Join creative director Judith Cheung at developer Lofty Sky and Theirno Soumaré, a cultural consultant at the Batuki Music Society, for a behind-the-scenes look at the West African level, including West African Griot culture, in Verse VR. Verse VR is available now on Meta Quest and Steam VR. The Verse VR Deluxe version for Meta Quest features additional poetry, music, and spoken word hotspots.
00:00Verse VR is an immersive journey through poetry, music, and oral traditions from cultures around the world.
00:07I'm Judith Chung, Creative Director at Lofty Sky Entertainment, and here I have with me Tirno Sumere.
00:14He's a cultural consultant who worked with us from Batuqi Music Society on one of my favorite levels of Verse VR, the West African and Mali Riverbed.
00:22Tirno, what was it like to see your traditional culture in virtual reality?
00:26For myself, it was just an amazing thing. I never see something like that.
00:31Putting the African tradition in a virtual reality will maybe give people to have another vision of African culture in general,
00:38especially those who are outside Africa who never have the chance to see the African culture or myth and African in general.
00:45So this was my first ever encounter with West African griot culture. Can you tell those who might not be familiar what is a griot?
00:53Griot is the person who has to take care of the tradition from the past to the present and try to show the new generation exactly what they have to know about their own culture.
01:04And we call them also the storytellers. We call them also the library, the library, working library.
01:10Very nice. And they do this through song and music.
01:13You can experience West African griot culture in Verse VR, along with Chinese poetry from old masters like Li Bai and Lao Tzu, the works of Khalil Gibran, and European classics.
01:27Verse VR features eight unique environments as well as 39 spoken word performances, many of them recorded exclusively for the app.
01:36We are bringing together virtual reality and traditional cultures in an experience unlike any other. Immerse yourself in Verse.
01:48Verse VR is available now on MetaQuest and Steam.
01:52We'll see you next time on MetaQuest and Steam.
01:54We'll see you next time on MetaQuest and Steam.
01:55We'll see you next time on MetaQuest and Steam.
01:56We'll see you next time on MetaQuest and Steam.
01:57We'll see you next time on MetaQuest and Steam.
01:58We'll see you next time on MetaQuest and Steam.
01:59We'll see you next time on MetaQuest and Steam.
02:01We'll see you next time on MetaQuest and Steam.
02:02We'll see you next time on MetaQuest and Steam.
02:03We'll see you next time on MetaQuest and Steam.
02:04We'll see you next time on MetaQuest and Steam.
02:05We'll see you next time on MetaQuest and Steam.
02:06We'll see you next time on MetaQuest and Steam.
