Yesterday I went to the Next Reality Festival in Hamburg, Germany, for the first time. I want to tell you something about my experience and, in particular, I want to spend a few words about this event, two nice experiences I tried (Peak Rhythm and Unhome), and also… a nice moment I had!
[Disclaimer: The organizers of Next Reality Festival paid for my trip and accommodation for two nights in Hamburg to let me enjoy the event. No other monetary transaction was involved. I also had no obligation to write any content in exchange for the paid trip, so I’m doing this just because I want to.]
Next Reality Festival
Next Reality Festival is an event about immersive realities happening in Hamburg, Germany. I’ve been told this year it is in its second edition. The organizers have made other kinds of initiatives in Hamburg for a long time, but the festival is kinda a new one. To be honest, I had never heard of it before I was contacted by the organizers.
The event has both a few stages and an expo area. Since it is new, it is rather small compared with established events like AWE. But the lineup of speakers is a good one, though, and while networking, I was able to meet many professional friends from the German VR community. The Achilles’ heel is probably the expo area, which doesn’t feature many experiences and has no big names showcasing their hardware.
There are a couple of weird things that are worth mentioning. One is that the event expands vertically, with some initiatives happening at the ground floor, others at the 5th floor, and others at the 7th floor. It is the first time that I have to move between the different parts of a VR event on an elevator (and no, I’m not taking the stairs to do 7 floors!).
The other is that the event at the moment attracts mostly German people. At the VIP dinner the day before the event started, I was the only non-German guy. I felt a bit… different. I tried to make friends by saying a few German expressions that I know, like “eins zwei polizei”, “kartoffeln”, or “Borussia Dortmund”, but I did not have great results. Luckily, people were very kind to switch to English just for me, though. At least during the main event, there were various other foreigners: for instance, Andy Fidel was doing one of the keynotes. But Germans in general were the majority.
Most of the event was well organized: I had precise information about everything before going there, talks were on time, bathrooms were clean, there were always snacks to eat, etc (I mean, they’re Germans, of course they’re well organized… in Italy, when we do an event, after 30 minutes we are already 40 minutes late). I had a pretty good time: the event was enjoyable, the award ceremony was cool (more on this later), and during the networking parties, I met a few interesting people, even from relevant companies. So even if the event was small, I found some value by coming here. If you are focused on the German or surrounding markets, you should consider going.
The only big problem is that during the party yesterday night, the organizers ordered some Hawaiian pizza with pineapple on top. And some people even ate it. It’s a pity there is no death penalty in Germany anymore…
Peak Rhythm
One of the most interesting hands-on experiences I had in the small expo was with Peak Rhythm, an indie game that is a bit of a mix between Beat Saber and The Climb.
In the game, you are in front of a wall, and you have to jump on it and manage to stay attached to it by using some circular handles (the ones used in climbing) that appear around you: if they are purple, you have to grab them with the left hand, and if they are green, with the right hand. So you keep moving around the wall, suspended in the air, by grabbing these handles: every handle disappears after a while, so you have to react pretty quickly and grab the next one while you are still hanging on the current one, otherwise you fall down. After a while that I was performing this movement, a variation of the handles appeared, and I had to not only grab the handle with the right hand, but I also had to apply a quick twist of my hand at the right timing: only after I performed the twist, I unlocked the next handle to grab.
Notice that both grabbing and twisting have to be made at the right time to maximize the score, because theoretically you should move from one handle to the next following the rhythm of the music.
As you can see from the above image, the graphic style was minimalistic with fluo colors. I think it looked pretty well in its simplicity. Anyway, since you spend most of your time just looking at a wall, it would make no sense to make a super-detailed graphic for everything.
Even if I could just try an endless level, the game was enjoyable to me. It was the first time trying rhythm+color mechanics together with climbing ones, and I think this mix works well. It requires concentration and coordination to play it well. Anyway, since I tried only one tutorial endless level for 10 minutes, I can’t talk about the game’s long-term playability. But for sure, it is a promising title.
Peak Rythm should go into closed alpha at the end of this month and launch next year. The game won an XRIAA award at the Next Reality event.
Unhome
Another cool experience that I tried and that won an XRIAA award at the end of the day was Unhome. Unhome is a storytelling experience developed by Go Banyo (an association that offers showers to homeless people) with Curious Company (a software development studio). As you can imagine from the name of the experience and the expertise of Go Banyo, this piece is about homeless people.
Go Banyo took 5 years to build this experience, with most of the time perfecting the script by speaking with the homeless people who visited their public showers. The experience has been built in Unreal Engine by Curious Company.
Unhome is still only in the German language, but I decided to try it anyway. I didn’t understand all the writing and the dialogue, but given that the experience is intuitive and that I know a few words in German, I managed to get a grasp of the most important things about it. The team told me that if they manage to find some budget (they’re open to donations by the way), they would like to have an English version, too.
Without spoiling everything of the experience (but I have to make some important spoilers, sorry), Unhome is about a person who at a certain point loses a job, can’t find a new one, and so after various months loses his home. Without money and a house, the only thing you can do is pack your few remaining things and live on the streets. The experience lets you then live some separate moments of the life of a homeless person, like going with your dog on a metro and looking for food, or staying sleeping outside at night, and having to face some drunk youngsters who start mocking you. Depending on some choices you make, sometimes explicitly, and other times by just taking actions in the game, you will end up differently. In my case, my problems started when I cut myself with some broken glass while looking for food in the trash, and due to my other actions, I ended up dying of infection during the Winter, cold and alone. There are some other better endings, I have been told, though.
Unhome has been made with good production quality. It is not an AAA piece, but clearly an indie product with a limited budget, and it’s made quite well. The various scenes through which you live the life of a homeless person are pretty short and with very simple interactions (e.g., touch, grab). It is very verbose, with the main protagonist making a lot of internal monologues (which were all in German, so not very interesting to me). White-on-black writings tell you about the story that unfolds, and there are a lot of them, too. So, probably verbosity was the thing I enjoyed the least. It was not so bad to ruin the experience, though: it is just that I would suggest the team reduce it a bit.
What I think Unhome excels at is setting the mood. The experience puts you in the shoes of a normal person who becomes homeless, to make you understand that it may happen to all of us. The first scene where I transitioned from being in a home to being in the street begging was quite powerful. And the fact is that you have this sense that you’ve no way to escape from your destiny: once you’re homeless, you just try to survive, and there’s nothing else you can do, and you are doomed to live a miserable life, full of sad or dangerous moments. The only pleasure you may have from all of this is watching a picture of some relatives, or petting your dog (you can actually do it; it is very cute).
And your life may end rather soon for many reasons: you get a disease, you die from the excessive cold, and so on. In its simplicity, it is a very crude experience. And that’s why I think it is very good: if its purpose is to sensitize people about the life of homeless people, it manages to fulfill its purpose very well. Before entering the experience, I was making various jokes about the fact that I should try the experience because, doing VR in this difficult market, I may get homeless pretty soon. But after trying the experience, I lost the willingness to make jokes for a few minutes. I found it powerful.
Unhome is free on the Quest Store if you want to play it. But I find it weird that it is not going around in festivals like Venice or Sundance, because it could deserve it.
My XRIAA Award
My highlight of the day was the free food in the speakers’ room. But my second highlight of the day was getting an XRIAA award myself for my work in promoting XR and relentlessly informing the XR community for 9 years on this blog with articles like this one. It has been pretty moving to hear the one-minute speech where the presenters were saying the reasons for giving me the award.
I’m very happy about this recognition, and I want to thank you all for the support over these years. Without many of you helping me and telling me about how my work was being useful to you, I would probably have stopped many years ago. This award is also yours, not only mine. Thank you! And thanks also to the Next Reality organizers for choosing me for this recognition!
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