The Tribeca Film Festival, which opened on Wednesday, features the largest number of VR projects that its ever had in its Immersive Program.
“We have 33 [projects], two more than we’ve ever had, and that was not intentional. I was going for less,” Loren Hammonds, one of the curators of the festival’s Immersive program, said in an interview this month. “But there’s so much good work.”
While there is good work this year, that has not always been the case. VR has evolved into a staple attraction at major conventions over the last five years. Engineers at tech-savvy companies Sony, HTC, Samsung, Google, and Facebook-owned Oculus have been tasked to build head-mounted devices. VR is more of a spotty kind of entertainment, excluding video games where virtual technology has received mixed reviews. Most of the impressive storytelling VR content has been placed in museums and film festivals.