Filmmaker Victoria Bousis on Embracing Apple’s Vision Pro and VR Storytelling to Create Immersive Experiences

Filmmaker Victoria Bousis has partnered with Unique Network to enhance the immersive film experience of her award-winning film “Stay Alive, My Son.”

Inspired by true events and based on the memoirs of Pin Yathay, “Tu Vivra, Mon Fils” (“Stay Alive, My Son”), Bousis says she wanted to “leverage technology to break the rules of traditional storytelling and educating audiences about Cambodia’s history.”

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The film, which will screen at Siggraph in August and is currently on the festival circuit, uses augmented reality and a virtual world that audiences experience through a VR headset.

Bousis, PGA Innovation Award winner, who founded UME, a creative and technology-based game company to pioneer the future of storytelling across all mediums and platforms for film, series, and VR/AR experiences made in the Unreal Game Engine, says it’s a unique way to build and create for the future. “Immersive storytelling invokes deeper physiological and neurological impact because it heightens your senses and provokes complex emotions of joy, grief, guilt and empowerment to inspire change, less able via traditional mediums. By interacting with an elderly digital representation of Yathay today, I sought to humanize the experience and deepen the connection to the Player before we became him.”

But why VR instead of traditional storytelling?

Bousis explains the way audiences consume content has changed. With the launch of Apple’s Vision Pro which uses eye movements and hand movements for navigation — with no external controllers — and also employs voice input, Bousis says it’s a way to bring powerful and immersive stories back to audiences and into homes.

She says, “This groundbreaking headset epitomizes the very purpose of storytelling: to ignite our senses, awaken our emotions, and re-engage us beyond story watching, into story living.”

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