they were exactly the same. It was the first event to be broadcast on live TV, which meant there were hours and hours of footage to work through. We break the frame of the archive and reproject the images onto digital twins of the historical locations. Within the headset, you experience these pictures in a new spatial way: history becomes a place you can visit. The story is narrated by those who experienced it, so the witnesses, the detectives, journalists and relatives. You connect with those people and enter their memories of that day. A lot of them have passed away since the documentary was made, so it was important we captured their testimonies and made them available for future generations in a very vivid way. What does the future hold for the immersive tech space, in the context of broadcast and film? As a company creating immersive entertainment, we believe the future of entertainment is spatial. We’re living in a spatial world already, everything around us being 3D, not flat. It doesn’t really make sense that we are watching a flat, limited screen. I think it’s important to mention that I don’t feel like XR is going to replace other media. We still go to the cinema despite having TVs at home. We still listen to podcasts and read articles. The fact we are creating new things with new technologies doesn’t mean we are going to erase other media forms. I think XR will coexist with other kinds of media. There’s also still a hardware issue because we need those headsets to be cheaper and lighter and able to integrate more seamlessly into our daily lives. I think a spatial future isn’t something that’s necessarily bad or scary. We are all glued to our phones and computers all day long as it is – and although headsets are still technology, they won’t ever replace real life. What we are trying to do is offer people things they couldn’t do in their normal lives, to go back in time to inaccessible places and meet extraordinary people. The goal is not to replace reality, but to make it better.
something we’ve been anticipating for a long time, because it targets the kind of audience that we’re trying to hit. It really aligns with our goals – as a company that’s pushing for mainstream topics in VR – and technologically we have seen it’s a very powerful tool. Still, the price tag is huge and it will take time to reach larger regions, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction. Could you talk to us about JFK Memento and how that came about? JFK Memento was the big brother of the D-Day project, produced on Meta Quest. It’s a 40-minute, fully interactive experience. You can walk inside rooms rather than being stuck in a 360 sphere. This was an interesting project because it basically does the same thing we did for D-Day, except on a larger scale. It takes you back to November 1963 in the hours following the assassination of President Kennedy. To recreate those events and those hours, we created digital twins of the historic locations as they were in 1963, using archives and resources to make sure
BACK IN TIME (Top left) An interview with Mary Ann Moorman, who witnessed JFK’s assassination; (above) a still from the JFK Memento doc
A NEW PERSPECTIVE (Left and right) The mixed-reality experience of D-Day using images from the time, enhanced by AI-improved image quality
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