https://boomar.github.io/eatout2helpout/

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This is an immersive VR political comic, telling a satirical story using WebVR software, and exploring the aesthetic and narrative possibilities of the medium.

It tells the news story of the UK government’s hugely popular ‘Eat Out to Help Out” scheme during the Covid pandemic (2020), where 100 million restaurant meals were consumed. The scheme arguably boosted Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s political popularity, but evidence shows the scheme likely contributed to the deadly second wave of the pandemic.

Artistic influences on this work include André Fougeron’s painting ‘Atlantic Civilisation’, a panorama of over 5.5m wide, telling a vast political narrative, in a comic style. Other influences were Cold War Steve’s vicious political photocollages and David Hockney’s wide immersive panoramas.

The work explores the aesthetics possibilities of WebVR, using the A- frame framework.

An A-frame scene is composed of multiple layers of drawings, separated by distance along the Z-axis, and overlapping. Authoring HTML in A-frame forces a layered approach, as a scene contains a list of entities. This aesthetic – the separation of successive 2D layers within a 3D space gives a feeling of space and depth, resulting in an effect like a traditional Diorama.

I was attracted by the fishbowl distortion of the drawings, when moving around the immersive 3D space, which felt like moving around inside a sphere, zooming in and out of the entities.

This is a panoramic story, told over time. A-frame seems to lend itself to a wide or panoramic storytelling.