The Rose and I review: short and sweet

The Rose and I is a short, slight, sweet experience with the simplest of narratives, following a gender ambiguous person watering a rose on a tiny boulder-like planet. We watch this cute little character emerge from a small hole and marvel at a red rose protruding from the ground, before falling backwards in surprise when it sneezes at them. Could this alien plant be a distant relative of Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors? Like in the classic campy musical, the plant is sick, its bright red buds flopping towards the ground.

Unlike Audrey II, it doesn’t require human blood to restore it to life and vitality—just some good old fashioned water. So the little person retrieves a watering can, gives it a drenching, and voilà!—the rose bounces back. The protagonist sits on the ground next to it, as if it were a sentient companion (which I suppose it might be, in this cute animated world) and looks ahead into the evening sky, watching a dark red intergalactic sunset.

I don’t often critique productions that are this short, The Rose and I clocking in at just over four minutes. But it’s a significant title for a few reasons. The first is that it was the debut VR production of its director Eugene Chung, a former artist for Pixar and Oculus Story Studio who made a small number of film-like VR productions with a distinctive diorama-like style. Chung’s productions relegate the viewer to an omnipotent perspective, allowing them to step through non-interactive scenes and observe them like a god. The first production of his I experienced was Allumette, a charming 20 minute experience loosely adapting Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale The Little Match Girl, also set in a fantastical outer space location. 

I still remember how it felt, in those early years of contemporary VR, to be like a massive invisible giant inside the scene, liberated by the ability to view it in various ways. In cinematic terms, you can switch to a close-up by sticking your head close to the characters, or a long shot by taking a step back. Diorama-esque effects always play with size and scale and are extremely powerful in VR, used in tonnes of productions including the Asgard’s Wrath games, Down the Rabbit Hole, Ghost Giant, and more film-like experiences such as Gloomy Eyes, Paper Birds and Battlescar: Punk Was Invented By Girls.

Two versions were created of The Rose and I, which offer conceptually similar interactive features but different means of activating them, according to the headset being used. The Rose and I offers a walkaround, volumetric experience enabled through the 6DOF technology. A spin-off version was created, titled Rosebud, which aspires to create essentially the same experience ported over into a format for more primitive headsets such as Gear VR, which was powered by a smartphone and did not offer positional tracking. Chung’s production company Penrose Studio considered reducing the experience to a pre-rendered 360 video but chose a more elaborate adaptation process, creating what they called “Touch Orbit” or “Torbit,” allowing viewers to change viewpoints by holding and moving areas of the touchpad.

This was early in the present era of VR: a time of intense experimentation. A few years ago I spoke to Chung for an interview conducted for my PHD thesis, and he shared with me many interesting insights about what it was like to create VR content at that time. To close off this review, here’s a sample of what he said. 

“When it comes to issues such as camera movements, one of the things that guides me is that I actually get pretty sim sick from movements in virtual reality. It’s kind of interesting that I’m even in VR, given how sensitive I am to it. Because of that, part of our belief is that we want to make VR for the world, not just gamers—or hardcore gamers—who are used to first-person shooters. We want to make VR that everybody can appreciate. So we’ve made many things that are friendly. We’ve chosen themes that are broad and universal, and chosen to tackle things that are extremely human.

“I suspect with coming years, much more interesting rules will develop. One of the key things—though this isn’t quite a rule—is that 6DoF, or Six Degrees of Freedom, is extremely powerful. It’s something we took to heart from the very beginning. Also, doing things at a high frame rate, playing 90 frames per second on tethered devices—and I suspect that number will increase as these devices get better—are all things that I think are extremely important in making VR what it is. We are here at the beginning, trying to figure it all out.”