“XR needs discoverability”
Lisa Maria Wurzinger is the co-founder and COO of Arrival.Space, an immersive web platform that provides easy access and discovery for the social 3D web and its creators. She is also the co-founder of GO!insideVR, an virtual movie production company whose works have been featured at film festivals worldwide. Anelia Heese from the AUREA Community team sat down with her for a chat.
Lisa Maria Wurzinger is the co-founder and COO of Arrival.Space, an immersive web platform that provides easy access and discovery for the social 3D web and its creators. She is also the co-founder of GO!insideVR, an XR production company whose works have been featured at film festivals worldwide. Anelia Heese from the AUREA Community team sat down with her for a chat.
Like many founders in XR, Lisa-Mariae’s journey started in theatre: “As a fourteen year old, I was already quite involved in Austrian theatre. Things picked up from there, and before long, I was involved in TV, moderating cultural events.
This is also where she met her business partner, Gero Egger, who had a Film production company at the time: “We travelled a lot, doing feature film documentaries and various media productions.
Film and the production department fascinated me and I became a production manager and then a producer.”
The interest in XR took off at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016: “There was this super small VR thing in the so called “NEXTCorner”. We could try a few tech demos, and it was super interesting, but there was no storytelling at all.”
She basks in the memory of their first breakthrough: “We come from this tradition of film, and we thought we have to do something. So we started to improve the cinematics of it, and in 2017, we produced our first 360 VR film titled “Remain At Home”. We premiered at the 360°Film Festival in Paris and had our own VR showcase at the Marché du Film Cannes in 2018. It was selected at all festivals worldwide, such as FNC Explore in Montreal, Transitions Film Festival in Melbourne or Animation Nights in New York!" Remain at Home tells the story of a grandmother who has to push her grandson and his family to leave home and escape war.
You can hear the emotion in her voice as she recounts the story: “No one wants to leave home. But as you are watching this emotional short with this new medium, I think it helped a lot of people understand the refugee crisis at the time.” Lisa fails to mention what a terrific feat this project was: at the time, no one had designed a 360 set before - it was unchartered territory in filmmaking and VR. “There are no blueprints. There are no standards.”
When the pandemic hit and the world was bunkered down, Lisa and her team saw the need for social XR experiences and improved digital communication . They started to produce social XR live events and took the lessons they learned from the film industry with them: “When you need to try something new, access needs to be easy. Onboarding needs to be simple. “The transition from the 2D web to the 3D web still needs a lot of work, so that’s why we’ve built Arrival.Space as a starting point.”
On Arrival.Space, you can “dip your toes” into this metaverse “thing”. Discoverability and interoperability should be at the core of this transition. “With Arrival.Space, we are working hard to contribute to better content sharing, browsing, navigating, and socialising - across immersive platforms.” Much like when people still had landlines and the phone book when the first mobile phones arrived, there needs to be a transition where one can safely discover what Web 3.0 will feel like.
I get a quick tour of the space, and Lisa-Maria’s excitement is palpable. “You can join this space, watch a YouTube video together, be together, laugh together. Cool, right?”
In a world where we need people to laugh together a little more often, this is really cool indeed.