Week 8 ERWL Writing Workshop

October 25th, 2022

Douglas Shi

October 25th, 2022

In this work, the author recorded the seemingly chaotic dreams of a little girl. The scenes of the dream transitioned in a very abrupt way, which might actually deepen the strange feelings of how dreams happen to be like a continuum without clear logical connections. As I was watching this artwork, my emotions changed dramatically from one scene to another, as I wasn’t able to predict the next event that is going to happen in the journey. This accurate capture of the essence of dreaming makes this work even stronger and more immersive.

The game VR Chat can almost be qualified as the most famous VR game in the world just after maybe Beats Saber. It’s one of those games that you know it exits before you even have an Oculus. However, trying it by myself and watching people play it is a whole different experience. In this world, I genuinely felt the power of VR in creating a very different community and interactions between people and the arts. This is also one of the best parts of the game, it creates space for people to invent, interact, and share without any barriers. Anyone in this world can create their own VR space and invite people to come into the place and experiences it. This strategy makes it easier for artists to create their own interactive expressions and let more people view them, try them, and even be a part of them In my perspective, Jon Rafman’s Dream Journal 2016-2019 really showed me the power of VR in expressive arts.

Response to "Invisible Cities"

The city that stood out to me is Maurila city. This city is particularly memorable because it reminds me of the city I was born. When the main character visited Maurila city, the locals showed him the old post-cards house of the city and let him praise the old grace of the city without criticizing its modern developments.

This type of feeling can be sympathized by most of the inhabitants in my city as our city also had various traditions and beautiful cultures, but everything changed with the massive wave of urbanization. Old houses and farmlands were destroyed and new skyscrapers were built. Many people are shocked by how fast this urbanization canceled those old cultures and traditions in our lives and started to miss the “old good time”, but they are also proud of the fast development of technologies around them. This contradictory narrative also makes the visitors confused when the locals are trying to share their sentiments about the growth of the city.

However, the author proposed that time may not make the city grow or change – it destroys a city and forms a new one under the same name. In many of the stories in the book, the author mentioned how can time make the city totally different from its past. Sometimes people talk about things like while the historical buildings and traditions were dying, the essence of the city is kept. This “essence” is what the author tried to find and grasp, but it turned out to be volatile most of the time.

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Week 3 ERWL Writing Workshop

September 18th, 2022

Douglas Shi

September 18th, 2022

In In Micheal Naimark’s article VR / AR Fundamentals — 2) Audiovisual Spatiality & Immersion, I was able to learn more about VR/AR technological foundations that are being used to develop newer works in virtual settings. From the basic physiological prerequisites of interpupillary distance to the introductions of the essences of the experimental panoramic display, I gain the necessary background knowledge of what techniques can be used in our future works and generate insights about how can human better interact with machines, more specifically, VR/AR technologies.

Besides learning foundational theoretical knowledge, this article also raised the interesting conversation of whether we should design VR sensory systems that fit the needs of each specific user or create artificial and universal sensory systems that give users new ways of experiencing the virtual world and then adapt those different ways of ‘hearing’ and ‘seeing’. When it comes to ‘seeing’, everyone has a different interpupillary distance. Even though this number is within a specific range for most people, it still can make a big difference in terms of recreating one’s real vision. This is also why Intel’s new Vaunt Smart Glasses decides to collect the user’s personal interpupillary distance data to make their smart glass fits the user’s visual status. However, the author argues that providing users with VR works that have interpupillary distances different than their own might give them more interesting experiences. For example, the famous non-electronic work “I’m Seeing Like a Sheep” gives users abilities to see things from the perspective of a sheep; people might feel that they are seeing things in a way they are not used to seeing, but they quickly adapt this new pair of ‘eyes’ and have pretty exciting experiences. The same debate also happens when it comes to hearing-Head Related Transfer functions, where people have different shapes of ears and sizes of heads so that developers can have the room to decide whether they want to recreate the real feelings of each specific individual or let users embrace those new, but slightly unreal ways of ‘listening’.

Week 2 ERWL Writing Workshop

September 12th, 2022

Douglas Shi

September 12th, 2022

In Dan Cox’s speech Interior Design and Environment Art: Mastering Space, Mastering Place Life After. The presenter gives us a unique perspective when looking at the subject of interior design. Before Watching this presentation, I rarely related the area of interior design with things we are learning including scenario construction and game environment building. However, this speech gives me some very important insights about how we can use knowledge of interior design to make our virtual environmental design more psychological effective to the audiences and meet digital creators' goals better.

The main topic of the speech, also the thing that I believe can be directly related to our Virtual Environmental Design, is the classification of Order, Enrichment, and Expressions. When I was designing for my last project, I was having a very difficult time understanding what are the things that we should be creative about and what are the things that we should keep as realistic as possible so that the design won’t be too confusing to the audiences. By dividing the design elements of an environment into these three categories, I would be able to understand this boundary better. For example, after learning about the significance of simple patterns of colors and exclosure when we are building the order of an environment, we will be able to know why there are certain things, such as the simple patterns with minor differences in the designing of different routes in a building, that are necessary and cannot be ignored when designing the specific environment.

Besides talking about the basic principles of interior design that can be applied and should be followed in virtual environmental design, the speaker also offers us insights into how to enrich our images to let our environment augment the ideas we want to realize. For example, it demonstrates to us how the narrowness and openness of a road in the environment can be used as a tool to manage viewers’(players’) emotions, making those feelings align better with what the creator of a setting is expected to create for their audiences.

Week 1 ERWL Writing Workshop

September 4th, 2022

Douglas Shi

September 4th, 2022

After spending seven days in a completely virtual environment, Jak Wilmot, an online content creator, has truly realized the differences and similarities between the real world and the virtual world, and what people will feel when they are fully immersed in a virtual society. From the first day to the seventh day, his psychological state changed from excitement to disconnection and finally turned to the acceptance of the characteristics of this alternative environment.

Among all the observations he made during the experiences, there are two of them that stand out to prove that VR technology has gone beyond a technological additive and can be expressed as a unique expressive form. In the presentation, Wilmot mentioned that the VR environment has helped him “step inside artwork to experience artists’ mindsets”. With the medium of VR technologies, artists are able to express their minds in a more creative and open way. Before, viewers of artworks might only be able to look at them from far away. But with the help of VR, audiences can become a part of the artwork and explore it freely themselves. Therefore, besides making previous genres of artworks more vivid and accessible, like what the invention of the search engine has done, VR actually created a new way of expression.

In the third chapter of Murray’s book - “Hamlet on the Holodeck”, the author mentioned the four properties of the digital environment - procedural, participatory, spatial and encyclopedic. As one of the most memorable characteristics of VR technology, the creation of new spatial environments are long been held as one of its most important features. The recent trend of constructing and trading artificial properties in the VR world is also based on its spatial importance. However, in my perspective, a real VR environment that fulfils its spatial abilities should be able to change people’s concepts of “time, space, and environment”. In other words, when people are creating virtual space in a VR environment, they should be able to design experiences that fully take advantage of its multi-sensory and the property of complete concentration. Therefore, I would say it will be a failure to meet its potential as a medium of creating ‘cyberspace’ if people only try to recreate experiences you can get from a mobile device or a PC with a few augmented sensory features.

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