Excitement and Enthusiasm for VR at Sundance’s New Frontier Program

The Sundance New Frontier program had 37 different virtual reality experiences showing on two different floors on Main Street in Park City during the Sundance Film Festival. Bechir Sylvain is an independent filmmaker who got his first taste of VR at Sundance last year at the New Frontier program where there were only about a dozen different experiences. For Bechir, going through all of VR experiences at Sundance was like a kid getting to experience Disney World for the first time, and I had a chance to capture his reactions and enthusiasm as he got his second big exposure to VR.

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Baobab Studios co-founder Eric Darnell summarized the difference between film and VR beautifully. He said that while film is able to give you the story of a single experience, VR enables you to have your own experience that allows you to generate your own story. I don’t think that the New Frontier program was quite prepared to handle the demand to see VR as the average wait time to see an average experience was 90 to 120 minutes with some of the more popular experiences seeing over 3-hour wait times. While this was disappointing to some film fans looking for a quick VR break, it’s certainly good news for VR in that it’s something that had a lot of buzz and interest within the independent film community to see how storytelling is evolving in this new medium.

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