The future is coming to the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival, presented by AT&T, in the form of a completely immersive multimedia experience. This year, we’re proud to host the majority of our Innovation Programming at Spring Studios, our new downtown creative hub for festivalgoers, where filmmakers and creators will be able to interact and collaborate at every opportunity. Have no fear, the much beloved Storyscapes is back for its third edition of groundbreaking interactive installations presented in collaboration with BOMBAY SAPPHIRE® Gin.

The Festival will also provide a variety of experiential programs—covering a broad range of tech disciplines—including Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, founded by Jeremy Bailenson, which will team up with Worldviz LLC to create diverse VR experiences for Festival audiences. 

In addition to a daylong TFI Interactive summit, an initiative of the non-profit Tribeca Film Institute with leadership support from the Ford Foundation, we’re pleased to offer a special edition of Tribeca Talks®: Imagination powered by The Hatchery, which will feature lively panel discussions with tech gurus such as Google’s Captain of Moonshots Astro Teller and AOL Chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong.

The best news is that it’s easy to take part in all of the action! Reservations for the free Storyscapes exhibition are open to the public beginning on April 6 at tribecafilm.com/storyscapes. To ensure seats at events like TFI Interactive and other Innovation events, audiences can now purchase our Spring Pass which serves as the gateway to all content and activities at Spring Studios during the festival, including the Artist Awards Gallery. 

One project will be awarded The BOMBAY SAPPHIRE® Storyscapes Award, which recognizes groundbreaking approaches in storytelling and technology. The five Storyscapes interactive installations presented at this year’s Festival are:

Do Not Track
Project Creator: Brett Gaylor

To what extent are you being tracked? In this personalized documentary series about privacy and the web economy, creator Brett Gaylor will reveal what the web knows about you— that is if you share your data with him. From mobile phones to social networks, and personalized advertising to big data, this project shows how the modern web is increasingly a space where our movements, speech, and identities are being recorded.

Door Into the Dark
Project Creators: Anagram

"This is a labyrinth.” Find out what it means to be lost in an age of infinite information.

Using groundbreaking locative technology, this immersive documentary combines captivating storytelling with a visceral physical experience: feel your way into the the dark—blindfolded, shoeless, and alone— along a taut length of rope that leads to a vivid aural world of real people who have been profoundly lost. Your encounter with these characters takes you deep into their sensations, risks, and illusions. To find your way into the light you must surrender to the unknown.

The Enemy
Project Creator: Karim Ben Khelifa

Two combatants from opposite sides of a war observe each other. We are in the middle.

This project, at the crossroads of neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and storytelling, takes us on an extraordinary odyssey through some of the most contested conflicts in the world. In the first chapter you are immersed in a virtual reality gallery, moving between an Israeli, and a Palestinian soldier. Creator, Karim Ben Khelifa is a conflict photographer who is pushing his work a step further with this creative investigation of the limits of empathy.

Karen
Project Creator: Blast Theory, developed in partnership with National Theatre Wales.

Karen is an app that mixes together gaming, storytelling, and psychological profiling. Karen is a life coach and she’s happy to help you work through a few things in your life. As soon as you launch Karen, she will ask you some questions about your outlook on the world. As she becomes more and more curious, Karen starts to identify things about you that she shouldn’t know. Where exactly is this going to end?

The Machine To Be Another - Embodied Narratives
Project Creator: BeAnotherLab

BeAnotherLab will be presenting a series of Embodied Narratives that will allow you to inhabit the body and life story of another person, while interacting with artefacts from their life. Imagine the possibility of creating stories that can be felt through your own body as something real. For three years BeAnotherLab has been working with an extended community of researchers, artists, activists, and members of the public to create performance-experiments related to the understanding of the other and of the self.

TRIBECA TALKS: IMAGINATION, POWERED BY THE HATCHERY

On Wednesday, April 22, the Tribeca Film Festival® will host some of the most influential, provocative, and creative minds for an all-day summit that asks: what happens when our wildest dreams become reality and what that reality will be in our not-so-distant future? Experience the wonder and inspiration of new technologies, as tech’s thought leaders reveal what is just beyond the horizon through multisensory storytelling.

Confirmed speakers include:

• Astro Teller, Captain of Moonshots, oversees Google moonshot factory for building magical, audaciously impactful ideas that can be brought to reality through science and technology. Before joining Google, Teller was CEO of Cerebellum Capital, Inc., an AI-based investment management firm; CEO of BodyMedia, a leading wearable body monitoring company; and CEO of SANDbOX AD, an advanced development technology incubator.
• Tim Armstrong is Chairman and CEO of AOL which serves nearly 250M global consumers and is a leader in the digital content, video, and advertising industries. Armstrong served as an executive of multiple internet and media companies, including President of Google's Americas Operations, Snowball, Disney's ABC/ESPN Internet Ventures, and Paul Allen's Starwave Corporation.
• Ashwin Vasavada, Project Scientist for NASA, is a planetary scientist leading work on Mars. He has participated in several NASA spacecraft missions including the Galileo mission to Jupiter and the Cassini mission to Saturn.
• Ping Fu, Chief Entrepreneur Officer at 3D Systems (NYSE: DDD) works on the cutting edge of 3D printing at scale. Honored as Inc. magazine’s Entrepreneur of the Year, Fu co-founded Geomagic, a 3D imaging software company, which was acquired by 3D Systems. The 3D technologies they developed were created to fundamentally change the way products are designed and manufactured around the world. She serves on the NACIE (National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship) at the Department of Commerce.
• Jeremy Bailenson is founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab. Bailenson’s main area of interest is the phenomenon of digital human representation, especially in the context of immersive virtual reality. He explores the manner in which people are able to represent themselves when the physical constraints of body and virtually-rendered behaviors are removed. He designs and studies virtual reality systems that allow physically remote individuals to meet in virtual space, and explores the manner in which these systems change the nature of verbal and nonverbal interaction.
• Carl Dietrich, CEO of Terrefugia is an expert in liquid bi-propellant rocket propulsion, aircraft design & fabrication, as well as plasma physics & fusion energy. As an aerospace industry entrepreneur, Dietrich raised over $12 million of private capital, grew Terrafugia through the successful development of airworthy prototype vehicles, and built a $30 million order backlog for Terrafugia’s launch product, the Transition®.
• Efi Cohen-Arazi is CEO of Rainbow Medical which is at the forefront of implant technologies to restore and heal. Cohen-Arazi has over 25 years of experience in the medical and biotech industry. Cohen-Arazi served as CEO of IntecPharma Israel, General Manager & VP at biotech giant Amgen, Senior VP at Immunex and General Manager and VP at the Merck-Serono.
• Anthony Lewis is Senior Director, Technology at Qualcomm leading biologically-inspired computing and robotics. Dr. Lewis is an expert in robotics and neuromorphic engineering with more than 80 publications and patents in these fields. Dr. Lewis directed a multi-faculty robotics lab focused on cooperative robotics at UCLA, and developed high-performance control systems for robotic hands and force feedback exoskeletons as a member of the technical staff for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He also founded Iguana Robotics, a private research company, where he spearheaded the development of biologically inspired robots.

A full schedule of TFF innovation events taking place at Spring Studios follows:

• Storyscapes presented in collaboration with BOMBAY SAPPHIRE® Gin (Thursday, April 16 – Sunday, April 19)
• TFI Interactive summit, an initiative of the nonprofit Tribeca Film Institute with leadership support from the Ford Foundation (Saturday, April 18)
• Tribeca Talks Imagination powered by The Hatchery (Wednesday, April 22)
• Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab (Thursday, April 23 – Saturday, April 25)

Additional invitations events during the Tribeca Film Festival include:

• Games for Change Festival in its second installment as part of the Tribeca Film Festival (Tuesday, April 21 – Thursday, April 23)
• Sixth Annual Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Awards (Friday, April 24)

Click to see titles in the TFF 2015 World Documentary Competition, World Narrative Competition, Viewpoints, Spotlight, Midnight, Special Screenings, Shorts, and Tribeca/ESPN Sports Film Festival categories.