Week 8
The first artist I chose is Maurice Benayoun. The reason I likes his works is his avant-garde concepts. For example, he started the first comtemporary art collection in virtual reality, which is Art After Museum. He imagines the art after the gallery, which can interact with the audience and even partly created by the audience. This is what I want to try. I want to exhibit my pieces of work in virtual reality in order to make it more immersive and more critictable. The other amazing work is The Brain Factory. It is more like a installation artwork. It use 3D printing to make abstract human thoughts visible and touchable. This project is aim to let people understand the power of their brains in the digital world, just as the power of the robots in the reality. The imagination is to let people modify the real world by thinking only. And the other works with the theme "emotion" are also great, such as Emotion Vending Machine, Emotion Market and Emotion Forest. I have been trying to express my own emotion to the audience in my works by different ways. But after learn his projects, I think it is also a great idea to invite the auience to participate with their own emotions. I think I am going to mark Moben's works in order to learn more and get inspirations.
The other artist I chose is Ian Cheng. To be honest, I cannot completely understand his concetpt of Bag of Belief, but it reminds me an aneme I have watched, which is To Your Enternity. This aneme describes the experience of a ball that is created by the god, which can inherit/collect dead creature's feelings and emotions. I think this is similar to the several demons of BOB. Ian is making a great attemption of creating such a system. Moreover, I love the style of his art and narration. He use transpositional geomery figures and flashbacks to tell the story. I think this is a tensive way to create a storyline in virtual reality. I want to learn more about this in my future studying and make use of such skills in my projects. For example, I can use different pieces of flashback to replace the dull texts in my project.
Do you consider this socket as a dumb smiling face?
Week 3
VR and AR can be considered as tricks played on our senses. Michael Naimark introduces several techniques and conceptions in his article VR / AR Fundamentals — 2) Audiovisual Spatiality & Immersion such as Stereoscopic & Stereophonic Displays, Parallax & Disparity, Interpupillary Distance and Convergence. Which are ideas about our eyes and eyesights. The engineer designs VR equipment to simulate a real 3D world for us by knowing the conceptions and working principles of human eyes and doing tricks on them. He also mentions some concepts of our ears and hearing. The visual graphics and sounds make the VR world more immersive and make our brain consider it as a 3D world which surrounds us.
The VR games and projects realize storytelling by tricking our brain as well. As Laura Hall said in the immersive design summit Telling Stories in Spaces Without Saying Anything Out Loud, she makes some examples of how designers make people focus on something so intensely that the participants are actually distracted and they will ignore the things that are supposed to be obvious to them. And some game designers make use of this to frighten players or create a certain atmosphere. She also said that people love to come up with a narrative for something even when nothing is actually happening. This makes certain objects become symbols of some kind of emotions or factors of a story.
I also think that there are many things in common for narrative experience design and immersive design. Narrative experience design focuses on what kind of world that we are living in and immersive design focuses on the story we are experiencing. Both of these designs play tricks on the participants by making use of the principle of human brains. Physical environment is about everything that has a physical presence in the world, or affects the senses automatically, like sound, temperature and smell. This is what the VR equipment should create. And it is designed through the balancing of objects, structures, spaces, surfaces, colors, lights and sounds… A good immersive experience designer can make use of these factors to tell a story well without directly telling the participants the context. Social environment is about everything that affects our agency and actions. There is a definition of alibi for interaction, which is a social rule, physical object or situation that allows someone to try a new behavior or experience or initiate an interaction. I think this is the key point of creating a good game. Because the designer needs to let the player know what they are expected to do in the game world. However, as Joanna Kolijonen said, if liquor is the only recourse in a party, it is badly designed. So if a game directly tells the player the rules of the game world, it will be pale and boring. Social environment is designed through the rules, suggestions and the physical environment. That’s why we need narrative experience design and be skillful in storytelling. And I think making some tricks on the weakness of our brains is an interesting aspect to explore.
Week 2
After watching the video, I was very interested in interior design. I have taken Creative Game Design this summer and I found that the biggest problem of my game is the game world. When combining the prefabs together, I had no idea about where to put them and how to arrange them. Now I know that the 3 principles of designing a 3D space are order, enrichment and expression.
Order is about orientation and spatial definition. The key point is to make every direction slightly different. Because our eyes like to deal with some issues such as separating a space into different parts. However, if the space is too simple, we will lose the point. For example, many fritenning games use this to create a place which is very confusing. The player doesn’t know whether they have passed a certain corner or not. Otherwise, if the space is too complicated, our eyes will feel tired and we will see a messy space.
Enrichment is about the idea of elevating the core experience of being inside of a space. And there are several ways of manipulation of form. Manipulation of enclosing space is to create an interesting space that fits with the whole style of the game. Surface articulation is to use paintings, strokes and so on to enrich the walls. Composition is more likely to deal with the order. Different ways of arrangement will make the space understandable. Novelty and tension focus on the whole design of the space, which provide the player a sense of enrichment.
Expression is divided into world expression, inhabitant expression and symbolism. World expression is about expressing the historical and cultural things through details. For example, my game was based on the myth of Icarus, so it will be good for me to use some ancient Greece style architecture and status to build the game world. Inhabitant expression aims on creating the sense of a certain atmosphere of the space. This can be understood as the personalities of a certain individual. For example, the sound of "Virtual Leonardo's Submarine" creates a feeling of underwater diving. Symbolism is the hints for the players. Such as ascending and descending and welcome through a light and warm space or refusal through chains and warnings.
After learning these, I think it is much more clear for me about how to enrich my game world. And with spaces with good interior design can cause the players to respond realistically to situations and events portrayed. Because the space must be immersive enough to cause the appearance of PI. This reminds me of the movie Inception. The characters build their dream space according to the basic principle of the real world. So if we want to create a space which will be used in a VR project, we need to make it immersive enough to express our attitude and self-presentation to the participants.
I think Psi is more like dreaming. People will respond realistically to their dream even if they know that they are dreaming. At a higher cognitive level participants know that nothing is ‘really’ happening, and they can consciously decide to modify their automatic behavior accordingly. According to the experiment, I wonder if we can apply Psi into physiological test and treatment. “It has been found in several studies that people with a tendency towards paranoia respond to these virtual characters with persecutory thoughts, and this has been demonstrated in a large sample (200) of the general population”.