At Artheria, we’ve been planning the release of this article for months. We know we need to update you on important news that involves us, and we were simply waiting for the right moment.

I realized that for me this is not insignificant: if on the one hand it means having done our job well, on the other hand it means … that this adventure is coming to an end! For this reason, I have chosen not to hide my feelings – a mixture of satisfaction and melancholy – in writing this post.

I will come to the point: some of you may have wondered why – despite some small events – Vajont has not been mentioned about the end of the Venice VR Expanded, the Virtual Reality section of the Venice International Film Festival, in its 2020 edition.

Well, the reason is simple: we spent these months – juggling, as you can imagine, all the difficulties that a pandemic can create for an indie production company – to adapt the piece to a fully online version.
Adapting the piece to an online version means designing from scratch the user-experience, rewriting the code, removing polygons from the 3D models and – as we saw in the article dedicated to the production pipe-line – testing, testing, testing to find a mode of interaction that can be intuitive for all types of audience.

Why? Simple!
Because we wanted all of you to be able to enjoy Vajont without any difficulty.

Vajont, as those who have followed us in reading this blog know, was born as a museum installation; and this had led us to an essentially physical-based user-experience design: we were waiting, in fact, for the moment in which we could build a physical location and, simply, wait for you at the museum.

This day never came. The pandemic fell upon our distribution strategy: museums opening and closing intermittently, the need to recharge the disinfection costs of the physical scenography on the tickets… all elements that, instead of bringing us closer to the audience, created in us the feeling of pushing them away.

There was only one solution. Get back to work and create a native version of Vajont for online distribution on stand-alone headsets.

So here we are at the core of this post.

The first news I want to tell you is that, in recent months, we have created from scratch a version of Vajont optimized for Oculus Quest: the type of headset that, according to our market research, is most popular among you.

No need to go to a museum, then, nor to pay attention to your movements to avoid tripping over cables!
And to those of you who are wondering which type of Oculus Quest is the most appropriate – if no. 1 or no. 2 -, I say don’t worry: Vajont is optimized to work on both.

The second news I want to give you is that Vajont is now available on the Oculus Store!

Is there anyone among you who believes that bringing your product to an online store is a simple drag-n-drop operation? I’m sorry to say that this is not the case: Oculus’ fame is directly proportional to the quality of the experiences it hosts. That’s why the selection process, carried out not by a computer but also by human curators to ensure the correspondence between the piece and the Oculus editorial line, is particularly long and strict.

Having the chance to distribute Vajont on the Oculus Store means having the chance to reach you all in your homes, and to spend these times of uncertainty with you.

What are you waiting for?
Try it now: https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/4350073158413049/