The Starry Sand Beach was selected for Sheffield Doc Fest’s Alternate Realities Talent Market. Co-created by the french director Nina Barbier and the Taiwanese new media creator Hsin-Chien Huang, The Starry Sand Beach is a real-time 3D interactive VR experience – coproduced by Lucid Realities and the Museum national d’Histoire naturelle (National Museum of Natural History), a scientific tale about the starry sand grains of Taketomi Island, in the far south of Japan. Subject of a poetic legend, the starry sand is actually a marine micro-organism called foraminifera « Baculogypsina sphaerulata ». It is both a lucky charm for Japanese lovers and an object of study for scientists. By exploring the cosmos and the memory of the earth, this VR experience will take us into the world of the starry sand, a poetic witness of the organization of the universe.

Now in its 7th edition, and encompassing projects from over 30 countries of production, the XR Talent Market by Sheffield Doc Fest aims at fostering collaborations between artists, creatives, and organisations focused on using digital technologies to push storytelling in exciting new directions. Lucid Realities was thus honored to be part of the 20 teams selected for match-made connections with curators, exhibitors, galleries, museums, international festivals, broadcasters, funding bodies, NGOs and distributors. An external assessment committee comprised of Catherine Baxendale (Invisible Flock), Emma Cooper (VR gamemakers Cooperative Innovations), Alex Davidson (The Barbican) and Julia Scott-Stevenson (i-Docs/UWE), selected the Starry Sand Beach to be part of the Alternate Realities Talent Market Pitched, which will take place in early June 2020.

Needless to say that Lucid Realities is more than excited to push storytelling in exciting new directions, with projects such as The Starry Sand Beach.