Weekly Writing

This week, I explored the video on “I Love Bees” and the trailer for “The Changing Same”, watched “What I Learned from Spending a Week in Virtual Reality”, read Hamlet on the Holodeck, and listened to “The Past, Present, and Future of VR”. These readings enabled me to get a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of how we got to where we are right now in VR technology, as well as the opportunities that exist for creative expression with VR.

I found “I Love Bees” interesting because it reminded me of Cicada 3301, a similar augmented reality scavenger-hunt mystery. Cicada 3301 also used simple websites, clues hidden in inspected code, and going to GPS locations to answer phone calls, but it was framed more as a test rather than a story. Watching the “I Love Bees” video and thinking about Cicada 3301 helped me realize that AR isn’t just Pokemon Go or Google Lens; it’s a wider range of experiences that bounce between the physical and digital space.

Second, I really enjoyed the trailer of “The Changing Same.” Previously, I didn’t know that a VR film had reached the likes of Sundance. I thought that it was not only technologically marvelous, but also very compelling with its story and message about racism. In the same way, I will definitely keep the concept and story first in mind as I craft my own VR experiences.

“What I Learned from Spending a Week in Virtual Reality” helped me better understand the experience of immersion in VR. I was able to see a range of functions and experiences that I didn’t know were available in virtual reality, since I’ve only used my VR headset for videos and a few games. It also helped me see the range of possibilities not just for one person using the headset, but for more shared social experiences that could happen in a virtual world.

Similarly, listening to “The Past, Present, and Future of VR” allowed me to peek into the early days of the VR industry. Since I only started becoming interested in virtual reality way after the first Oculus headset was released, I was fascinated by how the idea of creating it came about, the early challenges of its production, and the idea of “perfect virtual reality.”

Lastly, I found Hamlet on the Holodeck very thought-provoking. I think VR is definitely still in the middle of the spectrum from additive to expressive, but it is growing way more expressive because of how many companies and individuals are using it for creative and technological projects. As the technology becomes more widely adopted, I feel certain that it will usher in the bold exploration and exploitation that will turn it into an expressive form rather than one that relies on existing forms of media. In the meantime, it still achieves many of the spatial aspects Murray discussed regarding digital environments by simulating a sense of physical and digital space, but not as compellingly as it could given the interfering feeling of the headset, dizziness, boundary limitations, and more.

When I watched Hito Steyerl’s Virtual Leonardo’s Submarine, I thought that its theme about how man’s creations can bring about great destruction was delivered very poignantly through the story of Leonardo’s submarine and the company now named Leonardo. I also enjoyed the ending, where the video is revealed to be the vessel for the “weapon” which will only be revealed in 500 years. However, I got dizzy from navigating the space in VR, especially because of the three or so curved screens that I had to look at to see the actual presentation. My computer’s slight lag also made it difficult to watch. I think this is an example of how VR can be additive rather than expressive. I might have enjoyed this more had it simply been a video and not involved VR, especially since the scene didn’t really change much aside from some arbitrary movements of the diver and fish.

The talk regarding Interior Design and Environment Art was fascinating from the perspective of a game designer bridging environment art, virtual spaces, and interior design. Contrast and repetition are also very relevant to my work as a graphic and digital product designer, so I thought that it was fitting that these core principles transfer just as importantly to virtual reality spaces. In fact, I was surprised that environment artists weren’t already required to study interior design, since it’s so important to how we feel and think about the spaces we occupy. I definitely wouldn’t think the Oculus was as amazing as it was if the home area I saw upon my first time wearing the headset was poorly designed.

Life After BOB: The Chalice Study was gorgeous!! The visuals, the animations, the characters, and the styles were gorgeous. I think I watched it three times just to take it all in. It reminded me of the short films in Love Death and Robots, and it had a magnificent concept and story. I especially loved how it took AI and humans and decided to give them a more complex, interesting relationside by putting BOB in Chalice rather than outside her as an enemy. I really wish that I could see this live. It made me super excited to make projects and films like this someday on Unity.

The paper regarding place and plausibility illusion was interesting because it quantifies metrics that we implicitly observe in VR: how much you feel like you’re in a real place, and how much the events happening seem to be realistic. It forms an interesting theoretical framework for thinking about why or how our own VR works can feel more realistic.

Lastly, the podcast about VR had a fascinating take on the role of memory in virtual reality. It discussed how VR can enable stronger memory formation because it’s so much more immersive as a form of media, and it could even influence dreams as a side effect of memory consolidation. While I have played VR games and tried VR experiences before, it had never occurred to me that I could dream about things that had happened in VR. It was an obvious but fascinating realization that even when we consciously know that VR is “not real”, the experience is absolutely real in our memory.

I found Becoming Dragon very interesting because it tries to understand, interpret, and almost mutate a very human predicament of the Real Life Experience requirement before undergoing Gender Confirmation Surgery through the lens of virtual reality. Its central theme was that if a human needs to live for a year as the gender they want to live as in order to get the treatment to actually change genders, then living as a dragon in virtual reality should make one theoretically just as eligible to get species reassignment. I thought it was an awesome way to investigate this subject matter, and it was the perfect medium to artistically explore the relationship between our minds and perceived bodies.

I also enjoyed Telling Stories in Space Without Saying Anything Out Loud. I think it touched upon a lot of ideas from psychology, user experience design, and environmental design, and it ultimately gives a very sharp and compact introduction to how to design environments so humans can quickly, easibly, and enjoyably digest the stories and messages contained within them. I particularly liked the quote "The whole value of a game is the mental model it projects of itself into the player's mind." It reminded me that my user doesn't see my whole model in its entirety; they see the parts of it I want them to see, explore the model uniquely, and interpret the signals I show in the environment sequentially, non-omnisciently, and under the limitations of their human observational skills.

I read through VR/AR Fundamentals and found it very interesting. It was quite lengthy, but I was able to see various ways, methods, and types of alternate and virtual reality that are not just limited to Oculus headsets. I learned a lot about stereoscopy, depth perception, immersion, and how humans interpret the reality of things around them.

Lastly, I listened to Environmental Storytelling and Intro to Narrative Experience Design. I thought that the speakers for both talks were awesome and extremely detailed in discussing both the concepts around environmental storytelling and the actual details of example works including their own. I particularly liked the idea of the alibi for interaction, which removes the social cost of embarrassment and allows users to explore new behaviors within an experience that we design. I also liked "The Nest", which combined many different media and fields in order to design a really unique and interactive disappearance-mystery experience. I just wish that we were there so we could actually watch the theater performance :(

Invisible Cities

I actually read Invisible Cities a long time ago. It was such a moving experience to read it again after so many years – to reconstruct the imagery, analyze the themes, and interpret each city’s story, having seen many more things in my own life and experienced so much more than my younger self.

I love all of the cities in the book, but my favorites are the ones that speak about memory, longing, and desire, like Isidora (pictured on the left.) I was very moved by the idea of a city you visit in your old age that once featured in your dreams from youth. To me, this represents many of the cities where I have lived, grown, and changed as a person.

I was born and grew up in the city of Manila (which sounds enough like a female name that I could almost imagine Marco Polo using it in the book), but I know that the way I experienced it as a child, the way I recall it as an adult, and the way its millions of other inhabitants experience and recall it are all totally different. Every time I come home for the summer, things have moved. Stores have changed, people have gotten older, and even my home is different. Every time I leave, I know that the next time I go back it will be different again. I will have to relearn patterns and streets and people's names and faces, and I will feel sad and happy and lost and at home all at the same time.

I have also spent summers in Xiamen, China, and in the same way, I know my memories of my time there have warped and changed. The Xiamen I visited as a teenager no longer really exists, because my teenage self no longer really exists. Now that I have also spent nearly two years in Abu Dhabi, I sense the same thing happening. It's a trap I cannot escape; I learn to love a city, develop a wealth of precious memories with the people in it, go through transformative experiences among its stores, landmarks, streets, and walls, and then leave it, come back, and feel like it is at once different and the same and strange to the older, different me. For all those reasons, I feel a lot of longing for these cities and resonate deeply with the passages where Marco Polo describes a feeling that cannot be named.

As for the rest of the cities, each one has its own charm, personality, and message. I like how the more concrete details give you a strong image that, while more solid, can also symbolize something much more abstract. Meanwhile, the abstract elements might sound very symbolic, but they each become concrete through our imagining of them. If I were to turn these invisible cities into virtual spaces, I would do my best to preserve the soul of their personalities. It might not matter whether there are exactly seven silver pipes in a town square, or a certain color of roof tile in the virtual simulation, but it matters whether or not I can simulate the feeling of memory, desire, curiosity, awe, or longing that the city aimed to embody in Marco Polo's retelling. How I might do that is through the balance of colors, the use of shifting sounds and landscapes, drawing from artistic elements that invoke nostalgia, fantasy, or modernity, and allowing myself to break away from realism in order to play with motion, time, space, shapes, solidity, and color.

In any given city, time plays a lot of roles. The storyteller uses it as the medium through which we can understand concepts like youth, regret, and nostalgia. Through his stories, we understand how time changes a city before we get to it, changes things as we perceive the city and live in it, and continues to change the city long after we are gone. It also shapes the physical environment that we engage with by wearing materials down, moving them around, leading them to be built in certain ways, and shaping how the inhabitants see their city and each other. Of course, this also includes how a person's unique subjective state, like how old they are, where they come from, or what they have experienced manipulates the time and space of their city experience. In this way, time is just as important as the space itself in conveying emotion and creating each city's unique impression on both the storyteller and the audience.