OnBoardXR Season 5: ‘21 Day Challenge’

In anticipation of the season, Brendan Bradley began producing a series of challenge videos to allow new participants to intake and onboard themselves on their own schedule. This led to a 3X growth in Discord membership and more participants began the 21-Day-Challenge in its first month than the total number of prototpyes in the history of OnBoardXR. Unfortunately, in an effort to attract new talent and foster more community, OnBoardXR limited submissions to current students (college and graduate level) without being mindful of the end of the academic year, resulting in zero applications.

The fifth season revealed an immense opportunity and appetite for asynchronous, low-stakes creatorship and remains the largest influx of new prototypes and members our community has experienced.

Production & Sponsors

The Jigsaw Ensemble oversaw production of the 21-Day-Challenge video series with a click funnel fully integrated into Discord to step users through the 21 challege videos with unique call-to-actions to onboard themselves into OnBoardXR’s community and toolkit.

Cue System

Michael Morran began development on a cue building interface that would allow creators without any background or experience in coding to build their own cues on the onboardxr.live server. Meanwhile, our 12th Challenge offered an overview of how to use a few simple scripts to understand theatrical cueing in web-based virtual reality.

Augmented Reality World Expo

OnBoardXR was nomintaed for the Auggie Award’s Best Indie Creator and invited to present their work. Brendan Bradley, Michael Morran, Rebecca Evans and Clemence Debaig presented ‘ONBOARDXR: LIVE PERFORMANCE IN WEBXR’ on Friday, June 3rd.

Reception & Analysis

While our fifth season did not culminate in a public showcase of work, it did foster several private showcase and speaking opportunities for our members. Without producing our own event, we seeded content to several events and entities, including our talks at A.W.E. and SF Design Week; private playtests of Non-Player Character, Unwanted Waters, and Mrs. Nemo; and provided mentorship and support for 30 new prototypes/creators who began the 21-Day-Challenge during its first month. One example was Mandy Canales who began the 21-Day-Challenge to develop a new play, Spaceholder which premiered a few months later at Charting The Stars

The Season revealed the value of OnBoardXR as an advocate for artists and productions to meet them where they are in their development process, rather than pushing them toward a public-facing production. As we look toward the future, we hope to explore an asynchronous model of “OnBoardXR presents…” to allow participating artists to access our community and tools within their own pace and process.