04. Parallels Expo: Artefacts of Verisimilitudes

// CONCEPT //

Our memories of events we experienced in our dreams trickle down into our waking life. These false memories pollute our perception of reality, like residues of a different world that are manifesting themselves in our here and now, blurring a conscious and unconscious state. What if these two could be experienced simultaneously?

Our work provides a window into an anti-world, where these false memories still exist. The participant can look “through” the panels into the room. A digital representation of the space owes its appearance to the limited technical capabilities of a 3D scanner (Kinect v1). The participant is encouraged to move around and seek the boundaries of this representation.

Through head tracking (Kinect v2) the real-world perspective of the participant is mapped seamlessly to the digital world, as if an augmented veil of a fake reality overlays the room and reveals its counter-identity. This way, the Kinect functions as a hypothetical eye to the participants’ unconsciousness, with which they can consciously look at ‘their’ memory of the room -- as if they would have visited the current space in the past. 

The lossy quality of the scan --morphing the structures of the objects in space-- and its frayed-end boundaries create a dream-like environment. This experience is enhanced by hallucinating visual effects that strike at random, reminding you of the fact that it is all fake.

The panels this way display artefacts of ‘what is not really here’, as windows to an anti-reality of unstable memories, which exists parallel to the world as we perceive it.

I: Experiments with on-site display quality // II: Projection mapping tests in Unity // III: Final prototype with stable construction and three layers

// CODE //

The source code of this project is available on GitHub under the MIT license: https://github.com/lshoek/verisimilitudes