It Can Wait VR places viewers at the center of a dramatic theatrical production about the causes, effects, and victims of distracted driving. Visually inspired by the powerful vernacular of black box theater, the originally scripted experience plays out on a virtual stage – evolving into an otherworldly space in which time is stretched and gravity is suspended. It Can Wait VR is a controller-enabled 8-minute experience developed in Unreal for the Oculus.
Leveraging VR’s physical boundlessness and its transportive power allowed us to visualize data and proof points in an innovative way. This gives viewers a fresh and compelling perspective on a subject whose statistics are staggering – often heard of, but difficult to grasp in the real world.
But changing people’s behaviors cannot only rely on innovations in data visualization. If one is to speak to VR’s power as a tool for empathy, one has to consider the human element and the power of combining the quantitative and qualitative. For our piece, this meant including controller-enabled choices, and real people and their real stories. Following an extensive casting process, we selected 8 people who ultimately provided harrowing and raw testimonials, representing a range of perspectives on the subject matter. Their testimonies were volumetrically captured at Microsoft’s Mixed Reality Capture Studios so as to ensure that the full power of their stories and personas came through in a dimensional way in VR.
Further extending the relationship between the physical and virtual worlds, we designed the installation for the experience, as a physical manifestation of the data left behind by lives lost. The experience is being taken on a nationwide tour of the USA in 2018 and will be available on app stores by the end of the year.
Read more at AT&T It Can Wait VR.
