News & Updates
We are so honored that #ZeroDaysVR is at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, 23-26 January 2018, and will be presented to World Leader’s as part of the Global Center for Cyber Security. Zero Days VR's exhibit is located on the Gallery on Level 0 of the Congress Centre.
We have exciting news! Zero Days VR is launches today on Steam in time for the holidays!
I first became aware of Scatter's work at the Tribeca Film Festival Interactive Vrcade in April, where they presented an astonishing location based work, Backout. Wearing a Vive headset and using its room scale roaming feature you can move around a real subway car. When you reach out for a pole you see in the digital world, you touch a real pole. It's a very cool, convincing illusion.
In today’s post, we take you behind the scenes of Zero Days VR, the latest project from Scatter, now available on Rift and Gear VR.
An official selection of the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, this immersive VR short film takes you inside the world of the feature-length documentary Zero Days to experience the high-stakes reality of cyber warfare at human scale. Scatter Co-Founder & CreativeDirector Yasmin Elayat gives us the inside scoop on the goal behind Zero Days VR, volumetric filmmaking, and episodic VR content.
Zero Days VR is one of the most powerful VR documentaries that I’ve seen so far since it uses the unique affordances of VR to visualize what’s at stake for weaponizing security vulnerabilities, and it uses these volumetric affordances to innovate what’s possible in immersive storytelling.
Stuxnet’s discovery, and the political intrigue surrounding it, is the focus of the VR film, which was created by the immersive media studio Scatter and has now won several awards. Scatter collaborated with Gibney on the documentary when he used the studio’s 3D scanning tool, DepthKit, to create an amalgamated character representing several NSA informants who spoke to the filmmaker. And since the actress playing the NSA informant had already been filmed in 3D, the studio decided to translate the documentary into virtual reality, with Gibney’s blessing and journalistic oversight.
We are excited to announce that Scatter’s first Cinematic VR title, Zero Days VR, is available on the Oculus platform for Rift and Samsung Gear VR for free for the first month!
I’m not sure what I was expecting to experience when I sat down to try Zero Days VR in Sundance’s VR Palace, but when I took the Oculus off, my mind was spinning. And not just because I’d been through a crash course in cyberwarfare and military history; I had that rare feeling when I go through a VR experience and think, “This changes things.”
I'm floating in cyberspace, and it's beautiful. A tunnel of sleek metallic tubes telescopes before me, criss-crossing into TRON-like circuit board cities that make it clear that I'm inside of a computer. I'm surrounded by information: infographics pulsing red and blue below me, elongated frames of news footage zooming past my eyes, their soundbites echoing in my ears—were I not wearing a virtual reality headset I'd be sure I could reach out and touch data itself. As Zero Days VR progresses, the companion piece to Alex Gibney's documenary about the Stuxnet super virus makes it clear that the serene world I'm drifting through is the battleground for the 21st century, and I'm on the front lines.