera Open Sky offers a glimpse into the world of Taonga Pūoro or traditional Māori instruments. We have a virtual encounter with a real pūtōrino and can examine the detailed carving on it created by master carver Sir Brian Flintoff.
Rangi Tuwhera – Open Sky
Director Kat Lintott, Dave Whitehead
Country New Zealand
Year 2021 Duration 20 mins
Award/Festival imagineNATIVE 2021
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Kusunda, a voice-driven interactive experience, explores what it means to lose a language and what it takes to preserve one.
Speak to Awaken: Kusunda
Director Gayatri Parameswaran, Felix Gaedtke
Country Germany
Year 2021 Duration 20 mins
Award/Festival Stereopsia 2021, Tribeca Immersive 2021, VR NOW Awards 2021
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Inspired by the homes of ancestors with numerous memories, the main character builds a new house where he can carve his own memories.
Ihyangjeong: Carving With Memories
Director Sunghwan Lee
Producer Rene Hyewon Lee , Mina Hyeon
Country South Korea
Year 2022 Duration 16 mins
Award/Festival SXSW 2022, DOK Leipzig 2021, IDFA DocLab 2020
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VR Films
The photo of the GDR border guard Conrad Schumann fleeing to the West in the year 1961 is considered an icon of the 20th century. In the Deutsches Historisches Museum, film director Boris Hars-Tschachotin takes us back to the year 1961 in a 360° virtual reality installation.
The Leap
Director Boris Hars-Tshachotin
Country Germany
Year 2021 Duration 20 mins
Award/Festival FIPADOCS 2022, Raindance 2021
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The Hangman at Home is an interactive animated experience exploring themes surrounding acknowledgement and the awkward intimacy of humanness. Told in five interwoven stories; each situation presents a person, or persons in a delicate moment: fragile, playful, terrified, contemplated, confused, curious.
The Hangman at Home
Director Michelle Kranot , Uri Kranot
Producer Floreal Films
Country Canada, Denmark, France
Year 2020 Duration 25 mins
Watch Trailer
Whakakitenga transports viewers to 1846 on the eve of great change for the Ngati Toa people residing in Aotearoa, New Zealand. It provides a cinematic VR experience of the Maori world, through the eyes of Ngati Toa chief Te Rangihaeata.
Whakakitenga
Director Wiremu Grace, Miriam Ross, Paul Wolffram
Country New Zealand
Year 2020 Duration 9 mins
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Take a look under the waves, get personal with the local marine life and discover the remains of the HMNZS Wellington (F69) shipwreck!
Taputeranga – Marine Reserve
Director Nicole Miller
Producer Friends of Taputeranga Marine Reserve
Country New Zealand
Year 2022 Duration 3 mins
* Watch also on Doc Edge Virtual Cinema or Virtual Hub
Immersive Installations
If your gods could whisper in your ear, what would they say?
Atua
Director Jermaine Dean, Tanu Gago
Producer Piki Films, FAFSWAG, Wrestler
Country New Zealand
Year 2021 Duration 4 mins
Awards/Festival Sundance as Virtual Experience, World Premiere as Physical Installation
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Paradise
Director Gabo Arora, David Rosenberg, Glen Neath
Producer Darkfield, Light Shed, John Hopkins University
Country United States
Year 2022 Duration 30 mins
Awards/Festival SXSW 2022
* Book your timeslot to experience this at The Civic/Auckland
** You can also watch this on our Doc Edge Virtual Cinema
Paradise is a two person AI-powered immersive audio experience for intimate partners in their own home. Part interactive game, part theatrical experience, audience members progress through a world of simulated scenarios that explore why we stay together or fall apart.
!!WARNING!! PLEASE BE AWARE SHOWS ARE 16+ AND EXPLORE THEMES OF INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE.
Manawa Hau is a Māori immersive VR experience. Activating practices of hauora (wellbeing) Cathy Livermore (creative director, movement artist, hauora practitioner), Rob Thorne (taonga puoro musician), and Jess Feast (director) invite you into a sacred realm woven through reo (Māori language), movement, sound, light and presence.
Manawa Hau
Director Jess Feast
Country New Zealand
Year 2022 Duration 14 mins
Immersive Films
Documentary about the interaction between the Brazilian city’s inhabitants and what is expressed in its walls. Graffiti, indecipherable symbols, slogans, political thoughts, hieroglyphs, declarations of love.
Skin
Director Marcos Pimentel
Country Brazil
Year 2021 Duration from 75 min
Watch Trailer
* Watch at The Civic/Auckland, Te Auaha Gallery/Wellington or Doc Edge Virtual Cinema
This is a road movie encapsulated in the Moscow metro system and filmed over the course of one year: a documentary film that observes cultural and social issues in modern Russia.
Where Are We Headed
Director Ruslan Fetodow
Country Russian Federation
Year 2021 Duration 63 mins
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* Watch at The Civic/Auckland, Te Auaha Gallery/Wellington or Doc Edge Virtual Cinema
The planet locks itself in. Our world is being drained of its substance and digital life forms are multiplying, like these couples who meet in a virtual universe. What if the crisis was not the pandemic, but the derealization of our lives?
I Gotta Look Good for the Apocalypse
Director Ayce Kartal
Country France
Year 2021 Duration from 6 mins
Watch Trailer
* Watch at The Civic/Auckland, Te Auaha Gallery/Wellington or Doc Edge Virtual Cinema
Three Chinese ladies developed their romantic relationships with artificially intelligent virtual partners in real life.
My AI Lover
Director Chouwa Liang
Country Australia
Year 2021 Duration from 16 mins
Watch Trailer
* Watch at The Civic/Auckland, Te Auaha Gallery/Wellington or Doc Edge Virtual Cinema
Emergence of patterns in chaos or the way we fall in love. True beauty is everywhere. Hard to reach, ephemeral and mysterious, or simply hidden from us, it shapes our ability to feel, to observe and to marvel about Nature and other beings.
Order & Chaos
Director Thomas Vans
Country France
Year 2021 Duration from 4 mins
Watch Trailer
* Watch at The Civic/Auckland, Te Auaha Gallery/Wellington or Doc Edge Virtual Cinema
Phenomena fuses art and science together to explore naturally occurring patterns, and the fundamental forces of nature that create them, to take us on an ambitious, innovative, and psychedelic journey through the fabric of the universe.
Phenomena
Director Josef Gatti
Country Australia
Year 2021 Duration from 28 mins
Watch Trailer
* Watch at The Civic/Auckland, Te Auaha Gallery/Wellington or Doc Edge Virtual Cinema
Sentience starkly contrasts the stunning beauty of Guanxi Provence’s ancient mountains and the abrasive imposition of modernity playing out on Yangshou’s famous fourteen hundred-year-old West Street.
Sentience
Director Elliot J. Spencer
Country Australia
Year 2021 Duration from 9 mins
Watch Trailer
* Watch at The Civic/Auckland, Te Auaha Gallery/Wellington or Doc Edge Virtual Cinema
Online Experiences
What is it like to communicate in sign language? Find out for yourself in Ravi and Emma, an interactive experience that celebrates diversity, inclusivity, and love—with humor and inventiveness. Join in and you’ll find yourself immersed in the story of deaf-born designer Ravi and Emma, a hearing student.
Director Kylie Boltin, Ella Rubeli, Ravi Vasavan, Emma Anderson
Country Australia
Year 2021 Duration 12 mins
Awards/Festival IDFA DocLab Liminal Reality 2021
* Watch on Doc Edge Virtual Cinema or Virtual Hub
A true story about a boy Wiesio Stypula, one of thousands of Polish orphans who were saved from the hell of World War II by an Indian Maharajah Jam Saheb Digvijaysinhji
Director Thomas Stankiewicz
Country Poland
Year 2021 Duration 90 mins
Awards/Festival Slamdance International Film Festival 2021
* Watch on Doc Edge Virtual Cinema or Virtual Hub
REGENERATE Game Jam is a 48-hours of reimagining farming in games to focus on regenerative and sustainable practices.
Regenerate Game Jam Matariki is an opportunity to create fun and visible action towards the regeneration of people, place and planet. Make a game in 48-hours in reimagining regenerative and sustainable practices that will run from 17 -19 June 2022 NZST.
You all definitely know the classic story of The Very Hungry Caterpillar – we all grew up with this book, in its good old hard thick book, with the shortened pages for the days of the week.
But imagine…having this book in one of NZ’s official languages – and the language of NZ Deaf community – New Zealand Sign Language – aka NZSL. This amazing digital book, told through NZSL storytelling style, at your fingertips. Enjoy watching this story you know off by heart, but in sign language – it will blow your mind.
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
A classic book in one of NZ’s official languages, the language of NZ Deaf community – New Zealand Sign Language. Enjoy watching this story you know off by heart, but in sign language.
* Watch on Doc Edge Virtual Cinema or Virtual Hub
Here is a NZ book where you cannot get more Kiwi as than this.
Written, illustrated and voiced by Stephanie Thatcher, this book comes with an avatar who signs the cheeky story of the little two kiwis, keeping their NZ native friends up all night playing. Watch these little NZ mischievous animals celebrate the joys of silliness and pure enjoyment of playing through the night, in the language of NZ Deaf community – New Zealand Sign Language(NZSL)
Kiwi One Kiwi Two
Kara Technologies brings you this very kiwi book by an avatar who signed the cheeky story of the two little kiwis, keeping their NZ native friends up all night.
* Watch on Doc Edge Virtual Cinema or Virtual Hub
Allan, Ami and Saber come with high fidelity faces and emotional expressions which give them the ability to be fully expressive and engaging – easily connecting with the audience.
They can preside at the bottom of any screen or on any device, interpreting any content into a signed language. ssadasdasdasdasdasd dsfsd
Meet the digital sign language avatars
Allan, Ami and Saber, our many hyper-realistic sign language avatars (digital humans), are responsible for translating a variety of media content such as Video, Audio, or Text into a signed language.
Check out the Sign Language Books brought to you by Kara Technologies.
What does normal mean? Mika Orr, director and daughter of a psychiatrist, takes a look at widespread mental disorders. Discover the amazing selection of digital work at IF Digital Institut Francais: https://ifdigital.institutfrancais.com/en
Supported by French Embassy
Director Mika Orr
Country France
Year 2021 Duration 12 x episodes, 8-15 min each
Spoken Languages French, German, Hebrew, English
Awards/Festival IDFA DocLab Competition for Digital Storytelling 2021
* Watch on Doc Edge Virtual Cinema or Virtual Hub