Debuting at Sundance, this mixed-reality project transforms the viewer into a rainforest tree. With your arms as branches and your body as the trunk, you’ll experience the tree’s growth from a seedling into a mighty Kapok tree and witness its fate firsthand.

Working with Droga5 and the directors, I helped extend the experience into an all-encompassing sensory experience across the entire user journey.

Critical to understanding climate change, is the need to empathize with the impact of humanity. To do this, this project worked closely with MIT Media Lab technologists, to activate as many senses as possible in order to help the user truly build a connection with the tree they have become.

Working together we added heaters, diffusers, and fans to an already immersive SubPac, arm vibrator and vibrating stage.

The result was obvious as users came out of the experience with emotional memories from the story.

Generally VR is a personal or purely digital experience leaving viewers outside of VR without many pathways to share in the fun. With tree we took this problem as a challenge to develop a method for telling a part of the Tree story to viewers watching someone inside VR.

By projecting a tree growing behind the person in VR and leveraging the natural behavioral urge to stay in one place while inside the experience we transformed VR viewers into trees themselves as actors.

FESTIVALS AND EVENTS
Sundance, Tribeca, Cannes, AFI, TED, World Economic Forum, Games for Change and many more

PRESS
NYTimes, TechCrunch, Vice, The Verge, and others