The Waiting Room VR
The Waiting Room VR
The Waiting Room is a Film and VR Journey which tells the story of Victoria Mapplebeck’s breast cancer (as patient and artist ) from diagnosis through treatment to recovery. The Waiting Room VR provides an intimate and visceral portrait of cancer treatment and its transformative impact on the body and family life. The lynchpin of the VR piece, is a 9 min durational 360 take, a reconstruction of my last session of radiotherapy, which marked the end of nine months of breast cancer treatment. The user finds themselves in an intimate and unexpected role of bystander. This experience is counter balanced by a CGI journey inside my body. Working with 3D artists, I bought to life the medical imaging I’d collected through out treatment. Cancer cells, CT scans, mammograms and ultrasound provide a 3D portrait of my body from the inside, out.
The Waiting Room VR explores chronic illness from a patient’s POV and reminds the audience of the person behind the diagnosis. The Waiting Room begins with a personal journey but as cancer affects one in two of us over the course of a lifetime, it also tells a very universal story.
The Waiting Room VR project premiered at the 76th Venice International Film Festival . It was also selected for the 2019 IDFA Doc Lab where it won The IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling. The Judging panel wrote of the piece, “The Waiting Room VR was able to address the complexity and simplicity of one of the most dramatic human experiences….It provoked us to breathe and feel, and left us with a sense that we just experienced something new and poignant and unforgettable”. The Waiting Room VR was also included in Forbe’s Top 50 XR experiences of 2019
The Waiting Room: VR was commissioned by the Virtual Realities Immersive Documentaries Encounters project; a collaboration between Watershed, the University of Bristol, UWE Bristol (University of the West of England) and University of Bath, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
In 2019, Victoria appeared on BBC Click discussing the production of The Waiting Room Film and VR project