Parallux’s chief creative officer Kris Layng said, “We came up with this idea for Cave, which we thought was the solution to a lot of problems that are in this emerging industry right now.”

The first issue: You can’t scale in VR experiences yet, he said. Existing systems aren’t capable enough to handle the massive throughput needed for many people simultaneously. There also isn’t yet a way to individually manage members of a large audience in VR. To counter these issues, CEO Sebastien Herscher spent about five years perfecting a system that uses data compression and management that only sends critical information “in a manner that’s built to scale up.”

Because of this inability to scale, the team believes virtual experiences are alienating and isolating. With MASS, though, the team feels encouraged by the level of interaction they’re seeing between audience members. A Parallux representative recalls that at their exhibit in the festival’s Arcade, a father with his two children was pleasantly surprised. “He asked, ‘You mean I can see my kids inside?'”

The Cave is proof that MASS works. It’s a short animated film that transports you to 10,000 BC. The surrounding walls are covered in shamanistic murals. A young woman struggles with a decision she has to make, and seeks guidance from the spirit world. The viewer has no part to play; you’re simply an onlooker. But there is a surprise encounter (I won’t spoil it for you) that immediately draws everyone’s attention to one spot. In both the real and virtual worlds, you’ll see audience members turn their heads to look — my colleague Devindra was on my right as we watched this together, and seeing his generic avatar swivel its head around was amusing.

In technical demos, Parallux saw the effect its technology had on viewers. “People were holding hands, whispering to each other; doing things that you would expect people to do at the cinema or a theater,” said the company’s COO, Gabe Zetter. “But they were all in a shared virtual environment.”

The demonstration appeared simple, though, frankly, it could use better animation. Even so, as a proof of concept The Cave is compelling. Not only can you interact with a large group of people inside a virtual world, but the creators also have the ability to customize your virtual point of view. In another demo, Herscher placed Devindra and I at different spots in the cave, facing each other instead. With more work, Parallux could have even greater control over individual viewer storylines, even.

The implications here are massive. Imagine going to the theaters not to watch a movie but to be part of a VR experience with 49 other people. With the slow adoption of headsets in consumers’ homes, location-based and group VR is more likely to reach a mass audience, at least for the short term. Instead of having people wait in line to put on a headset for a solo adventure that lasts just a few minutes, we could take part in longer, larger scale events. Parallux has ambitious goals. As Herscher said, “We’re not at all stopping at 50, we’re aiming to go much larger than that.”

Carlin’s penchant for drama and storytelling is obvious from the start of War Remains. After donning a VR headset and backpack computer, I took a step forward and found myself in the basket of a hot air balloon. I peered over the edge — all the while holding onto the straw basket in real life — and saw airships and a gray landscape lit up with ammunition firing. Explosions rumbled beneath me, and I felt the floor shake. As Carlin explained, these observation balloons were used to map out battlefields. It wasn’t too long before a virtual map appeared in front of me, set atop a wooden podium on the side of the basket. When I reached down to touch it, I was surprised to actually feel worn wood underneath my fingers.

“When we talked about what to do, there are so many things I’d like to,” Carlin said in an interview at Tribeca. “When we started this, it was the centennial of the first World War. And it’s one of those things where it seems to be close enough to us, so that it’s easier to relate. My grandfather fought in this war, it’s not that long ago. If I took you back to ancient Rome, it’s going to be awesome, but it’s going to be a lot harder [to relate]. I felt the emotions are close to the surface [with World War I]. And in the US, we feel this war a lot less than they do in other countries. The depth of emotion that’s already right there to be tapped, it just seemed like the sweet spot for us.”

Carlin says he and his team also considered the limitations of VR when they were conceiving the project. After seeing plenty of other experiences, at one point he was confronted with a VR figure standing in front of him. He realized the closer he got, the less real it seemed. “The last thing you want to do is have an experience that’s this intense, and then take you out of it,” he said.

In the festival’s Arcade section, which is full of eye-catching installations and people wearing headsets, Stealing ur feelings is easy to miss. It consists simply of a 46-inch display mounted onto a pillar in the middle of the aisle separating the exhibits in the long rectangular room. There’s a camera above the screen and a button below it to start the video, with minimal signage explaining the project.

When you’re ready to experience Stealing ur feelings, hit the button and the video begins. The presenter begins his fast-paced, upbeat spiel while a mix of stock images and clips of people using Snapchat appear on-screen. A few seconds into the film, you see your face along with an explanation of how the computer picks out features like your eyes and mouth to understand if you’re smiling, frowning or neutral. Throughout, the narrator verbally pummels you with revelation after revelation about what the film asserts companies are doing. Things like using your smartphone camera to watch you as you’re scrolling through your Facebook feed, for instance, and determine how you react to what you see.

It doesn’t just suggest possibilities, either. The video highlights patents filed by Snap, Apple and Facebook that show diagrams and registration numbers with detailed descriptions of how these companies can score your mood based on your facial expression.

It’s worth noting that big companies like Snap, Facebook and Apple patent all kinds of technologies all the time, and sometimes never use the intellectual property they own. Whether they will actually deploy or have actually started using these features isn’t something we know for sure just yet, but Stealing ur feelings imagines the worst that could happen if they did.

To prove its point, the film shows you what it learned about you from your expressions in the past few minutes. According to Stealing ur feelings, I have a:

• 0.890247 positive reaction to Kanye West
• 0.547226 positive reaction to pizza
• 0.012154 bias for black people

Throughout the film, I felt confused about how the system was assessing these supposed biases. It wasn’t until after the film ended when I asked creator Noah Levenson how these numbers were calculated that I learned that the system had been assessing my reaction to the footage it was showing me. Some of its findings were fair, like my preference for celebrity gossip over political analysis in my feeds, and that I like looking at my own face. (To be fair, I was just smiling a lot at the funny masks and filters that the film overlaid on my face as I looked at the screen.)

Many of the film’s assessments were wildly inaccurate, though, like when it said I was 100 percent Republican and that I like pizza. (To the chagrin of my friends, I am not a big fan of pizza.)

But the inaccuracy is the point.

I asked Levenson whether he’s uncovered any evidence to suggest that these companies are using our phone’s cameras to spy on us. “Is it definitely happening? No,” he said. “But maybe.” Levenson pointed to all the patents these companies have filed for different purposes as proof that they’re at least looking into it. “Snap is the most obviously nefarious example,” he said.

Indeed, Snap has a patent titled “Determining a mood for a group” that shows it using smartphone cameras to study a user’s expressions and assign a score to indicate how they feel. These groups are shown in patent drawings as being at concerts or political rallies, with multiple labels showing the rating for various individuals’ mood scores. According to Stealing ur feelings, Snap could then sell that information alongside other data like where the person is or what they might be doing at the time.

This information can then be used to cater content to you. It’s pretty much up to marketers to do whatever they want with the data once they have it. Levenson offered examples like the profiles you’re shown on dating sites or the political messaging you receive. The danger here is, that sometimes — often — the information extrapolated about you is wrong. “When they extract data from you, they market that data as truth,” Levenson said. “They decide how much of a racist you are or what races you seem to prefer.”

Even data that’s not about you could affect your life, Levenson said. “What if Kanye’s tour bookers bought Snapchat’s aggregated responses as a way to decide where to have his concerts,” he said. If you liked the artist but people in your neighborhood overwhelmingly disliked him, then you might lose out on an opportunity to catch a concert at a location convenient for you.

The idea isn’t new: Marketers already use old-school information like demographics, survey data or purchasing habits to make similar decisions. But it’s the idea that something as new and unpredictable as facial expression can be used in such an exploitative manner that Levenson wants us to think about. I have doubts that big tech companies are actively carrying out such invasive data harvesting methods, but Levenson believes that at the very least, something is going on. “What we know is there are a lot of companies using facial emotion recognition for various purposes,” he said.

Some use cases are less nefarious. For example, Snap has another patent titled “Emotion recognition in video conferencing” that’s described as a means to enable “another videoconference participant, such as a service provider or supervisor, to handle angry, annoyed, or distressed customers.”

Regardless of how a company says it’ll use emotion recognition tech, Levenson believes we should be vigilant. He started developing the film after winning a $50,000 Mozilla grant for art and advocacy exploring artificial intelligence last year, and had its official debut at Tribeca last week. You can check out an early version of it on Github. The project will launch as a website later this year, so you can see for yourself what your biases for Kanye and pizza are. Or what Stealing ur feelings thinks they are, anyway.

Lucy, and the technology behind her, are Fable’s true focus now — interactive virtual beings that you can interact with across AR, VR, phones and just about every other computing platform. The first episode of The Wolves in Walls, which premiered at Sundance last year, was Fable’s initial push towards this concept. But the second episode, It’s All Over, takes things to another level: Not only can Lucy remember your interactions, she can subtly read your intentions. If you’re taking a while to bring her an object, she might comment on that, or wait for you to reach her. She likes certain colors. And she can tell where you are, and what you’re interacting with.

“These subtle things are foundational of an AI system that has to maintain the illusion constantly,” said Pete Billington, director of Wolves in the Walls, and co-creator of the project alongside Jessica Shamash. “The problem with [Amazon’s] Alexa is we see the edges [of her intelligence] all the time … It’s important from an emotionally important standpoint, you never want to see the edges, we don’t want her to seem like she’s in a loop or some sort of robotic mode.”

You take on the role of Lucy’s imaginary friend throughout the experience, and you soon learn you’re probably her only friend. You’re the one she confides in as she explores the mysterious sounds within the walls, something her family dismisses outright. During the episode, you help Lucy take a photo to prove that the wolves exist. I picked up a Polaroid-esque camera, looked through the viewfinder and hit the shutter. Out popped a photo, and Lucy couldn’t be happier when I handed it to her.

While it was a fun bit of VR interactivity, what’s more important is that it also brought me closer to Lucy. “It’s clear to us now that VR is the most powerful way to connect to a character,” Billington said. “You have the most intimacy, you can do the most magic tricks. But AR has a ton of potential, and we’re figuring out how to adapt to those things. It’s just like you might engage with a friend, you might do that on a phone, or do that with a text.”

I won’t spoil everything that happens in It’s All Over, but the title doesn’t leave much to the imagination. The final sequence of the pieces features shots of static imagery, like viewing a comic book from the inside. Billington says that entire experience was drawn from within virtual reality using Quill, the groundbreaking illustration tool created for Dear Angelica in 2016. It’s a bold choice that feels like a stylistic punctuation mark — after spending the entire episode interacting with Lucy, in the end all you can do is watch as her world turns upside down.

“We’re incredibly suspicious that memory is the most important component moving forward in a character,” Billington said. “If it can experience something together with you… That’s what it means to be a friend, that’s what we remember as an important part of our lives.”