Lucid Realities Studio

Étiquette : Nina Barbier

  • Lucid Realities, one of the five winning company to receive the first TAICCA’ grant

    The Taiwan Creative Content Agency (TAICCA) yesterday announced five teams that have been selected to receive its newly established grant to encourage international collaboration on immersive content including Lucid Realities and Taipei-based Oready Innovation Lab for the project The Starry Sand Beach, co-directed by Nina Barbier and Hsin-Chien Huang.

    The agency, which was established in June last year and is supervised by the Ministry of Culture, in March opened applications for its Immersive Content Grant for International Joint Ventures or Co-productions. At a news conference in Taipei, the agency said it received 34 proposals from teams in Taiwan, France, Japan, the US and the UK. The recipients of the grant were selected by a multinational group of 10 experts in cross reality (XR), and the arts and culture, the agency said.

    Agency president Lolita Hu (胡晴舫), who chaired the selection committee, said the selection process took place during a virtual meeting that lasted from 10pm to 3am. Under the program, each of the selected teams would receive a NT$3.5 million (US$118,004) grant, she said. The agency and the selection committee would also support the teams throughout their development processes, she added. Their projects would be featured in the agency’s IP Showcase, a platform through which the agency recommends works to the world, Hu said.

    One of the winning projects is by Paris-based virtual reality (VR) studio Lucid Realities and Taipei-based Oready Innovation Lab, which is expected to feature scenes from Penghu County’s Cimei Township (七美) and Kenting National Park, the agency said.

    Another project is a collaboration between the UK-based production company Oiffy and Playerium, a game development studio based in Taipei’s Neihu District (內湖), it said. Playerium founder and chief executive officer Solomon Temowo said the two studios are working on a game that would tell the story of “what it’s like to be replaced by automation.” The Virtual and Physical Media Integration Development Association of Taiwan is to partner with US-based ScienceVR for a project titled “Through the Body,” led by artist Huang Hsin-chien (黃心健), the agency said. The other selected projects are “Missing Pictures” (大師狂想曲), which Taipei-based Serendipity Films would create in collaboration with French VR company Atlas V, and Etat Lab Theater’s “Anthem to the Fading Flowers” (花神祭).
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    Source : Taipei Times

  • THE STARRY SAND BEACH selected for Sheffield Alternate Realities Talent Market

    The Starry Sand Beach was selected for Sheffield Doc Fest’s Alternate Realities Talent Market. Co-created by the french director Nina Barbier and the Taiwanese new media creator Hsin-Chien Huang, The Starry Sand Beach is a real-time 3D interactive VR experience – coproduced by Lucid Realities and the Museum national d’Histoire naturelle (National Museum of Natural History), a scientific tale about the starry sand grains of Taketomi Island, in the far south of Japan. Subject of a poetic legend, the starry sand is actually a marine micro-organism called foraminifera « Baculogypsina sphaerulata ». It is both a lucky charm for Japanese lovers and an object of study for scientists. By exploring the cosmos and the memory of the earth, this VR experience will take us into the world of the starry sand, a poetic witness of the organization of the universe.

    Now in its 7th edition, and encompassing projects from over 30 countries of production, the XR Talent Market by Sheffield Doc Fest aims at fostering collaborations between artists, creatives, and organisations focused on using digital technologies to push storytelling in exciting new directions. Lucid Realities was thus honored to be part of the 20 teams selected for match-made connections with curators, exhibitors, galleries, museums, international festivals, broadcasters, funding bodies, NGOs and distributors. An external assessment committee comprised of Catherine Baxendale (Invisible Flock), Emma Cooper (VR gamemakers Cooperative Innovations), Alex Davidson (The Barbican) and Julia Scott-Stevenson (i-Docs/UWE), selected the Starry Sand Beach to be part of the Alternate Realities Talent Market Pitched, which will take place in early June 2020.

    Needless to say that Lucid Realities is more than excited to push storytelling in exciting new directions, with projects such as The Starry Sand Beach.