2016 was the year that VR got real at Sundance. At last year's festival, Amazon didn't buy any films. This year, they bought six. And Netflix -- which last year bought just one doc -- had their checkbook out and bought six titles.
If there was any doubt that VR had the attention of the creative community, this year's Sundance Festival should put that to rest. The New Frontier program this year offered an extraordinary selection of VR works from some of the most adventurous and prolific makers in the business.
"Sundance as a festival has been growing in different ways to make our program more accessible," said Shari Frilet told WIRED magazine. Frilet heads up the New Frontier segment at Sundance. "So this is a natural extension of what we've been doing all along to try to give access to people outside of Park City."
The New Frontier program is known for embracing new forms of storytelling that push the boundaries of conventional film.
Until just recently, VR was something experienced in labs or galleries, but for the public, it was more of a buzz world than a real experience. Sundance's director John Cooper, told WIRED he was surprised "how many people I talk to who have never tried it."
This year represents a change in both content and delivery of VR.
Facebook purchase and release of Occulus Rift, Samsung's Gear, Google's Cardboard (and the partnership that dropped 1.1 million VR viewers on NYTimes Sunday readers near the end of December) have all together added up to 2016 rapidly being labeled "the year VR arrived."
Sundance has even made a number of it's Festival offerings available online, for owners of VR devices. The only disappointment is that the 'official' Sundance VR app is only available on the Google Play store, and only for android. That may explain why Apple CEO Tim Cook proclaimed VR "cool" and has a secret skunk works working hard to catch up.
So we're still on the cutting edge, but with Virtual Reality now on the horizon.
Here's list of the 30 projects presented at New Frontier this year:
- #100humans
- 6x9: An Immersive Experience of Solitary Confinement
- Across the Line
- A History of Cuban Dance
- Cardboard Crash
- Click Effect
- Collisions
- Condition One
- Defrost
- fabulous wonder.land
- Hard World for Small Things
- Irrational Exuberance
- Job Simulator
- Kiya
- Nomads: Maasai
- Nomads: Sea Gypsies
- Notes on Blindness - Into Darkness
- Perspective, Chapter 2: The Misdemeanor
- Sequenced
- Sisters: A Mobile VR Ghost Story
- Sonar
- Stonemilker
- Surge
- The Abbot's Book
- theBlu: Encounter
- The Martian VR Experience (Ridley Scott and Robert Stromberg)
- The Rose and I
- The Unknown Photographer
- Viens! (Come!)
- Waves (Reggie Watts outrageous comedy)
- Waves of Grace