The 6th Annual FIVARS Awards – Official Winners
FESTIVAL of International Virtual & Augmented Reality Stories
The 6th Annual FIVARS Festival of International Virtual & Augmented Reality Stories continues to break new ground with its custom-built 360° WebXR theater platform ending with a bang at the FIVARS Awards. The awards – hosted in our Mozilla Hubs-powered Auditorium – celebrated experiences helping to share arts, culture, humanities, and sciences by pushing the limits of these revolutionary new technologies.
The Official Award Ceremony was captured live in WebXR in our custom-designed gala theater powered by our friends at Mozilla Hubs. The YouTube premiere took place on Tuesday, November 24th.
This year, the festival featured 38 experiences–26 interactive and 12 spherical videos–and represented countries including Austria, Brazil, Germany, Qatar, South Korea, and Spain, sharing their heartfelt stories, groundbreaking visual effects, and incisive documentaries using this rapidly evolving medium.
From 2015 to 2020, FIVARS has showcased over 200 experiences and recognized over 25 pieces at the festival’s annual award ceremony.
Here are the Official FIVARS 2020 Winners:
Excellence in Visual Design
WINNER: Hominidae | Director: Brian Andrews
Hominidae depicts an ecosystem of x-ray visibility. Creatures have evolved in surprising ways, where humans, birds, spiders and frogs share unique anatomies. This experience follows an Arachnid Hominid, an intelligent creature with human and spider physiology, as she struggles to raise her young in a hostile environment.
Excellence in Sound Design
WINNER: Symphony of Noise VR | Director: Michaela Pnacekova, Composer, Interactive Music Developer: Phivos-Angelos Kollias, Additional Interactive Music Developer: Stephan Kloß
Immerse yourself in the world of exploration of sonic landscapes in this high-end spatial sound design experience where you can make, hear, see and feel sound in a way not possible before and compose your own score.
Excellence in Experience Design
WINNER: Sleeping Eyes | Director: Sojung Bahng, Sungeun Lee
“Sleeping Eyes” an interactive experience that reconstructs the experiences and dreams of a Korean artist (Sungeun Lee) suffering from narcolepsy.
Technical Achievement
WINNER: The Cosmic Laughter of Cucci Binaca | Director: Jonathan Sims
Ever wonder what it would be like to be trapped inside the soul of a drag queen? The Cosmic Laughter of Cucci Binaca is an uncompromising and technically advanced new entry into the immersive visual canon.
Impact Award
WINNER: Indirect Actions | Director: Maranatha Hay
The 360 feature film follows the social media-driven outrage over the Dakota Access Pipeline to the icy prairie of North Dakota—only to discover the dangers of a single-minded perspective and some surprising, unintended consequences of Internet activism.
People’s Choice Award – Best Passive Experience
WINNER: Warsaw Rising | Director: Tomasz Dobosz
Warsaw Rising tells a story based on the fate of one of Warsaw insurgents, who received a note with a message from his daughter when he was leaving to fight in the Uprising in August 1944. At the time, he did not know yet that the note would influence his further fate
People’s Choice Award – Best Interactive Experience
WINNER: Gravity VR | Director: Fabito Rychter, Amir Admoni
Gravity VR takes place in a surreal world with no ground, everything that exists is forever falling. Houses, clothes, cars, ruins of a civilization. Everything just falls. And the player too. But even though all things are falling at full speed, the general feeling is peaceful. In this world without walls, horizon, up and down orientation, it is impossible to perceive movement.
Grand Jury Prize
WINNER: Minimum Mass | Director: Raqi Syed, Areito Echevarria
Love, loss, and black holes. Minimum Mass is the story of a couple who experience a series of miscarriages and come to believe their children are being born in another dimension. Set in contemporary Rotorua, New Zealand and in the speculative world of black holes.
