VR and Place

Still from “How the West was Won” 1998 Interactive QuickTime VR format

This is an example of using VR to experience the idea of the American western landscape.  The interface offered representations of the west, both appropriated and my own work as a “menu.”  By touching 2D images in the VR space you could move to an experience more of what you might call “natural” videos of Yosemite.  All of this was still in a fairly crude 2D display.  It was a decade before Oculus visor was in development.  You can imagine the looks I received from gallery owners when I tried to explain the medium I was working in.  Ah well . . .

VR and place

What I was commenting on in that piece was the importance of a sense of place within VR, that is, the relation between sensory experience and subjectivity.  Instead of placing the viewer in Yosemite Valley, I placed them in representations of that space.  They still could experience the videos I shot around the valley, but how they got to those experiences was via an interface without instructions or menus.  Which is not what most people were doing with QTVR.

The easiest way make a VR experience understandable is to make the VR space look like the reality already experienced (including conventions such as animation).  Back in the 90’s most QTVRs were basically what you see with people’s 360 camera posts today—360 views of the world around us.  These are shared so others can “experience” the place and are thus left with a sense of having “been there.” That makes perfect sense and it makes the extension of that, immersive VR, an easier sell.  There are animated product and combos of real image and animation (which includes augmented reality), as well as simply recorded places from prison cells to rain forests. 

Unfortunately, at the moment any ability to invite others in VR into that space is via simplistic avatars, at best.  But that will change very quickly.  Facebook has already announced this capability and as people use it, they will want more options, finer grain detail.  This ability to create a space and invite others will bring on a major shift in web and social media interactions.  Additionally, news, pro sports, concerts, and other live events will become very energizing in VR. On the opposite end, dreamy, relaxing meditative spaces will also be wanted.

In all of those spaces, however, the user is extremely limited by the physical space in the real world and the complexity of interface device in use—and thus, very passive.   Many are going to want active experiences.  Adventures.  Stories told.  But the old narrative models dependent on unique rhetorical structures will be ineffective in virtual reality, primarily due to our current relation to place and time in VR.