
#1555: Award-Winning Tabletop Animation “Oto’s Planet” Uses Unique Interactive Mechanic to Chose Perspective
Voices of VR
Exploring Innovation in Immersive Animation with 'Oto's Planet'
This chapter delves into the animated short 'Oto's Planet', emphasizing its interactive features and the immersive experiences provided on platforms like Quest and Apple Vision Pro. The discussion highlights the significance of storytelling in immersive media while inviting listeners to engage with and support the ongoing oral history project.
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Speaker 2
So generally when people talk about this they look at I hear two things references one is inscriptions to something like Yahweh and his wife Ashera or something like that and then there's also references to Second Kings which is interesting because when I go to those it seems clear to me that they're at least the text for itself take it for what it is is referring to throwing out pagan gods out of the temple not like a like a normative Israel is worshiping this person alongside them but that something from the outside has gotten in the temple it feels like that's how it's framed in the scripture.
Speaker 1
That's typically how it's presented again we really have a great deal of difficulty reconstructing the nature or extent of whatever syncretism or apostasy they might have been engaged in because it's just not the Bible's intention to document that it's not documenting the the varied trails that they followed in their ignorance or unbelief it's trying to document something about Yahweh and true belief. And
Speaker 2
so I guess you know pastorally I think one of my concerns is especially a lot of the skeptics who bring this up they kind of should bring it up to say see this all this all this was made up all along you know you know you don't think Ashera is real but Yahweh was right there with Ashera and you know it became politically inviolable for whatever reason for God to have a wife so they just took her out and so I wonder you know especially I know that you as some of your teaching includes undergrads and I'm wondering you know pastorally how do you help and walk students through those kind of difficult questions. When
Speaker 1
I teach undergrads I'm not teaching history of Israel
Speaker 2
religion okay fair. You
Speaker 1
know Old Testament interpretation and literature and so we don't take that root on things still occasionally the questions come up but I think the the kind of direction you've just represented that you've summarized is accurate that people talk that way but it's so highly speculative at every term yeah how do you document that they took something out unless you can document that it was in and the inscriptions that the very few inscriptions we have making fairly vague suggestions hardly give a basis for saying oh and everybody thought Yahweh had a consort you know it's just not sufficient evidence for that I'm I've tried to be very careful about speculation whether it's in my favor or not that that's just not how we build cases so but often skeptics on the one hand and apologists on the other hand are not necessarily careful about the nature of the evidence and how firm it is and I think that's unfortunate.
OTO'S PLANET was being exhibited on the Quest at SXSW, but I had a chance to check out the Apple Pro Version ahead of the SXSW festival and I felt like I much preferred it. OTO'S PLANET picked up the second place prize at Venice Immersive, but I missed being able to interview the director Gwenael Francois there.
I did manage to catch up with Francois at SXSW to talk more about the development of this beautiful interactive narrative that uses table top-scale animation, and requires the user to rotate a tiny planet around in order to follow the story of Oto, his pet, and the story of a colonizing intruder who arrives.
I found that the interactions were much smoother and immersive on the Apple Vision Pro than the Quest, and the higher resolution also popped a lot more. The Apple Vision Pro version defaults to mixed reality while there is an opportunity to see it in fully immersive VR on the Quest. I normally would prefer the Quest version, but having the better quality mixed reality cameras and overall much higher resolution in the Apple Vision Pro.
Apple also featured Oto's Planet, and DPT CEO Nicholas Roy shares in this interview that they've actually received more purchases on Apple devices than Meta's ecosystem. Meta’s storefront has been flooded by Meta's own first-party Horizon world as well as App Lab apps, and so it’s very telling and reflective of the current state of distribution to have more sales for the Apple Vision Pro than Meta Quest.
It is promising to see Apple get more serious at immersive storytelling as there was a session titled "Create Interactive Stories for Apple Vision Pro" on Tuesday morning featuring three representatives from Apple.
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Music: Fatality