Walking around the campus of NYU Abu Dhabi, you can see cats everywhere on campus. Being a fervent cat lover and also the owner of three cats, I am always wondering how our relationships will change with them if they are existing in a different form. Inspired by Indonesian artist Fransdita Muafidin, I started to imagine what if cats are 50 times bigger than their current sizes. What will it be like to have a ‘street’ cat actually walking on the Street?

In this Project, I used several different assets to build a small city by the mountain. I also found an asset that has the model of an orange cat, so I enlarged it 50 times and put it in the middle of the fictional road I built. After that, I put a car in front of the cat and tried to take a U-turn to avoid bumping into this gigantic animal. It is very exciting to see that I constructed the city exactly as I thought it was going to look.

There are many things that are very challenging to a complete beginner like me. During the process of designing, I had a hard time changing the texture of the terrain, as I do not know how to design it to make it look more realistic. After several failed attempts, I finally decided to use plain green as the base colour of my terrain, which might make it less realistic. At the same time, it was very challenging to find the right assets that match each other well. I found a lot of good assets in the store but a lot of them have different styles, so I ended up using the assets from the different works of the same artist. Because of that, I am wondering if there are anyways I can find assets that fit with each other in a more efficient way.

In the classes, I really want to learn how to make animations and build the terrain to make it more pragmatic. By learning those things, I can make the scenario more vivid and realistic.

Week 1 ERWL Writing Workshop

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 fulfills 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.