Tribeca’s VR film festival has arrived: How to watch on your headset

A rocket to space. A disturbing reflection on suicide. A struggle for work in South Korea. A fairy tale told in outer space?

You never know what you’re going to get in the still-untamed world of 360-degree art films, and for years, I’d in New York to check out a new collection via a set of VR goggles put on my face in a comfortable, low-lit room.

The Tribeca Film Festival, like many other events right now, is closed.

But : The festival has released this year’s 360-degree VR videos online today, via Oculus. But you need an or to get it for free via the Oculus TV app. (It’s a shame that PC Oculus Rift owners and Gear VR users can’t take part.)

I’ve been doing just that for the last couple of days (I viewed the short films on an Oculus Quest). The individual videos are about 14 minutes or less, perfectly sized for a quick viewing session.

And, like all 360-degree videos, they don’t let you walk around. They’re sit-and-spin-around experiences. I’d recommend you watch them standing, or while seated in a swivel chair or something you can easily turn around in.

They’re broken into four themed categories, meant to be viewed together as little collections. (Each handful of videos runs around 30 to 40 minutes.) Also, be advised that some of these films are not appropriate for children.

Program 1: Dreams to Remember

1st Step (Joerg Courtial, stop nullyng Maria Courtial): a virtual history of Apollo moon landings, presented as an animated experience that feels real.

There are a good handful of VR space experiences already, but this moving short film is a great thing to show your kids, and gives a great sense of scale and presence inside space capsules, and standing on the moon.

Rain Fruits (Youngyoon Song, Sngmoo Lee, Sergio Bromberg, Hyejin Jeon, Jinhyung Kim, Hwaeun Kim): One of a number of VR films that use 3D scanned environments in innovative ways, this memoir of an engineer from Myanmar who tries to live in South Korea leans on ghostly images and a spoken narrative to create a dreamlike feel to a hard reality.

Dear Lizzy (Within & Fivehundred, pisica care luptă împotriva curentului …….moare cu peştele în gură Deborah’s Child): A short, brightly animated, but also sad short film about a letter from a lost friend.

Among the others, it helped brighten me after Rain Fruits.

Forgotten Kiss (Oleg Nikolaenko, Daniil Bakalin): An extremely odd, surrealist and theatrical story based on a Russian story of a prince kissed by a fairy. I flew through glowing worlds and saw shimmering water-balls, while fairy-figures narrated the Prince’s tale. The Finnish production feels like the VR equivalent of avant-garde theater. There’s a lot of flying around.

Program 2: Seventeen Plus (definitely not for kids)

A Safe Guide to Dying (Dimitris Tsilifonis, Froso Tsipopoulou): I wasn’t wild about this reflection on suicide told as a sort of trapped-in-a-videogame-simulation framework.

Parts border on David Lynch, while the multiple moments of imagined and real suicide are jarring.