Hi everybody. Thank you for being here. I'm sorry I only speak English, so I hope that's okay for everybody.

Thank you for the introduction. My name is Grace Boyle and I'm the founder of The Feelies, which is a multi-sensory VR production company. We work in collaboration and also developing of our own content. As was briefly mentioned in the introduction, we have a number of projects going.

I'm going to focus a little today on one particular production which is launching at the end of this month, which is a collaboration with the environmental charity Greenpeace and Alchemy VR. This is a still from that place. This is the Tapajos River. The Tapajos is the last major tributary of the Amazon River that currently doesn't have any large dams placed upon it.

There are currently plans to build 43 large hydroelectric dams in the area, which would obviously be devastating both for the place and for the people that live there, the indigenous population. A population called the Munduruku live along the Tapajos River, and Greenpeace has been working with them to try and facilitate them to establish their rights over the land and be able to resist these dams.

This is obviously a very beautiful image, but I think you found that if you went there, it would be even more impactful. What are the smells of this place? What is the heat of this place? What are the messages that you receive as a sensory being through being in a place like this? And that's what we try and do with the Filiis.

We try and bring as much of the experience of a real place to audiences that are in a different place, and in doing so, we hope to build social cohesion between people who may live in places that look very different from one another, but actually, of course, there are so many connections that we have as humans all over the world.

So I'd just like to start with this quote. Maya Rongelu, one of the greatest poets of our time, she said, I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. It's something that I've found to be very true in my own life, and it's something that we use as an inspiration with the Filiis. And how can you cause people to feel things?

The name of the Filiis actually comes from the Aldous Huxley novel, Brave New World. I don't say that so often because it's a slightly dystopian version that he uses in his novel. But I think when combined with virtual reality, this is something that we can actually really start doing, and we can transport people to places in a sensory way that's not just audio visual.

So I realize this quote is probably going to elicit a groan from everybody because it's so well known now, but VR has been called, obviously, the empathy machine. That's a quote from Chris Milk, who with Gabor Aurora made the film that this clip is from, which is called Clouds Over Sidra. It was the first VR film made with the United Nations,

and it sought to evoke empathy between urban populations and populations that were transient, that were refugee populations. Clouds Over Sidra goes inside a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan called Sertari. It has a population of 84,000 people. It's almost a permanent settlement now, and what the film sought to do is take you through the eyes of this little girl called Sidra,

who's a resident of the camp, and seek to make people understand what her experience was and evoke empathy for that. But if we start to look at empathy and how we feel empathy, where does that actually come from and how do we feel it and how do we seek to tell stories that evoke empathy even more in the audiences?

We're all sensory beings, right? We're constantly making up our perception out of inputs that we receive through all of our senses. And so I started to look into this a little bit more. We base a lot of what we do in cross-modal science. Your modalities are your senses. Cross-modal science is therefore how your senses combine to form your perception.

So it's not just a matter of kind of adding in a bit of wind or adding in a bit of a smell, but it's how these things combine to form your overall perception. An example that I use quite often is the way that we as society and storytellers have figured out how to use music as an emotional language. If you watch a film, an audiovisual film, without its soundtrack,

it has a small percentage of the emotional content. Similarly, if that soundtrack is mismatched, then the overall message ends up being kind of confusing. You don't absorb the audience in the same way. You can imagine the Titanic going down with the psycho soundtrack. It's not really going to work out for you, and you're going to be kind of irritated and pulled out of the story.

So when you think about our senses, commonly we think of five, you know, sight, sound, touch, taste, smell. The latest cross-modal thinking is that we actually have around 33 senses. This includes figuring out whether you're upside down or not, and things like this, so we don't necessarily stimulate all of those. But there's certainly a huge field of perception

that as storytellers we can bring in. And if we're just telling our stories in audiovisual, even if it is an immersive virtual reality visual, there's still huge channels of perception that we're missing out on in our ability to relate stories to people. Particularly empathetic senses, touch, for example. There are probably a lot of oxytocin,

the cuddle hormone, the love hormone. Interpersonal touch causes the release of oxytocin. It causes people to feel these feelings. Similarly, smell. It's one of our oldest senses, our most primitive senses. It's long been associated with issues of trust and reward, going back to caveman times.

If you actually look at the way the brain is formulated, you have similar neuro-atomic regions serving smell as serve value judgments, memory, learning and, of course, empathy. Smell is very good for being able to evoke a sense of home, I think we all know that. If you see a picture of your baby blanket, you touch your baby blanket, it's going to do something for you,

but if you smell your baby blanket and that smells the same, it takes you back to these memories and this sense of home in a way that the other senses simply don't. You've actually got a kind of shortcut, as it were, between your olfactory bulb and these senses of memory and learning in the brain. The other senses, vision, touch, sound, they get filtered out in a way that smell doesn't.

So this is something we can bring into our storytelling as well. Speaking of crisp milk, crowds over Sidra, I'll just go back to kind of how the feelies began. I've also in the past worked to curate a festival called Shuffle in a disused cemetery in East London. And one year I thought, wouldn't it be cool to make the feelies?

You know, Aldous Huxley is the feelies. And around the same time I discovered VR, which for me personally had never had that much of a draw. I kind of associate it with gaming, which I hadn't felt much correlation with. And so I was quite surprised to discover it. And for me it really opened up this new way of being able to storytell. So then I needed some VR and I needed some sensory input.

So I actually wrote to Chris Milk and I told him our idea. And he wrote back and he said, yeah, you're welcome to use our material and we'd like to support you. So Verse, as it was then called, actually supported us in this festival. They gave us eight headsets and we created an immersive theatrical experience involving these two films of theirs,

Clouds Over Sidra and Walking New York. The theme of the festival at the time was movement, migration and place. And so we sought to really involve people in these stories of immigration and see two very different sides of immigration. The artist JR from Walking New York is of course an immigrant to New York himself. And he's had a very different story so far

as the little girl Sidra that we saw. So this is a kind of crappy image. This is prototyping, I guess. This is how things begin. We took these films and then I thought, how are we going to do these sensory parts? So I reached out to the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at the University of Oxford.

And similarly, I wasn't previously in contact with them and they wrote back and they said, we love this idea. We'd love to work with you. This man is Charles Michel. Charles Michel is an experienced designer and a chef-in-residence researcher, as he was then at the Crossmodal Research Laboratory, always trying to discover how the senses combine, particularly in food because that's where a lot of our senses combine

and our sense of taste and the ceremony around it. And he also brought along this man, Mujiba Chibu, who is a perfumer. And he showed up at the cemetery to meet me and he was carrying a tiny bottle with clear liquid in it and it had a label that said human skin. I was like, OK, this is great. And we added in perfumes, wind, temperature to these two experiences.

And it was a little difficult at first because people weren't really aware of what we were making. It was a new concept. So we got a couple of journalists in, we published this photograph and then suddenly everything had sold out and people were queuing up. And even though they were VRs that people had quite often seen before,

people were still coming and wanted to experience in this new way. And we took 600 people through in eight days, so it was a kind of a public cinema. And people were extremely moved and they were coming out. They were moving VRs anyway, but we found that the addition of these extra sensory inputs had the ability to touch people in a way that was taking into a whole new realm.

And people came out and they said, what can I do? And that kind of got us thinking. And so this was in August 2015 and ever since then I've been working on building up the feelies. But of course what we don't want to do is 4D cinema, right? I mean, Disneyland is very good at what it does, but it's kind of fun.

And actually what we're seeking to do is a coherent, skillful storytelling that uses all of your senses and tells you stories to all of your senses. So of course to do that you need to make content, original content that is multisensory from the very beginning. You need to write stories that are multisensory and then you need to shoot stories that are multisensory, however you do that, and then you need to perform these stories that are multisensory.

So since then we've also been working in this kind of sensory orchestration, as we tell it. Kind of like I said before with the Psycho and Titanic example, you can't just kind of mash stuff together and expect to reach your audiences in the same way. VR, as we all know, is quite expensive and it takes a certain amount of time.

So this is a little thing that we put together for the Wellcome Trust, again basing it in our research in kind of neuroscience, perception psychology, cross-modal science. Using, and so this is kind of original content that we created, but instead of having an immersive vision, we actually took out the sense of vision. Vision is your most dominant sense, and so you find that when you start telling stories using the other senses,

you have this way of really starting to immerse audiences. Here are some perfumes that we've made for this. They're called Multiplicity of the Senses, Spark and Life. This is actually a telling of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. I originally made it for Mother's Day, which I thought was funny, but I don't know if everybody did. My mom did, so that's fine.

And we've also started working with infrasonic frequencies as well. So frequencies are slightly below your range of hearing as a human. So yes, I can make you hear things that you feel at the same time, but also if I want to, I can make you start hearing different things and feeling different things, depending on how we want to tell the story.

So just to pause for a minute and probably tell you about how I kind of came to this point. As I have a eclectic career, I have a chemistry degree. I was working in new generation photovoltaics, synthesizing copper indium disulfide for photovoltaic applications. But I didn't really want to be in the lab. I was much more interested in kind of social causes

and how these kind of renewable energy technologies and things like that and issues to climate change are actually going to be solved and explored in the social context and how all the urban populations can stop fucking up the world, of which I'm extremely guilty. And I went to live in India for about five years,

and I worked with Greenpeace there. And I was always kind of trying to figure out how to make those bridges between urban audiences to whom you often need to tell your stories because not least, they're the ones that are online. They're the ones that have more socioeconomic power. But how do you transport them to these places that are inevitably rural?

Either you're talking about a rural environment or the lives of people who live in these rural environments. And quite often, particularly in countries where you have a native indigenous population still, there's quite a disconnect between those urban and indigenous populations. There are preconceptions of the indigenous population as primitive or holding the country back and the urban population more consider themselves forward

and keen to drive the country forward. We were campaigning on trying to stop a coal mine being built in a forest area in northern India on the borders of Uttar Pradesh. And we were having a really tough time communicating about this forest visually because it didn't look like the Amazon.

We looked for tigers. There were no tigers. The trees were kind of spaced out. They lost their leaves every year. You look at a photo, it doesn't look that impressive. But in terms of biodiversity, it was an extraordinary place. And I grew up in London. I'm kind of stupid when it comes to nature, right? I had a very urban education sensorially.

But I remember going to this forest for the first time, and I suddenly was overcome by this feeling that I was in a living thing, which of course I was. I felt that I was in this living, complete, coherent bio-system. And the reason that I felt that was because it stimulated all of my senses. There was this kind of richness in the smell that was coming out of the earth,

the wind, the way it was gentle on my skin, the sunlight moving through the trees. And then we went to a coal mine that had already been built nearby. And although there was wind and there was sun and there was smell of dust, whatever that I had felt in the forest was no longer there. This place was dead, and I felt that sensorially.

And so it seemed to me suddenly that having then gone back and done the feelies, this was a really potentially rich way to try and build those bridges between urban and rural audiences. So I took the idea to Greenpeace, and they are a fantastic organization, and they've brought it forward. And we've actually created this experience about and with the Munduruku,

who are the indigenous population that live along the Tapashoss River that I showed you in the first slide. This is the name of the experience that launched at the end of this month, Munduruku, the fight to defend the heart of the Amazon. These are the Munduruku. This is Kaziko Juarez, and this is our small crew. So we actually went and shot, however you do that,

your multisensory virtual reality, staying with these people for two weeks in their village, Sore Moiba, in the Tapashoss River. And they were wonderful. And what was amazing about it is not just the closeness that you get with them with this experience, but also the way they kind of co-directed with us. And that includes their kind of participation in the scenes,

but also when we explained to them what we were doing in terms of sensory mapping, they utterly got it, because, of course, this is the sensory environment they live in. So they were bringing us smells as we walked through the forest. They're like, here, smell this, or here, taste this. You know, you walk by a tree, and it looks the same to me, but they suddenly cut the bark, and this white sap starts coming out, and they're like, I'll taste that.

In terms of sensory mapping, I mentioned that I had a chemistry degree. Our perfumer also had a chemistry degree. It was very interesting. We had similar educations, and we approached this sensory mapping in a very different way. Mine was, yes, noting down perception, but also taking a lot of measurements. We measured humidity, temperature. This is my horrible job.

We're kind of mapping how when the sun either goes up or goes down, how light intensity changes in correlation with humidity and so on. Five minutes, okay. We're also taking kind of audio recordings, turning it into vibration recordings that form part of the ultimate experience. In terms of sense, there are ways that you can do this chemically, but it's hell of expensive.

It's not really the kind of budget that you can do if you're also paying for a VR and it's working for a charity. And you kill the subjective part of the storytelling, you know? Like when you watch a film, the evidence of the director is very much there, and it's them that's telling you the story. And so I don't want to erase that by doing everything just in automated machine ways.

So we actually took Najib to the Amazon as well. So this is probably the first perfumer on a VR set. And here are some of the monsieur who are coming to us, as I was saying, bringing us things, inviting us to make these smells. We've actually created six bespoke perfumes. I was in Berlin this weekend because we actually got through to the finalists of the Art and Old Faction Awards,

which was a wonderful honor. And one of them is our scent of the Amazon jungle. So if you want to, I don't know, it's obviously supposed to be smelled in the same experience, but I could kind of pass that around and give you an idea. When we first went to Sorimoba, we took a series of scents with us to try and, you know,

kind of connect with them under a goo and explain what we were doing. Pass those around if you like. Pass those around. And we took a jungle scent, right? So Najib, he's a classically trained perfumer. He trained in Paris. He's like, jungle, green, grass. OK, so we made some green notes, put it in a bottle. We took it along with us, along with a few others. And we get to Sorimoba, and he's like, leave the jungle in the bag.

Because the second that he actually arrived in this environment, he was so embarrassed by the simplicity of what his imagination had told him that a jungle would smell like. And actually what you have is you have an extremely rich biosphere. Yes, you have kind of green and grassy notes, but you also have a lot of death in there. You know, this is the entire circle of life that you have in a place.

And so, of course, if we're just seeing this visually, or we're just listening to it, we're cutting out so much of this rich messaging that you get through things like the smell of the place. I'm going to speed up. So what we hope to do, in summary, is to build bridges through sensory immersion between people in different places. And in doing so, try and do something to help protect these beautiful,

natural places in some of the last living rainforests that not only, of course, form the home of these people, but they also protect us all of the time because they regulate our world. We've just been selected for the Alternate Realities Exhibition

at Sheffield Documentary Festival. So if you're going to be at that, do come and see us and try it out. It will also be launching in Sao Paulo in Brazil at the end of the month, so seeking to form those connections initially between urban and rural populations in Brazil. And then we hope that these are going to travel. We've created our own, so it doesn't look like that first photo, we've created our own multisensory VR pods

with a production designer who actually designed the Olympic opening ceremony in London 2012. And the idea is that they're mobile, so they pack up, they go in place, they pack down, they go in the back of a van, and then we can go somewhere else and go somewhere else and go somewhere else. And we hope to spread this message to as many people as possible and continue working further on stories that are multisensory in nature

and speak to all of your senses. There's a holding page at the moment, we're still getting set up, but this is our website, or you can follow us on Instagram, or do come up and say hi afterwards. Alright, thank you for listening. Thank you. Thank you, Grace Boyle.

We have time for one question. If someone has an urgent question which might interest everyone, feel free to ask now. I see the first, I think he was, sorry.

There, behind the pillar, one. Thank you very much for this interesting presentation. I'm wondering, how is a multisensory VR experience scalable

in such a way that many people can experience it without a huge team of people? Yeah, certainly. I mean, it is a challenge. It's a challenge for virtual reality alone at the moment. That's increasingly getting reach. At the moment, we're very much working with it in the setting of a kind of immersive theater as well. So this Munduruku experience is 14 minutes,

but actually, as a visitor, you have a one-hour experience. We work with experience designers as well. As I said, always thinking about cross-modal perception. So what is your experience from the first moment that you walk into a place? How are you made to feel comfortable? How are you made to feel comfortable enough that you can open yourself up to this experience?

And so we actually have kind of actors and people who are trained who run the experience on a wider level and a room level as well. Quite often, it's coming with exhibitions and things like that, and the VR is at the center. Moving forward, I think it's only a limitation of technology. It smells the most difficult one. The other project that we're working with has a kind of fully automated, integrated experience

using scent as well. Lingering is always a problem. You know, there's all of this. But I think it's just something that is coming. We're a little early, but there's a certain amount that we can do, and there'll be more all the time.