The winner of the 39th annual Emmy Awards are in, and while nominated VR projects were few and far between this year, Zero Days VR nabbed the award for the category ‘Outstanding New Approaches: Documentary’.
Update (October 9th, 2018): Both the video, linked below, and description of the project was incorrectly cited, pointing readers to the non-VR project ‘Zero Days’ instead of ‘Zero Days VR’. The corrected article follows below:
Produced by Scatter, a New York-based studio that creates immersive stories and AR/VR creativity tools, the film delves into the rapidly changing world of cyber warfare and its impacts on international politics. Zero Days VR was based on the titular Oscar short-listed Participant Media documentary, and visualizes the story of Stuxnet in a way the traditional documentary simply couldn’t—by placing you inside a virtual world of computer viruses, which the studio says lets you experience “the high stakes of cyber warfare at a human scale.”
Here’s Scatter’s description of Zero Days VR:
The true story of a clandestine mission hatched by the US and Israel to sabotage an underground Iranian nuclear facility told from the perspective of Stuxnet, a sophisticated cyber weapon, and a key NSA informant. Audiences experience the high stakes of cyber warfare placed inside the invisible world of computer viruses.
Zero Days VR was released to the public in June 2017, available both on the Oculus Store (Rift) and Steam (Rift, HTC Vive) for $5. Check out the trailer below for a quick look at Zero Days VR.