Inside the helmet, out of time: virtual reality still searching for a story
The Visioni VR competition, organised in collaboration with the National Science and Technology Museum in Milan, presented six short films exploring the limits and potential of immersive storytelling
3' min read
3' min read
Wearing a VR helmet in 2025 to enjoy a film show is a cyberpunk act, a post-modern gesture, something that is already vintage because it belongs to the recent past. Despite numerous experiments, visor-based cinemas have not become mainstream, nor has VR in video games and on the home television. While it has found important applications in education, maintenance and design.
This premise is a must when you attend a VR short film event as a juror. This year's competition Visioni VR, organised in collaboration with the Leonardo da Vinci National Museum of Science and Technology, was held in mid-September, a few days ago, and featured 6 of the best national and international productions, ranging from documentaries on current affairs to pedagogy, from physical to inner journeys, and even the recounting of crucial events in recent history.
Also in previous editions, Visioni VR was a moment to get inside the heads of directors, scriptwriters and digital artists who believe - or have believed - in this technology. In order to better understand the boundaries of these experiments, at what point is the dialogue with the language of videogames, for example, how much the passive narrative of audiovisuals can be possessed by the interactivity of virtual reality.
This year, two works caught the imagination of the public and critics more than others.
"Sweet End of the World!" by Stefano Conca Bonizzoni (Officine Creative - University of Pavia, Motion Pixel and Notte Americana) is an immersive experience in virtual reality, we could say classical. We are inside an experience that has nothing virtual about it in the proper sense of the term. It is filmed with special cameras shooting in all directions. The viewer, with a VR visor, can look around as if he or she were 'inside' the scene, but cannot move freely in space (you are stationary at one point). It is the most common format for real films.
