 Please welcome Winslow and Milica from New Reality Company. Such a warm intro, I appreciate it. Here we go. Hi, everyone. So we can, yeah, this is good. Yeah, I guess delaying his dinner was the best thing we could have done. So we are a New Reality Company and my name is Milica. And my name is Winslow. Apologies for a little bit of a horse voice. I might have done a little too much karaoke last night, but bear with me. So we are an actual virtual reality company, a studio base, both in New York here at RGA, if you guys are familiar. And also if you find us afterwards, we'd love to be able to show you at RGA right now. We have tree setup, which we're also going to be talking about. But we are a virtual reality and augmented reality company specializing in social and environmental impact. And we are also, we are bi-coastals. So our second office is based in LA where I am. And it's based actually in Technicolor Experience Center. So a little bit about me. There's some MKG people in the house. Shout out to them. I started out as a creative technologist. There we go. A creative technologist doing a lot of immersive installations. Some of them you can see at the bottom. We worked on some projects for TED with Delta. And also it was a producer, an interactive producer at the Barbarian Group. But really, I was always the kid in my family who knew how to change the clock on the VCR. I was always interested in how to tell different stories. We started out both as editors, but then we realized we wanted to tell our own stories. But with traditional linear media, it's not always a conversation. So with interactive art, there's the opportunity to bring the audience into that world, to have a conversation with them, for them to feel like the protagonist, the editor, the camera person, and really feel like they're part of it. So for us, that was really important to be able to put that in our work and also bring our experience from working in the experiential ad space to interactive storytelling. And my background comes, I started in film as an editor, then transition, interacting, and I worked for nine years. I lived here, actually, in New York for 10 years and worked, out of those 10 years, worked with Marina Abramovich for nine years, preparing her performance, the artist is present in MoMA for four years. So, and then worked on a lot of social issue documentaries as well. But Winston and I have always been saying in those 10 years that we were friends, that we need to start our, you know, to start doing our own thing. And that happened with our first project. We actually, the first project was called Giant. And we, this was our first office, maybe some of you are familiar, this is a new museum, and then next to it is a new ink, which is a new museum incubator. That is for artists who work in intersection of art and technology. We didn't have, you know, we quit our jobs, so we didn't have any money. We didn't have a team, it's just two of us in this big, big passion to do something meaningful and to tell meaningful stories. So, we got this part-time desk here in New York, and then we assembled a team of people for this project called Giant. And Giant actually draws inspiration from me growing up in Serbia. I grew up in my whole, let's say, from 8 to 18, our country was struck by some kind of war. So, I lived through the bombing, and I went to, and because we all know that these situations are still happening all across the globe, I wanted to speak about that. But the way we learn about war is usually through media, and we understand political side of the war. We understand statistics behind the war, but what we don't understand, because maybe we were not inside the conflict zone, we don't understand those feelings that mainly innocent families who are struck inside these conflicts and who pay with their lives, what do they actually go through? So, that's why, that's how Giant was born. And so, what we decided is to place you inside a basement with this family to use virtual reality so you can be there. And this family has a young daughter, and it is an American family, and this is happening in the future, and we don't even say which war, because it really doesn't matter. We just went to focus on the human aspect of the war. So, in this situation, they want to protect this six-year-old daughter, and they tell her all these loud noises that you hear, that they're actually bombs, are friendly footsteps of a giant who is coming towards their building and wants to play with a girl. So, this is a story, and you're there with them, and we have actually a chair that is vibrating as you're watching the experience, so you can feel it even in your own body how it feels. And as storytellers, it was important to make you feel like you were there, as Militz was saying. So, this is actually one of the first projects where we're compositing volumetric video inside a video game engine. The same video game engine that's used to create games like Fortnite, you know, first person or sort of battle royale shooters, but we know that this is, you know, it's a new canvas for self-expression, for telling really new stories, and, you know, there's a huge opportunity to be able to evoke empathy when it comes to this. So, we shot the actors on a green screen stage, probably only 20 blocks from here in Chelsea, and as you can also see, we're using a, this is the volumetric capture, as you can see on the left, that's the color information, and then we married that with the depth data, using a Kinect 2, which is just, you know, something that you do dance video games on your Xbox, but we can, you know, reuse this technology to do really interesting things. So that sense of, when they put them together, you feel like you're in the basement with this family, and then you can start feeling what it might be like to be there. And also, if you want to talk. Yeah, we kind of approach, we are as not just eyes and ears, you know, but also as a physical installation. So we decided to build this room that is dark, that resembles the darkness of that claustrophobic feeling of that basement with the dim light bulb, and position these vibrating stools there. So that even when you, before you enter the headset, you enter this room and you already, like, you know, started experiencing something. And I think also as Militia was mentioning, you know, it's really important how we begin telling the story, it begins before they put the headset on. I think probably everyone here has been to the Javits Center, and there's some like VR experiences that you might do there where they put you in a folding chair, there's bright lights, they put a headset on you, and as soon as they take it off, it's a very jarring feeling, because in an experience, you feel like you're transported somewhere, and it's almost like waking somebody up from a dream. So you want to be able to off-board them as well, be able to let them sit with the emotional feelings that they're going through, because it might be something very new and profound for them. So the project premiered at Sundance, was shown at Cannesville Festival, and went all across the globe, and we were traveling with it, but when the year ended, we realized we need to embark on the next project. So Giant speaks about how we as humans destroy each other, but we don't stop there. We also destroy nature, so we decided to present that topic, but in a personal way. So in this experience, actually, we worked with the Rainforest Alliance, which is NGO, and they were advising us with their biologists and scientists how to really accurately depict what is going on, and we represented the Peruvian rainforest, but this is very common all across the world. And according to the latest UN reports, we are destroying this planet so fast that we really have a decade at this point to wake up and start doing it properly. So for us, this is very urgent to actually transport you in a body of a tree right now. So you start this experience underground. When you look at your body, you are a seed, and then you start growing in the experience. You pierce through the ground, and all of a sudden when you start getting trunk and branches, so you're in a full control of a tree. You're having fun, you're enjoying the nature until humans come to the rainforest, and that's how you witness firsthand what do we do to the rainforest all across the globe in this very moment. And we can show you a trailer, I think, oops. What's that play? I don't know if it's on a plate or I guess. Oh, we can describe what happened. It's what you just saw, but in video form. Yeah. And it's just a teaser. It's only a minute and a half, so just to wet the appetite, but... In this experience, we worked with two ad agencies, actually Hereby Dragons, or there is another arm of Smuggler and Droga Five. So actually Droga Five helped us with design, as you can see. So what happens at the end of the experience? Because we end on a very devastating note, on a very hopeless note, but that's not our goal. Our goal was just to inform you what's happening on an emotional level, but when you get out, we actually give you a gift. We give you a gift of a seed that you just embodied. It's a Keppok tree. It's a rainforest tree. With a message inside this envelope saying, take this seed as a reminder to keep our forest standing, because there is still time and something we can all do about this topic. And so, you know, as a team, there's just the two of us as the core creative team, but then we have about four other people that we work with on both coasts, but we're very collaborative in nature. We worked with four different VFX and AAA game studio companies. The one on the lower right needs a rebrand if anybody here wants to help them out with that. I'm not sure if that's a shiny potato or what it is, but it's a company called Dekochon that was actually helped us with the original version. They're a bunch of... They're really talented Dutch video game experts and also milk visual effects that did... They won an Academy Award for Ex Machina. They never really worked in VR, at least not in the way that we were doing it, so for them it was a really interesting opportunity. Converge in LA, Rewind in the UK as well. With these projects, because, you know, there isn't really that much immersive storytelling out there, especially things that aren't directly related to a brand, so there's a really interesting area to play in right now. And for us it was a journey where we created the first version in the prototype in three weeks and then we found out we got into Sundance and then we only had two months to be able to create that version. So, and that was during Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's, which was kind of crazy. But, you know, we really... We were fortunate enough also to get sponsorship from all the different pieces that made it up. The hardware, the software, the headset manufacturer. These were our three sort of, our marquee sponsors that really helped us throughout the way. And we also helped them. They were using mostly marketing budgets to be able to fund this. For them, there was a lot of learnings in this space because it's still so new. But, you know, from what started out as three companies, eventually it was 36 different companies helped us on this project. And it's still evolving. We're still showing Tree as we were saying, you know, all over the world and we're really interested in how can we take the learnings from that into our next projects. And this is the setup that we had at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2017. It's really important to consider the space, as I was mentioning before. You know, consider the user, if you will. But as some people say, the only people that refer to users are people who work in software or drug dealers. So, we prefer to say participant if we can. It's really important to consider them, you know, what is their journey throughout the experience? Because we're dealing with space, you know, how much space do they need? You know, how do we hide the technology so it still feels very much like a big illusion that we're creating in order to help immerse them even further into the narrative. And with that, too, we worked with a company called O-Widgets. And this is actually where the... For the first time when we were in Dubai, we were able to work with this automated scent machine. It's pretty new technology and it's really inspiring to see how it can enhance the storytelling. When you break through the soil, there's this really authentic wet soil smell. And then when you're also growing to be a tree, this smell of nature and like fresh-cut flowers are all around you. And then at the end, we won't spoil it, but that last smell is not a good one. Also, making sure that everyone gets the same experience, so we actually have a circuit box that triggers the fan and the heat and we have wind as well so that it really feels like you're there. You don't question it. When it's a nice marriage of technology and storytelling, you just feel like you're there and we're used to trusting our other senses than just our eyes and our ears. So how can we employ them to really bring a greater sense of immersion? And as a company, that's something that we really feel strongly about. We work with, you know, it's almost like Home Depot is one of our partners because that's basically the fan that you'd use if your basement was flooded. But we hide it away so you don't see it, that sub-pack. It's a base transducer that you strap to your back which simulates different parts of the tree's growth. And then that's just a generic honeywell heater that you'd see people in an office that's not adequately heated at the bottom of their desk. But when you turn it on and off and when you're in the headset, you just don't see these things. And again, it really helps compliment the narrative that we're bringing out. And so we've been traveling a lot with the project. We were in the World Economic Forum in Tianjin where we got to meet a lot of people making policy and also the heads of company that are also really closely integrated with environmental impact initiatives. So for us, how do we take this, something that is a form of entertainment but really try to make a real world difference? And we're continuing to show this, hopefully we haven't shown it in Africa yet but that's the plan for the fall as well and really just to show this to as many people as possible in as many different diverse environments as well. So after we actually also premiered at Sundance and went through the entire festival circuit and brought it to a lot of tech conferences, environmental conferences, but really Davos World Economic Forum this year opened up the doors for us to start showing this project to politicians and decision makers, which was our dream from three years ago when we started making this. So it is happening and that's where we met Madame Christine Lagarde from International Monetary Fund and we were just in Washington DC at IMF and World Bank Conference showing again, like for example we showed it to the Minister of Finance of Brazil, which was very important to show to him and he took off the headset and said I was a green person but now I'm even greener and in China we showed it to the Minister of Technology of China who said, who took off the headset and said we need to protect our grandchildren. So for us, we really want to keep going showing three making as much as people as possible on this planet into trees because we want to see a physical change happening on this planet. And BREED is the next project that we are working on. So giant three and BREED are a trilogy and BREED finally is about hope. It's about what can we all do together and it's about our connectivity on this planet. In BREED you're going to embody that little girl from giant. You will start as a six-year-old girl and you will go through her life for the rest of her life. You will be a vehicle of her empowerment and transformation and you will see what one human being can also accomplish on this planet. And we will be using... Yeah, so we'll be using a custom breath sensor that we have because we want it to be a really intuitive interaction and also we're not using controllers but instead a 3D camera that can track your hands. It feels really intuitive and we want it so that, yeah, you're not really thinking about it. You're feeling it. You're witnessing it. You're there. You are the character Rose throughout key moments of her life using BREED as a way to interact until ultimately her final breath. And we will be... We are actually working on a script with Luke Davis. He's a scriptwriter from Australia. He wrote a movie called Lion. Maybe some of you are familiar and he just wrote the whole Catch-22 Hulu series with George Clooney. So he's an incredible writer and we think this project is going to be very, very deeply emotional for people which is our goal with projects we're doing. And also we took a lot of the... After showing TREED to about 29,000 people, we've gotten so many different reactions and one of the most common ones is that they want to spend more time in the rainforest. And it's an interesting situation where we're using technology to bring people closer to nature but that might be nature that they would have never seen before. And it does raise a lot of interesting questions as us for storytellers and also as conservationists. But with Rainforest, instead of going to us to be able to put the headset on, how do we bring the rainforest to you? And so I'd like everyone to look under their chairs. We've got magic leaves for everybody here in this room. Right now, sorry, just kidding. That was my Oprah moment. Sorry. Yep. Yep. You can hate me later but after the presentation's done, okay. So next slide. I had a feeling that wouldn't go over well. So in the gameplay, yes, we were using smartphones, magic leaves as I mentioned, to be able to scan an environment and then we can populate a procedurally grown like rainforest with the flora and fauna that's accurate to the proven Amazon. And this game is not really about competing against each other. It is about collaborating together because really, what is the way that we are all going to survive and preserve the animals and nature on this planet is if we work together. So in this game, we will be together creating the whole virtual ecosystem. And we really want to bring it, we're talking right now to the Ministry of Education in Singapore, in Emirates. We want to bring it to the schools all across the world because the future is with the kids as we know like what Greta is doing now and the kids are protesting and understanding what's happening, maybe even better than the grown-ups. So we want to make it accessible to everyone either on your phone or in your school. But also we want to make it through fun. We don't want to beat you over the hat with the messaging. And so we can show you some basic prototypes for wayfinding. Right now in AR it's still, it could be someone's first time doing it. So we want to be able to onboard them to something that's very intuitive. So basically when we scan the environment, as soon as you get closer to these blue morpho butterflies, they'll be able to bring you to another place in the space to encourage you to explore, to interact more and ultimately through the interaction develop a closer relationship. Obviously this is an abandoned part of RGA right here, but picture this is in your own home and maybe in your own cubicle, how can you bring that to life? How do we go from tens of thousands of people now to tens of millions because smart phones are pretty much in everyone's pocket, at least in the United States and it's a growing number in other countries as well. How do we take something at scale, be able to bring an immersive environment to you so you can explore it, learn about it, become curious, develop a connection and then also when you feel like you're more responsible for it then you feel a sense of loss also when you learn about the inherent threats that it faces as well. And how do we be able to understand scale of something? Go from the size of your desk to a full, to a fully, to an actual scale rain forest that we can explore. Obviously these are like super early prototypes we have. We have a new version that we're actually going to be showcasing later today, but yeah we'd love to be able to, if you guys come by RGA, to show you the next stage of this. And yeah, that's our presentation. Thank you, thank you everyone.