Google Spotlight Stories: Pearl on Steam
The first thing I needed to do to experience this short was to sit down in a chair. This was the only interaction in this VR experience, but it immediately brought me into the story and started the immersive experience - by sitting down in the physical world, I also sat down in the passenger seat in a seemly abandoned car in the virtual world. A girl was approaching me and she looked like she was looking for something. I started to wonder: who is she? what is she looking for? is she also curious about this abandoned car? Before I could stop questioning, a series of flashback began to continuously “happen” around me. The whole duration of this short was less than 10 minutes, however, as someone who sat right next to the driver, I witnessed a story and relationship between a father, a daughter and her friends. The car was a symbol of love and memories that was passed on through generations and also passed to me through the VR lens.
However, although the story itself was immersive and impressive, I do have few things I noticed in this VR experience that I would like to mention. First of all, on the seat where I was sitting in the car, there were objects like guitar, food, bags which made me feel like I was not actually sitting there as someone who had a physical body. It was probably the creator's intention to not showing the player's torso and limbs because in this story the player did not actually "exist" as a character but only acted like a bystander or like a "ghost". Yet every time I looked down and see there were objects in the position where my body should be, I got pulled out from the immersive feel a little bit. Second, I loved the low poly aesthetics, the color choices and the music of this project very much, but at some point in this experience there were just too much happening in a pretty fast pace and I felt overwhelmed that I didn't know where should I look at. And I missed some information that happened around me made me want to go back and look at everything that had occurred. Yet I guess that is also how our real world works and I can't either go back in time or absorb all the information, right?
Overall I was really impressed by this VR experience and immersed into a touching story in such short amount of time. It also reminds me of another interactive VR storytelling project called The Book of Distance that I would recommend everyone to try it.
This is a piece of artwork I saw in Berlin. I don't remember neither the artist's name nor the museum's name, but this painting keeps evoking my emotions like sadness, desperation, sympathy and loved every time I looked at it. Without using my senses of hearing, smelling, tasting and touching, I can always imagine different stories from this drawing by using my ability to see those charcoal lines on a piece of paper. Sometimes I could see the separation between a mother and her children; sometimes I could see the death of the babies; and sometimes I see the reunion of the family... The ability of me imagining stories through my eyes is why I am always grateful for having my vision and grateful for the presence of the visual arts. And I am always astonished by how a simple drawing like this piece can be so powerful and influence people through our sense of sight.
