#1781: Winner of Venice Immersive 2025 “The Clouds Are Two Thousand Meters Up” Innovates on Gaussian Splats & Spatial Storytelling

I interviewed Singing Chen about The Clouds Are Two Thousand Meters Up on Monday, September 1, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.

Here is the story synopsis for The Clouds Are Two Thousand Meters Up:

"After the sudden death of his wife, Guan discovers her unfinished novel — a tale intertwining the endangered clouded leopard and the Rukai tribe’s sacred origin myth, which tells of their descent from the elusive animal. Grief-stricken and seeking connection, he sets out on a surreal journey into dreamlike scenes — a maze of the subconscious, mistshrouded forests, ancient tree hollows and symbolic inner landscapes. Adapted from a short story by acclaimed Taiwanese author Wu Ming-Yi, The Clouds Are Two Thousand Meters Up is a single-user, free-roaming VR experience that blends literature and memory into an intimate exploration of love, loss and self-reflection."

Here are the contextual domains that are explored:

Exploration of indigenous myths [9] as the protagonist goes on an epic journey into these imaginal (or real) realms [9]. It's a husband whose's wife [7] has died [8], and he's picking up clues from her work [10] as a writer as he explore her office [10], gets lost within a maze [12], and then he embarks on this adventure [9] deep into nature and the forest [4]

Here is the Elemental Center of Gravity:

1st Center of Gravity of Earth Element / Environmental and Embodied Presence: Blends a number of different spatial capture techniques from traditional CGI modeling to Gaussian Splats. Very high resolution spatial capture. Lots of theme park type of feel whilst exporing the maze portion, and recreated a spatial journey where you feld like you had some wandering agency. But it was all still very contained and constrained, but felt like a bit of using your body movemnt to edit and pace through the piece. You're mostly an invisible ghost without any embodiment, although there are some scenes where you have agency to move around, but there's other scenes where you're more of an invisible audience. Some incredible technical breakthroughs to fuse it all together.2nd Center of Gravity of Water Element / Emotional Presence: Very narrative and story-driven overall, with a lot of influences from the cinematic tradition, especially during the first half. There's some cinematic cut scenes inspired from film. Some spatial embodied movement of spatial storytelling, The last half involves more of theatrically staged dialogue, where the overall spatial contex