At 2025 Tribeca Festival, VR, augmented reality and AI showcase immersive storytelling
CBSN
The 2025 Tribeca Festival continues this week with movie screenings, Q&As, industry panel discussions and public performances across New York City. But one program in this year's festival takes place in virtual worlds.
For more than a decade, Tribeca has been expanding its focus beyond cinema and television to include new avenues of storytelling through the use of virtual reality, augmented reality, and other nascent technologies, producing some vivid immersive displays. Even if the storytelling aspect of the programs were limited, the artistic expressions could be powerful. This was especially true with past exhibits that enveloped the viewer in massive spaces, in which computer-generated imagery or time-lapse photography placed the viewer in new worlds, from exploding galaxies to swirling blood vessels.
Hosted under the umbrella title "In Search of Us," this year's installation in Lower Manhattan ties 11 projects together under the rubric of impacts on humanity — exploring topics from artificial intelligence to climate change, war, school shootings and transphobia. The exhibits with the most profound effects are those with the strongest and most emotional stories embedded inside them.
