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An Arts Celebration
Loving our community
The Family Friendly Festival

Treehugger:Wawona
Virtual Reality Experience

Marquee at St Mary's Parish Hall

Thanks to the generosity of the internationally renowned Marshmallow Laser Feast we are delighted to be able to offer this Virtual Reality Experience which allows you to explore the interior of a Giant Sequoia Tree in its natural forest setting.

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Treehugger Wawona

Located in St Mary's Parish Hall car park Treehugger will be open from

10:00 - 17:00 on Saturday & 10:00-12:00 on Sunday.

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Treehugger is a virtual reality experience and can only cater for one guest at a time. In addition to the VR experience there will be a screen version for additional guests to enjoy. The experience lasts for 10 minutes (including set up time). As you'll appreciate we want as many people as possible to enjoy this experience and you are invited to sign up for a time slot on the board outside of the marquee which holds the exhibition.

NB - due to the size of the equipment participants need to be at least 1.2m tall. Children under 12 must be supervised by an adult.

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Some Technical Details

Collaborating with leading researchers at London’s Natural History Museum and Salford University, Treehugger: Wawona uses a combination of LIDAR, white light, and CT scanning to create highly detailed textures that distort our usual sense of space & time and make the invisible visible. 

 

Marshmallow Laser Feast used ultra hi-spec graphics cards from PNY Technologies to enable computationally heavy real-time simulations. The end result creates a dynamic environment with interactive particle simulations, allowing audiences to sense their presence within the virtual space.

 

The tree’s vascular system is presented through a soundscape. Sounds were generated by capturing bio-signals and sonifying them via Mileece I’Anson’s custom-made hardware and software. The tree’s external binaural soundscape, designed to creatively represent the Sequoia National Park’s bioacoustics, was built by weaving audio layers of birds, insects, amphibians, rain, and wind to create an immersive sound field, with certain sounds being mapped to movement. 

 

Treehugger was awarded the Tribeca Film Festival’s Storyscapes Award for innovation in immersive storytelling in 2017.

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