Shadowtime is a VR essay by Sister Sylvester and Deniz Tortum, about being in two worlds at once.

You meet Alma, your guide. She has good news: you don’t have to stay in the world that’s on fire. She gives you a cube, the first virtual object ever created. This cube holds infinite possibilities, all you have to do is forget everything, including your mother tongue.

Making of Shadowtime

I did the technical side of Shadowtime, working closely with Sister Sylvester and Deniz from the first experiments on. Every scene had its own challenge. Alma is a 3D recording of an actor, but she’s still always looking directly at you, which took a lot of shader tricks. Shadowtime also waits for you and reacts to what you do, so a fixed timeline wasn’t enough. I wrote custom timeline tools and a music system that could cope with all the ways you can go through it.

The hardest part came after the PC version was finished, when we ported it to Quest. At first the app wouldn’t even build. The files were huge, and the crowd of believers was far too heavy. I rebuilt it so that shaders do the animating and slowly got everything running on the headset.

I worked closely with 3D artist Bats Bronsveld, who suddenly passed away during the project. It saddens me deeply. Shadowtime is in memory of him.