Walk Into Seedy Old Vancouver With This Immersive, Life-Sized App

It wasn't on purpose that I stepped back in time to 1940s Vancouver and straight into a brothel. It's just the first place I found.

If it was just a movie, it wouldn't be my fault—films just take you where they'll take you. Despite "Circa 1948" making a splash at the Tribeca Film Festival and being produced by the National Film Board of Canada, it's more accurately described as an app, though I guess that seems sort of inadequate to what it is, even if you can get it from the Apple App Store.

The PR material gets closer by calling it “a groundbreaking and immersive interactive storyworld.” But as I was playing with it, I described it as sort of like Wolfenstein 3D, if the levels were made with enough detail that it would never occur to you to shoot anyone. Plus there aren't really people walking around, there are only specters, columns of light living in a rainy, sort of run down and sort of sketchy Vancouver, circa 1948. But they'll chat if you stroll up to them, or poke around the brothel for a while.

“Vancouver has always had its seedier side,” Loc Dao, executive producer for NFB's digital studio, told me via a Skype interview. “It's a frontier town and culture.”

I told him all I knew about Vancouver came from Destroyer songs about East Van punks and stuff, and Dao laughed and pointed (presumably) to a window out of frame. “Yeah, we're on the east side of downtown and its still got some of that. We're always checking to see who's yelling and why.”

One of the two locations is in a pre-Bejar East Vancouver, in Hogan's Alley. That's where I heard the unseen Chinese madame talking about her girls, after I clicked on a lamp that was pulsing, which started one of 44 possible stories you can hear. The other location is in the Hotel Vancouver, which was home to destitute veterans after the war, but has since been torn down. Truth be told, it was already looking pretty run down by the time I dropped in, if the app is to be taken as accurate. And it is.

“Stan is a very meticulous artist,” Dao assured me. He was referring to the Vancouver-based artist that he and his team collaborated with on the work, Stan Douglas.

In addition to being meticulous, Douglas is no stranger to mixing mediums. Before working on Circa, he made short, minute to 90 second, pieces called “Monodramas” for British Columbian television to just break the steady stream of products and entertainment. At this point television has caught up with him, and has absorbed this bit of absurdity like it has so many others, but at the time they were quite striking. He's also created period photographs through meticulous restaging, and written for the stage, so in a way the “Circa 1948” app, while much more straight forward and something that my grandma would like, is a natural next step.

For it's part the NFB is also no stranger to the more experimental arts, having brought the world Norman McLaren's really rad handpainted animation back in the real 1940s. Even though their raison d'etre is bringing Canadian stories to Canadians, they brought a fully realized, room-sized version of the app to the Tribeca Film Festival.

The immersive, Holodeck room was an effort to take the device out of it even further, Hugh McGrory, who worked with the Circa team on the New York installation, told me. While iPads and iPhones are fairly intuitive, and playing with the app in gyroscope mode eliminates even the need the use your fingers to pan and look around, you're still holding the device. Oculus is obviously awesome, but still tethers you in place.

But the Holodeck room is another step towards immersion, designed to leave the devices and film behind. It's “a more natural way to tell a story,” McGrory said.

It's an idea taken from sci-fi—remember wall-sized TVs in Fahrenheit 451?—that is now completing the cycle by opening the door for other stories to be told. It's sort of a Ken Burns documentary where you're steering.

“There's going to come a time when the artists of the 21st century tell the 20th century to get out of the way,” McGrory said. “And it's going to come when the artists are gamers and coders.”

I'm not sure if “Circa 1948” is that moment exactly. But then, I guess the triumph of the project is that it does feel really 20th century, albeit through means, Holodecks or iOS, that were then unknown.