Since May 2014, Kent Bye has published over 1000 Voices of VR podcast interviews featuring the pioneering artists, storytellers, and technologists driving the resurgence of virtual & augmented reality. He's an oral historian, experiential journalist, & aspiring philosopher, helping to define the patterns of immersive storytelling, experiential design, ethical frameworks, & the ultimate potential of XR.
https://voicesofvr.com
#1143: VRChat World Builder Fins and his 3 Experiences in Venice Immersive 2022: “Treasure Heist,” “Magic Heist,” and “District Roboto”
VRChat world builder Fins had 3 experiences in Venice Immersive 2022 with one in competition (Treasure Heist), and two in the Worlds Gallery (Magic Heist and District Roboto). Fins comes from an illustration and concept artist background, and so he’s been able to be quite prolific in make a variety of different types of worlds with each one doing different types of experimentations with including narrative. He said that he was able to put together Treasure Heist within just a couple of months, which is pretty incredible compared to the timelines of other projects take many times longer than that.
I get the story of Fins’ journey into VR, and then we walk through the progressive development of his worlds starting with Shark‘s Fin Cafe, Deep Blue, Pandora Night, Mine Heist, Magic Heist, District Roboto, & Aquarius.
Fins wasn’t able to complete all of Treasure Heist in time for Venice Immersive, and so he’s currently trying to wrap it up in time for the Raindance competition starting at the end of October. One of the challenges he faced was trying to balance the difficulty of the puzzles across two radically different demographics: the core VRChat/gamer community who usually think his puzzles are too easy vs the the more passive film festival attendees who usually think some of his puzzles are too difficult.
Fins also shared some of his inspirations of Avatar and Stray, and I get the sense that he’s slowly building up to a really epic narrative adventure world in the style of Pandora and Avatar. You can keep an eye on Fins latest worlds on social media via @VRCFins.