PXR 2022
2022 Schedule

Join us in AltSpaceVR at the PXR 2022 Main Tent to ring in another year of programming, research, and development in performance and XR! Create your own avatar and meet the other attendees of PXR 2022 for our Keynote Speaker and official conference launch to be followed by a IBPOC Fellow Presentation.

From the small city of Barstow CA, (yeah, the pitstop on the way to Vegas) Adrian Rashad Driscoll followed his dream of becoming a professional actor and moved to Los Angeles. Shortly after that, he was woken up. After 15 years of great weather and bad traffic, he now makes his living as a filmmaker and Immersive Media creative. He has had the privilege of working with large companies such as CBS, NBC, KTLA, Facebook, Microsoft, United Way, and more to push the boundaries of immersive media whilst producing great XR titles and experiences. Recently, Adrian has partnered with legend Gimel “Young Guru” Keaton to form the immersive media production house, Collimation.In addition, Adrian teaches in multiple education programs to bring more people into immersive media. He also teaches at the EAST school program on multiple XR projects that are more geared towards education and medical research. He takes pride in the fact that he is able to help implement this technology into a wide range of toolkits. His goal is to create opportunities for underserved communities and using said opportunities, to change their current trajectory. “French fries” are the key to his heart.

This workshop incorporates 3d animation, XR spatial music, digital mask/puppetry, and new experiments in creative coding interactions. This cutting edge of synthesis of XR and immersive design comes together to produce a WebXr “Ceremony” that reveals the hidden secrets, dangers and surprising authenticity of communication in virtual space. These interactions highlight the intimacy of overlapping, in the words of Jaron Lanier, an “inversion” of our sensory organs. The utopian ideal this piece attempts to prove us the “presence” of XR not available over Zoom calls. This XR immersive artwork strives to lay the groundwork for a more ethical version of the 3d internet, intended to transcend the polarization of our current social media hell-scape by employing embodied empathy

What happens at the crossroad of Opera, Augmented Reality and volumetric capture?

Our project aims at the creation of operas for extended reality, to be experienced in the domestic space. Members of two creative teams will present the tools they developed to facilitate the interdisciplinary co-creation process and discuss the impact of XR on operatic creation and storytelling in the virtual set of the prototype of one of our operas. Take this opportunity to dialogue with our creative and technical teams to learn about volumetric capture, the creation and filming of a live musical experience for augmented and virtual reality, and our research-creation process to democratize opera.

The setup of this performance enables us to keep researching new formats for bringing dance into virtual spaces and how this can contribute to a more embodied experience for VR users. During this session, participants will be invited to go through a series of activities around digital embodiment to explore the role of body language in our virtual communications, as well as the differences in expressivity between 3-point tracking with headset / controllers and full body tracking with mocap.

Join the PXR Team and Unwired Dance Theatre in a vast exploration of worlds in Mozilla Hubs!

Step behind the scenes of Ferryman Collective and Screaming Color’s latest show Gumball Dreams, where creator Screaming Color and producer/assistant director Stephen Butchko will host a guided tour of their award-winning production and reveal what it takes to bring this surreal and magical VR play to life.

We’ll bring tiny hand held dancers, portals to 360 concert videos, volumatric holograms, and pizza top pac man to your mobile device without any special equipment or app downloads. We’l both look at and break free of the walled garden of AR applications such as Spark and Lens Studio to discuss what the future of AR experiences could look like.

Maamawi: Together Through The Fire is a full-length Contemporary Indigenous dance performance and immersive experience conceived of by Anishinaabe choreographer, Olivia C. Davies and digital artist, Athomas Goldberg, with original music by Michael Red. In this performance, live audiences enter a fictional, futuristic world following the revelation of the Anishinaabe Seven Fire Prophecies, as shared by Anishinaabe Elder, Gloria May Eshkibok. Using real-time motion-capture techniques, the movements of the dancers, Sophie Dow and Daisy Thompson are accurately captured in real-time and used to drive animated avatars and visual imagery conceived of and designed by Anishinaabe artist, Joshua Mangeshig Pawis-Steckley, filling the 3D space of an online immersive multiplayer virtual reality environment that remote audiences can connect to and enter from around the world.

Digital Cauldron Collective presents their path of transformation and transcendence from physical barriers in gender, time and space through a multi format presentation of Orlando, on stage, in person, on screen and in the Virtual worlds of AltspaceVR through the Meta Quest.

Welcome to AbTeC Island; the official, virtual headquarters of Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace within the online, multimedia, 3D platform of Second Life! AbTeC’s team includes the renown digital artist, Skawennati (aka xox Voyager), and multidisciplinary artist, Swarm (aka MultiverseTraverser1), both of whom use Second Life as a pivotal tool. In this presentation, they will discuss their practices to showcase the depths of possibility offered by this user-generated, digital universe. Additional technical staff (all named Abbi) will be present to help you navigate, customize your look, and even teach the basics of building. Upon downloading the Second Life application and registering an account, we invite you to fly and/or teleport over to meet us and explore AbTeC Gallery’s exhibitions, sets made for various machinimas created by Skawennati (and co-produced by AbTeC), or even prototype your own endeavors in our studio/sandbox. We look forward to meeting you and your second-selves.

You Should Have Stayed Home is an auto-biographical re-telling of the frightening events that took place on the streets of Toronto during the 2010 G20 summit protests, which saw the largest mass arrest in Canadian history and resulted in a $14.6M class action lawsuit. We join playwright and performer Tommy Taylor as he recounts his journey attending his first ever protest in the “Free Speech Zone” at Queen’s Park before being swept up in a mass arrest and detained at the Eastern Avenue Detention Centre.

Cara has spent over a year working in “web3” -whatever that is. Working in motion capture performance since 2016, she followed through on the ultimate rabbit hole. Her interest in gaming performance lead to minor coding and XR development and most recently working with several NFT companies. She’ll share the lessons she’s learnt and what can be applied to you social presence as an actor online.

Winter Lights is a live family-friendly musical performed virtually and presented in AltSpaceVR. Through a botched science experiment and a bit of magic a fantastical holiday character appears to a science-minded teen and takes her, her younger brother and her robot friend on a wild, funny and entertaining journey to help her face her fears and gain the confidence she needs to create her dream invention. Through her eyes we see that true holiday magic comes from the love of friends and family. The presentation will include a performance from the show along with an opportunity for viewers to tour the worlds and hear about the development and how creating the show in VR allowed us to experiment and pre-visualize ideas that will ultimately end up in a physical stage production planned for December 2023.

Half of us will go to Half and Half, and Half of us will go to Gathertown for social and digital collective gaming!

You Should Have Stayed Home is an auto-biographical re-telling of the frightening events that took place on the streets of Toronto during the 2010 G20 summit protests, which saw the largest mass arrest in Canadian history and resulted in a $14.6M class action lawsuit. We join playwright and performer Tommy Taylor as he recounts his journey attending his first ever protest in the “Free Speech Zone” at Queen’s Park before being swept up in a mass arrest and detained at the Eastern Avenue Detention Centre.

After receiving a sold-out world premiere in the summer of 2021, The Magic Hour 360 made its VR debut as part of Boca del Lupo’s LivePerformance360. Guided through scenes by rich audio, video, lighting and stagecraft, The Magic Hour explores the routes of the imagination; the physical world meets the digital world, blending art, design, music and text in a multi-layered mixed-media feast for the senses. The destination of this curious and magical journey is a reflection on an unprecedented year – and a step forward into a brave new world. “A lovesong for the possibility of change in even the most static of situations”. Created and conceived by Electric Company’s Kim Collier and written by The Only Animal’s Kendra Fanconi. Based on the original production of The Magic Hour produced by ECT, Innovation Lighting and Presentation House Theatre in 2021.

Shocap Entertainment’s co-founder and Chief Technologist, Athomas Goldberg joins Les 7 Doigts co-founder and co-artistic director, Samuel Tetreault to take you behind the scenes of their Cross-Reality Live Musical Circus Production of “Carry Me Home – A Live & Virtual Journey into the Creative Mind of Singer-Songwriter, Didier Stowe”

The show, the result of 2.5 years of creative and technical collaboration between Shocap and Les 7 Doigts, premiered in June of 2022 at Animatrik Film Design Studios in Burnaby, BC, where audiences gathered in-person, online and in-game on an interactive adventure combining real-time motion capture and 3D rendering with live music and circus performance.

Get a glimpse into the creative and technical challenges in presenting a live XR performance with digital projection in front of a theatre audience, while simultaneously inviting remote audiences into the interactive digital world of the live performance through virtual reality headsets, gaming PCs, or web-connected desktops, laptops and mobile devices.

The PXBar is open! Come have a drink at the PXBar, served to you by Single Thread Theatre artistic director Liam Karry. You never know who might stop by!

Ambiscapes presents: Holographic VR concerts in AltspaceVR as a part of the PXR 2022 Experience series. Audiences will get to enjoy a live electronic-looping music performance by Joshua Lucas, where he will debut his mixed reality Metaverse concerts for the first time. This series marks the culmination of over a year of experimentation and development to make this dream a reality. Thanks to the special support and collaboration of open hearted developers, the ability to chroma-key livestream video footage within AltspaceVR directly without the edges of a video screen is now possible. This prototype exploration will give audiences the illusion of seeing a real life music performance inside of a VR platform. Ambiscapes; a Web3 project that advocates for the adoption of interoperable music tools across all XR and Metaverse platforms is beyond excited to partner with PXR 2022 to present these findings and showcase them for the world stage.

In North America alone we are just beginning to realize that we are in the midst’s of a PTSD epidemic that shows no signs of slowing. An estimated 1 in 8 North Americans are suffering from PTSD or C-PTSD (Bessel van der Kolk) and that number only gets higher when your audience is mainly Indigenous. It is crucial then that as UX designers we, especially those of us working in live VR, are incorporating a trauma-informed methodology into our user experience design.

This presentation will introduce the concept of trauma-informed UX design (or TID) specifically in the context of VR and XR theatre development, however the practice itself is not confined to any one medium. The purpose of this presentation is to give participants the tools they need to begin developing their own TID practice.

From a spark deep within the primordial void of space, comes the source of all creation. Shockwaves of explosions, echoes of distant supernovae and glowing shimmers of dimensions beyond our reach offer audiences a glimpse at the expanse of our galaxy and universe. Cosmia | Journey Of A Star is a guided sound and art installation that explores using spatial audio to tell the story of star soul from birth to death. It begins in complete darkness, and audiences are guided to explore the piece following only the sound cues and distant visuals as prompts. The goal of this work is to see how intuitive storytelling can be conveyed through audio in XR and to push the boundaries of what’s possible for sound installation world building in AltspaceVR. Joshua Lucas hopes this piece takes his design work a step forward by discovering ways to make VR experiences more approachable and accessible.

THE CALLING, an immersive musical experience, transports you back to Memphis’ famed Beale Street on March 28, 1968 — the date of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s final march. Beginning in a Beale Street blues club in present day, users witness some of the scenes, prompted by historical photos positioned around the club, that lead to the sanitation worker strike in 1968. With the guidance of a mysterious Shoeshine Man you march with Dr. King and the thousands who journeyed to Memphis in support of the 1300 workers, striking for higher wages and better working conditions. Along the way you discover The Calling, an ancestral power to change the world resonating inside every person. This is a story about the audacity of hope, the challenges we overcome, and the choices we can make along the way.

Maamawi: Together Through The Fire is a full-length Contemporary Indigenous dance performance and immersive experience conceived of by Anishinaabe choreographer, Olivia C. Davies and digital artist, Athomas Goldberg, with original music by Michael Red. In this performance, live audiences enter a fictional, futuristic world following the revelation of the Anishinaabe Seven Fire Prophecies, as shared by Anishinaabe Elder, Gloria May Eshkibok. Using real-time motion-capture techniques, the movements of the dancers, Sophie Dow and Daisy Thompson are accurately captured in real-time and used to drive animated avatars and visual imagery conceived of and designed by Anishinaabe artist, Joshua Mangeshig Pawis-Steckley, filling the 3D space of an online immersive multiplayer virtual reality environment that remote audiences can connect to and enter from around the world.

Bringing audiences together in social VR for an interactive, collective experience is an intricate puzzle that combines story, worldbuiding and interaction strategy. During this hour-long workshop, participants will meet in AltSpace VR to engage in activities related to interactive narratives, improvisation, and immersive spaces. Exploring Double Eye Studios’ virtual theatre space, the group will work as a collective whole, as well as be divided into mini groups for intimate collaboration. Online attendees will be able to watch, and will be given their own interactive assignment.

I am a Child of… is a collaboration between Allen Kaeja of Kaeja d’Dance and Bruce Barton of Vertical City in which Toasterlab was engaged to created an interactive augmented reality experience for mobile devices in the theatre to provide unique personalized experiences for the audience with augmented reality and live streaming video. This multimedia production features physical investigations of childhood memories, resulting in unflinchingly honest stories of resilience. I am the Child of… is ever-changing, with structured moments interlaced with a responsive immediacy of movement, creating an unpredictable experience within every performance. It’s a show where mobile devices are welcome and part of the viewing experience. Join us to to discuss how the project came together, simple ways to get AR projects rolling, the challenges of delivering a synchronous WebXR experience to 300 people in a theatre, and how to take home your own tiny dancer.

The Student XRtist Link-Up is in its second year, bringing together students of game design and performing arts across Canada to imagine new virtual reality experiences. Join students from Lethbridge College, Queen’s University, York University, and University of Victoria as they showcase their innovative creations.

Join us to say goodbye to our largest and most ambitious Conference yet!