VIRTUAL REALITY BLOG
Virtual Experience: Democratizing XR & the Expanded Browser
Please remain seated until your captain has turned off the seatbelt sign. Don your headphones and click here.
As HCI is expands into virtual embodied experience, best practices should account for organic extensions of the senses in space and time.
“If I do it correctly, in terms of choosing the right sound and the right processing, I could place the sound of a church bell into an environment, and you’d swear there was a church there in that direction,” he said. “You’re fully immersed in the real world, and at the same time you’re immersed in a virtual world that is superimposed upon it.”
- Bill Buxton
“Exodus” is a browser-based XR Sound Sculpture, building depth into the monitor as a virtual environment, and augmenting the space between the user and the screen. Webcam motion tracking avails participants to a physically navigable experience without any specialty motion-aware hardware. We attempted to explore interactions that are organic extensions of our senses, like hearing in a 6DOF 3D sound-field, or exhaling to fog against the glass. I’m intrigued by the tension at the borders of what I call the “expanded browser”, and the room created to play at those interstices with which we can begin to consider by straddling that interdimensional mise en abyme.
"If you trace the back of your skull, you will find a door. Open it, and cross over. I will meet you there. You will see me, the lone horse stamping in the graveyard."
The world has ended, and the only thing left standing is a microphone in the last theatre on earth. The music is a requiem to the things we have destroyed as a human race, and a hopeful challenge to everyone about our legacy to those who come after us. Part beat poetry and part radio play, Stampin’ in the Graveyard is an immersive audio journey that invites the audience to experience the apocalyptic world of the last theatre on earth - your own imagination. Disconnect from a hyperstimulated digital world, and enter into a cinematic and embodied experience that will connect you to the world."
Elizabeth Gunawan, Jack Parris
VR Playtime: Richie’s Plank Experience
This assignment gave me the perfect excuse to finally mount a VR challenge that has been intimidating me since I first bought it months ago. I’ve even been to frightened to play it alone! My partner, who typically avoids VR, is deeply invested in my success in school (as she is an IDM alum), and so she is sometimes willing to push herself from her comfort zone for a virtual discomfort zone. And so, Richie’s Plank Experience fit the bill. We cleared the cluttered living room to open up the space, and actually had to hold on to each other for guidance, and even assurance that everything was actually ok, our feet still on the ground.
We joke about having a dollar jar, that increases by princely sums for repeated usage or abuse of the words “immersive”, “experience”, “spatial”, “embodied”, and “interactive” (and the list keeps growing...). As if my tuition weren’t high enough! This exercise had us both writing big checks at the end of the night, even from this piggy bank’s founder now guilty of violating her own edict on semantics, I felt that was an especially special onboard since she’s been such a hard sell into the medium. We were both gripped by fear and instability in ways we have never even observed or shared with each other, and even indicated we may never actually have to… The vulnerability of the piece and its embodied interactions ($$$$), and the extended embodiment of still being guided by a person in another dimension was smirked of Rod Serling, somewhere between the pit of our fears and the summit of our knowledge.
I read online that this piece emerged from an installation with where the user walks an actual plank. Combined with some fans to simulate wind for the haptics of the atmosphere, and olfactive augmentation, I can vividly imagine this as an overwhelming adrenal nightmare in a fully imagined installation. The bridge Richie’s Plank builds between embodiment and the internal dream-state thrusts the user into a waking somnambulistic fantasy. I understand that this piece was conceived as a psychological experiment, exploring a universal and deeply encoded fascination with death and the unknown that vexes any onlooker as they peer over the edge. Fundamental to the able-bodied human condition is a certainty the ground lies firmly beneath our feet, a conviction that only dawns as a baby learns to take their first steps. It is a problem of gravity, of mortality, or of “what if?”