Weekly Writing

Fall Break ERWL Response

23 Oct 2022

Week 3 ERWL Response

17 Sep 2022

I really like the metaphor in the Environmental Storytelling talk that telling a story through objects in an environment is like snooping through people's personal belongings which are imbued with real memory. Even though you might never be exposed to those objects before, you are immediately brought back to that memory of that exact moment. All the elements users can see and interact with need to serve a purpose, either to invoke emotions, motivate the development of the plot, add on to the atmosphere, or simply be visually appealing. These purposes are also unified to serve the ultimate purpose of telling a good story. The other end of the environmental storytelling requires players to piece together the story in various details - they are no longer just passive viewers, but triggers and participants in the game's narrative. They need to feel and understand what impact each of their actions has on the environment, and how the story will move forward.

I then looked at the Becoming Dragon documentation and it was very innovative and intriguing. One of the XR social practices I’ve always been envisioning is its capacity to redefine (in the virtual world) a person's innate identity - gender, race, sexual orientation, physical condition, etc. Users can step into the immersive “second life” experience and explore their "new identity" through internalized perception and external environmental feedback. In my opinion, Becoming Dragon is not just offered to users who have a clear aspiration of a second gender but can give everyone, including cisgender people, a context to explore the broad expression of gender identity. The second world AR creates has a great potential to disrupt the conventional discourse regarding people’s identity. Becoming Dragon, for example, conveys that gender actually has much diversity of expression beyond the binary framework. In the practical application, it can also be utilized as a rehearsal or rapid prototyping before the user makes some costly changes that are difficult to reverse, such as gender confirmation surgery in this case.

Week 2 ERWL Response

10 Sep 2022

The GDC interior design talk was an especially helpful piece because I instantly started applying some techniques to my workshop assignment after watching it. I added objects that stood out against the backdrop to leave a deeper impression - a brightly colored house and an LED screen in the restaurant. I also reevaluated the vibe I wanted to deliver in my scene, which was vibrant, dynamic, and wild. The presence of an alien object in an unexpected context, a pineapple house under the sea for example, and its color palette should all serve a purpose in influencing the audience. It was really intriguing how game designers can carefully manipulate a space to increase viewers’ engagement and appreciation of it. There are so many aspects to pay attention to, ranging from the overall layout, inhabitants, enrichment, atmosphere, expression, etc. My graduation project is to make a VR experience with mainly indoor scenes. I hope to have my audience step into an Alzheimer's patient’s living space and immersively perceive his distorted world. One of the most important takeaways for me is to take the inhabitant and their expression into account, which is indeed less of a technique but more of a mindset for my project theme. I am supposed to know how memory loss and cognitive dissonance would change their living environment, but also to communicate this message explicitly to my audience without breaking the coherence. It was interesting to reflect that the interior design criteria can vary hugely even only in terms of different inhabitants and how that can have a great impact on user experience.

Another thought-provoking piece was the podcast on "How VR affects Memories and Dreams". I could immediately think about some of the positive applications that VR has had on people, such as curing agoraphobia and social phobia by blurring the boundary between the real and the virtual to help people form false memories. However, it also occurred to me that since our memories are so susceptible to factitious reality and can be reconstructed, human memory might one day become very unreliable with the evolution and refinement of VR technology. It might be worth noting that VR may be used for unethical and inhumane purposes currently outside the legal restriction, such as deliberately making witnesses to events form false memories and give testimony that contradicts reality.

Week 1 ERWL Response

4 Sep 2022

In Chapter 3 “From Additive to Expressive Form”, Murray delves into the embodiment of expression in emerging media technology, in relation to the already existing art forms. She defines how the art form carries expression by distinguishing between "depending on formats derived from earlier technologies" and "exploiting its own expressive power”. Regarding VR technology, If we place the former "additive" and the latter "expressive" at opposite ends of the spectrum, I believe VR should land very much towards the “expressive” end. In terms of technical innovations, VR is not necessarily a repeat of antecedent technology - it involves the construction of 3D scenes, interactive programming, facial recognition, eye tracking, etc. which are experimental fields used in visual expression. Human-machine interaction no longer relies on the help of a keyboard, mouse, and screen, but on using a headset, touch controllers, or smart glasses to get an immersive experience.

In terms of content and presentation, many filming techniques are no longer applicable to VR but rather counterproductive. 360-degree camera shooting has exacting standards for the environment set-up, and the scene-switching coherence would be another challenge. VR also mainly uses first-person narrative while also granting the user great latitude to determine their own perspective and even the subsequent plot. For many scripts of self-examined stories and first-person dialogue, VR expression provides an option with a unique way to convey a message and evoke the audience’s emotion. Both Blackout and Changing Same VR experience, for instance, take advantage of this expressive form to convey the creators' ideas, which present individual stories in sequence to the audience to explore different social or political topics, such as immigrants, race, and LGBTQ issues. I found it very intriguing that VR is also great at illustrating more serious concerns. It combines the interactivity of a game with the literary storytelling of cinema to make the audience feel more prompt to explore the environment and interact with the strangers around them.

Murray then presents the four essential properties - procedural, participatory, spatial, and encyclopedic - of digital environments that separately and collectively form a powerful vehicle for literary creation. VR to a large extent represents the spatial property. The audience, with a VR device, can transport themselves to a simulated world that is more engrossing than conventional activities - watching a two-dimensional movie or playing a PC game. Its power of creating a new space has unlocked enormous potential and creativity for storytellers. However, what could stand in the way of realizing its full potential is also the spacial experience. The Illusion can be easily broken since human brains are naturally good at detecting incongruity. Every nuanced change in scenes and props might break the originally seamless blending of physical and virtual realities. Some transitions between different spaces can also be lacking in coherence, giving the presentation of the story a challenge. Content creators should think twice before impulsively using new technologies if they do not have the confidence to overcome these difficulties to truly realize the wonders of VR.