Weekly Writing
Weekly Writing
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W7-Invisible Cities & 2 Favorite Artists
W7-Invisible Cities & 2 Favorite Artists
Invisible Cities
Invisible Cities
Many cities are described in explicit detail—magnolia gardens, radiator pipes, facades, inhabitants—but some aspects are more abstract. How might these more conceptual details translate into a virtual environment and what we might do while there?
The city of Perinthia attracts me the most for its magical setting and the interesting story about its formation that is described. In this chapter, Perinthia is formed based on the astronomers' calculations that promise the prosperity of the city. It's promised with "the harmony of the firmament; nature's reason and the gods' benevolence" (Italo Calvino, 144). However, in the end, it's now the "city of monsters" (Calvino, 145).
I find the description of this city relatively abstract because it is told by a background story of it rather than how the city is structured or what is in the city. If it were to be translated into a virtual environment, I'm picturing a small game that displays the prosperous expectation of the astronomers and the actual decayed city. The aesthetic that I'm picturing for the decayed city is an environment that is dark and bedraggled, almost like that in those medieval films about dark supernatural creatures. On the other hand, the aesthetic of the expected harmonious city would be beautiful with various plants, bright with sunshine, and people living harmoniously with joy. To interact with this "small game", there might be a portal through which audiences could travel and experience the different worlds. Or the audiences could also do that by maybe dragging a time indicator and checkout the different environments.
Two Artists
Two Artists
Ian Cheng
The first artist that I choose is Ian Cheng. I really like his aesthetics and the environment that he creates according to his concept.
His works are mostly animated and low-polyed. It's not too expensive to create. And more importantly, this kind of aesthetics creates room for imagination, which corresponds to his imaginative concept that tackles the future and human cognition. It makes the audience accept his abstract and imaginative concepts more easily.
Simultaneously, the atmosphere that he creates through building the environment is very effective and inspiring for my own VR project. For example, in his "Life After BOB" series' trailer, he successfully creates a semi-dystopian, futuristic world. The scenes that indicate the harm that the protagonist receives are lightened red, which creates a tense and dystopian atmosphere. And some of the scenes have wave-like patterns around the character and some multi-image creates an illusionary and futuristic atmosphere.
Kristin McWharter
I also really like Kristin McWharter's artworks for their playfulness and the artist's use of multimedia practices.
I especially like the piece "Trophies" where the audiences are rewarded with a virtual trophy to congratulate them for showing up. I think it's very fun and creative to have the figure on top of the trophy constantly searching for balance at the speed of the audiences' internet connection. It not only invites the audiences to stay longer with the figure's movement but also visualizes and creates interaction between the internet itself and the users. I think this playfulness and concept is what I should learn.
In contrast to Ian Cheng, most of Kristin McWharter's works are more realistic and less animated-like. Her works focus more on the main character itself instead of creating a whole environment. Her works depend more on the audiences' interaction with the work and the interaction is made with multimedia practices. For example, the main component of "Wave" is the human figures moving. It might be too plain if audiences were only to watch those human figures moving. Thus, Kristin creates interaction between the audiences and the artwork through a projector that invites the audiences to see only a portion of the crowd but constantly shifting perspective. Although this might not be too useful for my VR project, I think her work could be a good reference for my future exploration.
W3-Storytelling
W3-Storytelling
This week's materials mostly focus on how a great storytelling could be make in a created environment/space. It's very thought-provoking considering what we learned in class about storytelling and what we are making for the workshop.
To begin with, from the video "Environmental Storytelling", I learned that it's important to create a space that is familiar to the audience enough so that they could immediately get a sense of where they are, but simultaneously not too familiar so that they would not be distracted from their past memories. I think it's a very interesting balance to consider when creating a space. It also involves a lot of symbolism in terms of what features of that space would invoke the audience's impression of the space's atmosphere. Also linking back to last week's materials, it's important to consider the audience's past experiences and cultural background to create a space that's understandable.
"Telling Stories in Spaces Without Saying Anything Out Loud" is also a helpful lecture that introduces some practical techniques for telling stories with only visual clues. It's interesting that the speaker brought up some facts about how our brains perceive visual clues: the "invisible gorilla" experiment and that our brain likes to look for patterns of things. Thus, I think there's another interesting balance that needs to be considered in creating a space, which is what we want the audience to focus on. The objects with the most important clues about the storytelling should be made apparent, but at the same time, those that are less important objects should not have "patterns" that could derive the audience's attention away from the important components. Thus, it's actually quite a lot of complicated decisions to make when creating a space.
I think the project "Becoming Dragon" is also a very imaginative and interesting artwork concept-wise. I think this piece of artwork fits into the "expressive form" of media use as defined in the first week's reading "From Additive to Expressive Form". The artwork successfully utilized the very essence of VR and used VR as a medium to explore the relationship between one's mid and physical body.
Week 2 - Reality & VR
Week 2 - Reality & VR
Jiapei, 11/09/22
The most interesting similarity that I found in this week's materials is the relationship between reality and VR, which constantly occur in many of the materials this week.
In the reading "Place Illusion and Plausibility can lead to realistic behavior in immersive virtual environments", the author explores why people would believe the situations and events created in the immersive virtual reality system to be true. The primary concepts, place illusion (PI, refers to the sense of "being" in a real place) and plausibility illusion (Psi, refers to the illusion that the scenario being depicted is actually occurring), is the key to understanding how and why our brain would perceive the VR as reality. In order for both of these experiences to exist, the designer of the VR experience must adapt to reality. As concluded by the author at the end of the essay, "[Psi] includes the notion of the credibility of events in comparison with what would be expected in reality in similar circumstances (M Slater 3556)". In other words, if the events inside the VR aren't reacting the same way as the reality would do based on the users' real-life experience in the reality, the Psi won't exist, and thus the immersive virtual reality won't be realistic to the users.
This is similar to the reoccurring notion in the video "Interior Design and Environment Art: Mastering Space, Mastering Place Life After" as well. The speaker mentioned how viewers perceive and understand the visuals, designs, or 3D experiences based on their own cultural and historical background, aka. their real-life experiences.
Based on these notions, I think the piece "Virtual Leonardo's Submarine" is a pretty successful piece in creating a realistic underwater experience. What works really well for me is first the sound of the piece. The environment sound is blurred and echoes a lot, which is quite similar to what we might hear underwater. Simultaneously, when not moving the mouse or the keyboard, the users will slowly "float" down to the bottom of the "sea", which is what will actually happen when diving under the water. Thus, I think it works pretty well in accomplishing the PI and Psi, as defined in the reading.
Thus, I think the correlation between reality and VR is an interesting topic to talk about. VR derives from reality by building scenes and events based on reality, so as to provide the users with a more realistic experience.
Week 1 - Hamlet on the Holodeck (Ch 3: From Additive to Expressive Form)
Week 1 - Hamlet on the Holodeck (Ch 3: From Additive to Expressive Form)
Jiapei, 04/09/22
Where do you think VR falls in terms of being an additive or an expressive form (or somewhere in between)?
Where do you think VR falls in terms of being an additive or an expressive form (or somewhere in between)?
I think the answer to this question depends on how VR is used.
VR could be a mere additive form if the creator, for example, only uses it to rebuild a place that already exists in real life. Similar to the example given on Web soup on pages 80-82, (although it has its purpose in terms of representing a place across time and space) it won't be as enjoyable as actually going to that place where you could touch the thing there, or adding some expressive and creative narrative from the creators that give the audience an imaginative and unique experience. I think this would only be an additive form because it only utilizes VR's ability to build a 3D scene in the virtual place, which is of course a technical fact about VR. However, it didn't really touch upon the intrinsic feature of VR, which I think is its ability to build a virtual 3D scene where the users could feel as if they are actually in that place.
In terms of VR's expressive form, I think the Blackout VR documentary could be an excellent example. The Blackout is a VR documentary where the users go into a virtual NY subway and listen to the stories of people on the virtual subway. It's expressive I think because it not only rebuilds a virtual space for users to walk into, but more importantly, it creates a place for people to hear and experience the diversity and the "tense political climate" in the US. In other words, the creators of this project use VR as a tool for creating a realistic virtual experience, in order to express their ideas about diversity and inclusivity.
Choose one of Murray's four principle properties of digital environments and describe in what ways VR can achieve that principle and in contrast, in what ways it can fail to achieve that principle.
In this chapter of Murray's book, she introduces four principles: procedural, participatory, spatial, and encyclopedic. Among these four principles, I think spatial is the most important and unique feature of VR.
As defined by Murray, the spatial property of digital environments is about the users' ability to navigate inside the digital environments. Apparently, by creating a 3D virtual space for the users to immerse in and walk around, a navigable space is created. And I think VR could provide the users with an even better spacial experience than the examples given in the chapter, as what VR is creating is not imagination in the users' mind or a graphic on the screen that could go away once the users stop looking at the screen, but a simulated world that the users feel physically situated in.
However, I can't think of a situation where VR fails this principle. However, I think VR might not be that successful in the spatial principle when the users' other senses (e.g. hearing, touch, smell) are not consistent with the visual scene, since this might make the users feel disconnected and unreal.
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