Director Rose Troche’s hard-hitting account of homelessness in modern America, We Live Here, is now available for anyone with an Oculus Quest.
We Live Here released earlier this week on the standalone platform and is completely free to download. The project is a blend of 360-degree film and fully immersive VR, taking viewers to a homeless community in Southern California. There, viewers meet Rockey and explore her past.
It’s definitely worth taking a look – what starts out as a standard 360 piece quickly evolves into something deeper as you’re given the freedom to discover exactly who Rockey is. You explore her home, picking up items and hearing her stories behind them. The environment itself is realized using volumetric capture – a process that stitches together multiple images of the same environment to create a realistic 3D asset you can interact with.
Ultimately We Live Here is a potent example of how VR can be used to help us understand and empathize more with people less fortunate than ourselves. The film debuted at Venice earlier this year and, in September, we featured an in-depth Q&A with the project’s producer and Troche. The director was also behind 2017’s powerful short film, If Not Love.
We Live Here isn’t the only Quest movie in the headlines this week; 3DAR and Baobab Studios are partnering up to release Paper Birds: Part 1 — another movie that debuted at Venice — tomorrow. Let us know if you’ll be checking out either experience and stick with Upload for all the latest on VR movies.
