Altered Festival

Altered Festival is a mixed-reality adventure highlighting cutting-edge artists and immersive experiences that alter our reality. The festival explores multi-sensory narrative experiences in VR/AR/XR that alter our taste, smell, or other senses. Altered Festival 2020 was held in October 2020 at Redline VR, Chicago. This catalog holds a record of the festival which includes two articles, 13 projects, and an interview. We are honored to have one of our jurors, Ron Martin, to share with us his experience at the festival, his insights as an experience designer. Our festival producer Jiaqi Zhang shared her story about how the collaboration with Redline VR came along. After the festival, she interviewed Aaron Sawyer, the owner of Redline VR, during which Aaron shared anecdotes about running a VR arcade bar in Chicago and the tough situations he faced during a pandemic.