The Turning Forest
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- See also: Cinematic VR and Spatial audio
The Turning Forest is a 2016 virtual reality fairy tale directed by Oscar Raby, written by Shelley Silas and produced by BBC Research & Development (BBC R&D) with Raby's studio VRTOV.[1][2] It is a real-time computer-graphics experience in which the viewer meets a large, furry creature in an autumn forest and travels with it to another land. BBC R&D describes it as "sound-led": the team produced the 3D audio first and then commissioned VRTOV to build a visual world around it.[3][4]
The piece premiered on the Oculus Rift in the Storyscapes section of the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival.[3][5] The BBC then rebuilt it as a free app for Google Daydream in November 2016, its first release on that platform, and for Samsung Gear VR in June 2017.[4][2] Its soundtrack won the Achievement in Sound award at the 2016 TVBAwards, and the app was nominated for Best VR Experience at the 2017 Google Play Awards.[6][7]
Content
Tribeca's catalogue entry describes a real-time CG VR experience "for people young and old", set in a place where rustling leaves might be the footsteps of something familiar yet strange. It opens: "In a land that never was and a time that could never be, a boy stared into the eyes of a fantastical creature."[1] Three narrators voice the story: Wunmi Mosaku, Graeme Hawley and Isaac Whitmore.[1]
In UploadVR's account, the experience begins in an autumn forest lit by golden sunlight with leaves falling around the viewer, before a big, friendly creature with "gigantic teeth" arrives; together they leave the forest and explore another land.[4] The Melbourne International Film Festival programme named Where the Wild Things Are, The Neverending Story and the art of Gustav Klimt as influences.[8] In the Gear VR version, the viewer triggers interactions by gaze, such as making music with the creature's teeth, and sets off birds, fish, icicles and other objects in the world.[2]
Production
The audio came first. The original production was one of three short audio dramas commissioned by S3A (Future Spatial Audio for an Immersive Listener Experience at Home), a spatial audio research project funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.[3][2] The University of Surrey ran the programme with BBC R&D from 2013 to 2019.[9] The University of Surrey's S3A project site describes The Turning Forest as an adaptation of one of the scenes from the S3A object-based audio drama dataset into a VR experience.[10] BBC R&D then commissioned Raby and VRTOV to turn the sound scene into an interactive VR piece.[3]
| Role | Credit |
|---|---|
| Director | Oscar Raby[1] |
| Writer | Shelley Silas[1] |
| Producer | Katy Morrison (VRTOV)[11] |
| Executive producer | Zillah Watson (BBC)[11] |
| Narrators | Wunmi Mosaku, Graeme Hawley, Isaac Whitmore[1] |
| 3D sound lead | Chris Pike[1] |
| Binaural sound mix | Tom Parnell[1] |
| Sound design | Eloise Whitmore[1] |
| Original music | Jon Nicholls[1] |
| 3D sound production | BBC Research and Development Audio Team / S3A[1] |
| Concept artist | James Gilleard[1] |
| 3D artists and Unity developers | Kalonica Quigley, Richard Taylor, Brad Hammond, Josh Bradbury, Ole Alfheim, Barnaby Reilly Williams[1] |
Tribeca lists the production countries as the United Kingdom and Australia.[1] The Melbourne festival described Raby as a multimedia artist whose RMIT graduation film Assent won the Sheffield Doc/Fest Cross-Platform Audience Choice award.[8] UploadVR described the film as another BBC collaboration with Raby, who had also worked on Easter Rising.[4]
Sound and technology
BBC R&D said its aim with the project was to show the effect high-quality 3D sound production can have on VR content. Two parts of its audio research went into the workflow: dynamic binaural rendering and the Audio Definition Model (ADM).[3] The binaural production system, earlier used for the BBC's Fright Night radio dramas, produced a headphone mix that used real-time head tracking to keep the 3D audio scene aligned with the listener's orientation.[3]
Unlike the team's earlier 360-degree video work, The Turning Forest was a computer-generated world in which the listener could move within a limited range. Using the ADM, the team exported the audio sources and their dynamic position data from the audio workstation into a single WAV file. BBC R&D built its binaural rendering and ADM software into plug-ins for the Unity game engine, which VRTOV used to build the graphics, so the whole object-based mix could move from the workstation to the engine in one file.[3] The engineering credits listed by BBC R&D include developers Richard Taylor, Richard Day and Tom Nixon; S3A researchers James Woodcock, Andreas Franck, Phil Coleman and Dylan Menzies; and Frank Melchior as head of the BBC R&D audio team.[3] The May 2016 post said a technical paper on the tools and workflow was planned.[3] In July 2016 the programme for the Audio Engineering Society's inaugural International Conference on Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality, held in Los Angeles on 30 September and 1 October 2016, listed a paper by Pike, Taylor, Parnell and Melchior of BBC R&D titled "Object-based 3D Audio Production for Virtual Reality Using the Audio Definition Model".[12]
Porting to mobile headsets
BBC R&D and VRTOV wrote that moving the PC-driven Rift version to Daydream and then to Gear VR amounted to rebuilding it. They cut the number of particle systems and polygons, simplified shaders and reduced real-time effects such as shadows. As a result, the tree canopies in both mobile versions are less complex than on PC, and the creature's body was remade with fewer polygons.[2] The Daydream version added hand-based interaction: the Daydream Controller appears in the world as a leaf, linked to sound effects of a trail of leaves blowing in the wind. The Rift and Gear VR versions use gaze-based interaction instead.[2]
The Rift version rendered each sound source individually, which was too demanding for a phone. For the mobile versions the team pre-rendered the roughly 60 audio objects into a 16-channel ambisonic representation and replaced BBC R&D's own rendering code with the Google VR SDK, which processed the audio in real time; the same audio SDK was then used for Gear VR. Composer Jon Nicholls reworked some of the music and recorded it with instrumentalists for the ports, and new interactive elements such as birds were added.[2]
Release
At Tribeca the piece ran on the Oculus Rift inside a forest installation built from acoustic blankets to reduce noise. BBC R&D added a low-frequency effects signal through a SubPac, a wearable haptic backpack that turns bass into body vibration, so that visitors felt the creature's footsteps.[3]
| Date | Event or platform | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 14-17 April 2016 | 15th Tribeca Film Festival, Storyscapes | World premiere on Oculus Rift; one of five VR works among ten Storyscapes installations[5][1] |
| 2016 | Melbourne International Film Festival | Listed in the MIFF 2016 programme[8] |
| November 2016 | Google Daydream | Free; the BBC's first Daydream release[4][2] |
| June 2017 | Samsung Gear VR via the Oculus Store | Gaze-triggered interactions[2] |
Awards and reception
| Year | Award | Category | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | Tribeca Film Festival | Storyscapes Award | In competition; the award went to Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness[5][13] |
| 2016 | TVBAwards (TVBEurope) | Achievement in Sound | Won (BBC R&D)[6] |
| 2017 | Google Play Awards | Best VR Experience | Nominated; the award went to Virtual Virtual Reality by Tender Claws[7][14] |
| 2017 | Webby Awards | VR: Gaming, Interactive, or Real-time | Honoree (entrant VRTOV)[11] |
The 2016 TVBAwards were presented at the Grand Connaught Rooms in London, where the BBC R&D entry beat shortlisted entries for The Five, Britain's Got Talent and the BBC Proms.[6] Road to VR's list of Google Play nominees credited the app to Media Applications Technologies for the BBC.[7]
According to BBC R&D, Wired included the piece among its eight favourite VR works at the 2016 Tribeca festival, and the BBC technology programme Click featured it after the premiere.[3] Andrew S. Allen of Short of the Week, reviewing the Rift version at Tribeca, found it less a story than a children's book that "unfolds without clear aim", praised the environments' use of scale and depth, singled out putting one's head inside the creature's mouth to watch its teeth vibrate to the music, and compared it to a "Nintendo 64-version of The Neverending Story".[15] Reviewing the Daydream release for UploadVR, Jamie Feltham called the opening "wonderfully peaceful", likened the experience to childhood bedtime stories and told Daydream owners not to miss it.[4]
A University of Surrey page for a July 2023 inaugural lecture by Philip Jackson described The Turning Forest as the BBC's first VR release and credited it with more than 80,000 downloads.[9]
Legacy
BBC R&D wrote in June 2017 that the project was informing how the BBC released other VR apps, and that the audio tools built for it were being used on other productions, including Planet Earth II.[2]
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 "The Turning Forest". Tribeca Festival. Tribeca Enterprises. https://tribecafilm.com/films/turning-forest-2016. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
- ↑ 2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 Zillah Watson, Chris Pike (2017-06-22). "Platform Porting: the BBC's Turning Forest launches on Gear VR". BBC Research & Development blog. BBC. https://web.archive.org/web/20170630183127/http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2017-06-platform-porting-gear-daydream-vr. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
- ↑ 3.00 3.01 3.02 3.03 3.04 3.05 3.06 3.07 3.08 3.09 3.10 Chris Pike, Zillah Watson (2016-05-10). "Virtual Reality Sound in the Turning Forest". BBC Research & Development blog. BBC. https://web.archive.org/web/20160521112953/http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2016-05-virtual-reality-sound-in-the-turning-forest. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 Jamie Feltham (2016-11-16). "'The Turning Forest' Is A Touching VR Fairy Tale From the BBC". UploadVR. https://uploadvr.com/turning-forest-touching-vr-adventure-bbc/. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 "Immerse Yourself in More Than 20 Virtual Reality Worlds and Installations at the 15th Annual Tribeca Film Festival". Tribeca Festival. Tribeca Enterprises. 2016-02-10. https://tribecafilm.com/press-center/press-releases/immerse-yourself-in-more-than-20-virtual-reality-worlds-and-installations-at-the-15th-annual-tribeca-film-festival. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 James Groves (2016-10-21). "TVBAwards 2016 winners announced". TVBEurope. https://www.tvbeurope.com/business/tvbawards-2016-winners-announced. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Ben Lang (2017-04-24). "Google Nominates Top AR/VR Apps for 2017 Play Awards". Road to VR. https://roadtovr.com/google-nominates-top-arvr-apps-2017-play-awards/. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 "The Turning Forest". Melbourne International Film Festival. https://miff.com.au/festival-archive/films/26354/the-turning-forest. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 "Professor Philip Jackson - Sound is all around us: Engineering sound spatially". University of Surrey. 2023-07-26. https://www.surrey.ac.uk/events/20230726-professor-philip-jackson-sound-all-around-us-engineering-sound-spatially. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
- ↑ "OBSA Productions". S3A: Future Spatial Audio for an Immersive Listener Experience at Home. University of Surrey. https://s3a.surrey.ac.uk/obsa-productions.html. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 "The Turning Forest". The Webby Awards. https://winners.webbyawards.com/2017/video-film/general-video-film/vr-gaming-interactive-or-real-time/26508/the-turning-forest. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
- ↑ "AES Conference on Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality Announces Program Details". TV Tech. 2016-07-15. https://www.tvtechnology.com/the-wire-blog/6591-506591. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
- ↑ "Fifteenth Annual Tribeca Film Festival Announces Juried Award Winners". Tribeca Festival. Tribeca Enterprises. 2016-04-21. https://tribecafilm.com/press-center/press-releases/fifteenth-annual-tribeca-film-festival-announces-juried-award-winners. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
- ↑ Purnima Kochikar (2017-05-19). "The winners of the 2017 Google Play Awards are ...". The Keyword. Google. https://www.blog.google/products/google-play/winners-2017-google-play-awards-are/. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
- ↑ Andrew S. Allen (2016-04-19). "Tribeca Storyscapes 2016". Short of the Week. https://www.shortoftheweek.com/news/tribeca-storyscapes-2016/. Retrieved 2026-10-15.