As part of the Venice International Film Festival, Venice VR Expanded takes place on the fictional island of Lazzaretto Vecchio, where, in previous years the festival has be been hosted in reality. I accessed the festival on a Quest headset through VRChat - a new platform to me - and after some initial onboarding and haphazard avatar creation I was ready to make my way into the festival. The opening world included trying on several venetian masks in front of a mirror and gondola ride to the island that proved to be a nice touch. On arrival at the island the festival was housed in an open roofed building with the film listing on the main wall and doors to each experience accessed by travelling down the red carpet. This made for an interesting foyer but given the odd teleportation mechanic used in VRChat (point then wait for you avatar to travel to the end before letting go of the grip on the controller to move) made it time consuming to get to the ‘films’ at the far end of the building and upon exiting each film the experience restarted at the entrance to the building that I found both frustrating and detracting from the films themselves. It was also disappointingly that only the 3DOF experiences could be experienced fully (and I’d already seen First Step and Home at Tribeca) whereas the 6DOF experiences were only available as previews on the Oculus Quest. I was directed to VRChat on the PC desktop in Terrain however this failed to launch for me. I have included some screen shots below of my Venice VR Expanded experience and I hope that I will be able to see some of the 6DOF experiences at another time.
