Creative Victoria is supporting Games for Change to present a series of interactive experiences in Melbourne Museum’s first-of-its-kind digital immersive Learning Lab.
City of Melbourne’s Now or Never Festival is collaborating with the Asia-Pacific division of the global group Games for Change, an initiative dedicated to supporting the development of serious games and games for social change.
The inaugural Now or Never Festival will celebrate local creative vision across art, sound and technology and will run from Thursday 17 August – Saturday 2 September.
Creative Victoria is supporting Games for Change to present a series of interactive experiences in Melbourne Museum’s first-of-its-kind digital immersive Learning Lab. Four sessions promoting the work of Victorian studios will showcase games initiatives that carry educational and social impact across the weekend of August 19 and 20. The program is a collaboration between the digital games and design teams at Creative Victoria, to highlight the contribution design plays in games development.
Visitors will be inspired to consider the issues facing the world we live in by venturing beyond the screen in projects including Games for Change’s On the Morning You Wake (to the End of the World), Opaque’s TRAPPIST-1, GOATi Entertainment’s 22 Series Racing and Opaque Space’s Earthlight: Spacewalk.
On the Morning You Wake (to the End of the World) – Saturday 19 August, 10am-1pm
On the Morning You Wake (to the End of the World) is a VR project by Archer’s Mark and Atlas V in collaboration with Games for Change. The project recaptures the troubling incident when an accidental nuclear emergency alert was sent to citizens of Hawaii on the morning of Saturday 13 January, 2018. For the thirty-eight minutes between the initial message and the official communication of its false alarm, citizens navigated rising panic and urgent decision-making in response to the alert.
On the Morning You Wake integrates VR production with documentary storytelling through first-hand audio testimonies to represent what those unsettling thirty-eight minutes may have been like and imagining the realities of nuclear threat.
Image: On the Morning You Wake (to the End of the World) / Archer’s Mark / Atlas V / Games for Change
For more information visit the ‘On the Morning You Wake’ project website
TRAPPIST-1 Saturday 19 August, 1:45pm-4:45pm
Visitors will also get to preview Melbourne-based developer Opaque’s prototype TRAPPIST-1, a room-scale VR tour of our neighbouring TRAPPIST-1 star system’s fascinating exoplanets.
The project’s inspiration came from 1960s retro-futurism and NASA’s pop-art space tourism posters of our solar system. As NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope currently surveys TRAPPIST-1’s exoplanets for habitable atmospheres, imaginations of space tourism have only further amplified.
From the safety of the tourist shuttle’s viewing compartment, users of this VR experience will visit the volcanic rocks and sulfuric lava flows of the exoplanet TRAPPIST-1b, the scorched desert and geothermal pools of TRAPPIST-1d, and the wind-blasted glaciers and mountain ranges of TRAPPIST-1g. It provides amesmerising and unfamiliar sensation of gazing at a sky in perpetual twilight with several planets in close proximity viewable to the naked eye.
Image: TRAPPIST-1 / Opaque
Visit Opaque’s website to learn more
22 Series Racing – Sunday 20 August, 10am-1pm
Now or Never will also feature 22 Series Racing, a game that is founded on the question, “What will car racing look like 100 years into the future?” Melbourne-based studio GOATi Entertainment envisions a 22nd Century racing landscape with gravity-defying tracks and futuristic vehicles capable of reaching of 1,000 km per hour.
In this future, the planet has suffered from the impacts of climate change. Resource-heavy racing series have shifted online to minimise their ecological footprint. Other tracks are represented in environments most vulnerable to climate change including Antarctica and the Solomon Islands.
Visitors can experience this imagined future of racing through an immersive VR physics-based simulation.
For more information visit the 22 Racing Series website
Earthlight: Spacewalk – Sunday 20 August, 1:45pm-4:45pm
The Earthlight: Spacewalk project was developed by Victorian games developer Opaque Space and presents a realistic depiction of an astronaut’s spacewalk from the International Space Station (ISS).
Informed by visits to NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory in Houston, where astronauts train for zero gravity, users will experience the gravity of Earth’s low orbit and engage with astronaut tools and ISS robotics.
This immersive VR experience helps players understand the wonders of what astronauts call the “Overview Effect,” a term used to describe the feeling of understanding the planet we live on in a new light.
Find out more about Earthlight: Spacewalk on Viveport
Keep an eye on the Now or Never home page for updates and future booking information.