Dustin Freeman

Category: commentary

  • 1px VR

    I have always had slightly dry eyes. This has made wearing contacts difficult. During the pandemic, I gradually became inexcusably annoyed at having to choose foggy glasses or blurry vision when wearing a mask in public. Independently, it occurred to me in The Year of Isolation that this would be an ideal time for some […]

  • Species-Wide Imposter Syndrome

    Have you ever had that moment where you’re walking from one meeting to another and something clumsy happens – like you trip over a chair corner, you realize your shirt is undone, or you sneeze inelegantly. And then the entire facade of civilization comes crashing down. We’re barely different from the apes messing around hanging […]

  • Taekwondo does not support Double-Jumping

    I started Taekwondo in November 2018. I’ve wanted to try a martial art for years, but it’s been one of those hobbies in the backlog that required a chance encounter to nucleate. I used to do more cardio and cognitive intensive physical activities: gymnastics, figure skating and parkour (amateurishly), but the last few years have […]

  • Player Character Bios in Participatory Media

    Originally published in Escape Character’s Newsletter. Question: What’s the best way to hack someone who’s never LARP’d[1] before to get into character? Our goal here is to have the player buy into the stakes of the show before they cross the threshold [2] into the space of the show. In Escape Character’s projects where the […]

  • Telepresence Immersive Theatre with Mice instead of Voice

    This past year at Escape Character has been quiet, but very busy. Me + several collaborators have been iterating on telepresence interactive theatre. We have written and debuted three scenarios and are in the middle of writing our fourth. We’ve put on in-person shows in San Francisco, Toronto and London. We just started remote invite-only […]

  • POV Edit: Star War’s Obi-Wan Kenobi

    I’ve taken Star Wars I-VI and cut out every scene that Obi-Wan Kenobi didn’t directly witness. I wasn’t trying to make a movie, and the end result has some bumpy transitions, but in the spirit of this upcoming standalone film, I wanted to get to know Obi-Wan Kenobi’s life better. I’m calling this a “POV […]

  • Studying Narratives in Small Spaces, Part 3: Conversations

    At the Augmented & Virtual Reality roundtables at GDC 2015, there was consensus that moving a player through space made them uneasy. While in the future, I’m sure we’ll discover interesting tricks to ease the transition, what if we aren’t worried about that, and instead an entire interactive narrative experience happens in a single space? […]

  • Wonderful Projects I Did With Microsoft’s Kinect

    RIP the Kinect. Literally changed the direction of my research/career/life/art. Gave it more DEPTH. — Dustin Freeman🚁LAX (@dustinfreeman) October 25, 2017 Microsoft has ceased manufacturing the Kinect. Here’s some projects, art and research, academic and industrial, that I could only have done with the Kinect. The Role of Physical Controllers in Motion Video Gaming, 2011: […]

  • Immersive Theatre Roundup: D&D Yoga

    Yesterday, I saw/experienced the show “D&D Yoga”, in the Toronto Fringe Festival. This is a literal combination these two things, which worked in some surprising ways, didn’t work in some surprising ways. It is a yoga class, run by a real-life yoga instructor Christine Desrochers, during which you go on an actual Dungeons and Dragons […]

  • State of Virtual Reality Venues in Toronto

    For the last few years, I’ve been a “VR tech professional”, which means I have, on my desk, various pieces of Virtual/Augmented/Mixed Reality equipment. These will get cheaper, but at the moment are dubious buys for the average person. Despite companies’ best efforts, set-up is still a confusing pain. VR still has so many goddamn […]