The Woman Who Fell to Earth and Met the Pontianak

VR Experience

Interactive room-scale VR experience | 2021
Viewed on HTC Vive Pro or wireless on Quest 3
Directed and produced by: Benjamin Seide, Benjamin Slater, Ross Williams
UE artists: Chan Guanhua, Cho Wei Li Justin

Presented at Transmedia 2 exhibition, KL, Malaysia, 2023

The room-scale VR experience The Woman Who Fell to Earth and Met the Pontianak (2021) is an artistic experiment and “B-movie” homage of confronting an alien with the unfamiliar environment of an historic early 20th-century Singaporean-Malay kampong village surrounded by tropical jungle. The kampong is home of the Pontianak, a female vampiric ghost based on Malay folk mythology. The project is loosely based on the Virtual Cinematic Heritage application Pontianak VR (Seide, Slater, 2021), which re-created scenes of lost film Pontianak (1957), but in contrast this project is generating its own narrative journey.

This research has been made possible through the kind support of an MOE grant in Singapore and ADM, School of Art, Design and Media, NTU Singapore.

Watch the video documentation on YouTube

Seide, B., Slater, B. (2020) Virtual Cinematic Heritage for the Lost Singaporean Film Pontianak (1957). In Rauterberg, M. (Eds), Culture and Computing. HCII 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol 12215 (pp.396-414). Springer, Cham. DOI and Full paper

Seide, B., Slater, B. (2021). Exploring B-Movie Themes in Virtual Reality: The Woman Who Fell to Earth and Met the Pontianak. Proceedings of ISCMA 2021, International Symposium on Computational Media Art. School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, HK.

Seide, B., Slater, B. (2021). Performance Capture for Virtual Heritage: Virtual re-enactment for the lost film Pontianak (1957). In Weinel, J., Bowen, J.P., et al. (Eds), Proceedings of EVA London 2021. BCS Learning and Development Ltd, London, UK, p69-72.

Seide, B., Slater, B. (2022). The Lost Film Pontianak (1957) as a Case Study to Evaluate Different Strategies of Performance Capture for Virtual Heritage. In: Wölfel, M., Bernhardt, J., Thiel, S. (eds) ArtsIT, Interactivity and Game Creation. ArtsIT 2021. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 422. Springer, Cham.