Whether you admit it or not, we have all caught ourselves at one time or another wondering – just maybe – what it might feel like to be transformed into another life form, a speeding cheetah, a soaring bird, or a blossoming flower. With current advances in technology, our imaginations are closer to reality than ever before.
The Sundance Institute offers a program known as the New Frontier Program, where the future of film-making is fostered and developed. Currently, they are experimenting with 20 Virtual Reality (VR) projects. One of these projects is simply named: ‘Tree’, as is showing now at the Tribeca Film Festival from the 19th-29th of April. The Tree VR is a joint venture by Sundance Institute with Rainforest Alliance, and allows you to see, feel, and experience what it is like to be a tree.
As Tree, you begin as a seedling and grow to become a part of a sublime rain-forest. The branches of Tree are your arms while the Tree trunk is your body. The empathetic experience allows you to interact with the environment and undergo growth until you witness your fate; all this is done in the form of a Tree, claims the Tree Official.
The Frontier Festival last year was heavily influenced by Google, Samsung Gear, and HTC; however, this year, Oculus Rift Headset brought five different ordeals, reports The Verge.
The Sundance Institute’s alliance with the Rainforest Alliance makes this a significant campaign for raising awareness of deforestation and unsustainable treatment of the rainforests around the globe. Given that trees are the building blocks of all carbon-based life, they are crucial to the continuity of all the living beings on our planet: for air, water, shelter and even medicine. The rapid acceleration of global deforestation is leading to climate change, multiplying the effects of global warming by 300%, and contributes 25% to the emission of greenhouse gasses worldwide, threatening our environment irrevocably.