Josephine Anstey Ten Seminar AH 563

 

I am an MFA student at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory, a state of the art computer science laboratory currently researching virtual reality, with focus on networked virtual reality. EVL is the home of the CAVE, a video projection, VR display system. 

In this last paper in this seminar about cyberspaces, I want to think a little about what I'm doing here; a student and would-be practitioner of virtual reality. 

One way to consider virtual reality is to think about it as a medium with technical characteristics.

  • immersion in 3D graphics
  • interaction in real time
  • sound
  • haptic feedback
  • smell

VR is a system that simulates reality by feeding simulated sensory data to the senses. Its success can be measured by how well it tricks the senses into experiencing a data-set as a kind of reality. Its progress is measured by how many senses it effects. Its failure is the breaking of the illusion, by technical hiccups, by nausea etc.

VR is exciting because of its promises, its potential. It will translate any raw data-set into an experience that we can comprehend intuitively with senses honed by reality. We will walk around in the cell structure of the human body, manipulating and interacting with medical data in ways that will give us insight into disease. We will model fluid dynamics, moving and changing the shape of objects in real time to see how flow is effected. We will learn to operate on retinas, ski, drive a nuclear sub. We will experience Mars as if we were a little robot on its surface. We will live inside operas, films and TV shows. We will participate in thought-provoking interactive art experiments. 

Virtual reality also exists as theory/ hype/metaphor. If we jump over technical considerations in our definition of VR a "system that simulates reality", can easily be expanded to include novels and films. 

And if, more generally, we say "systems that represent reality", I would include most other art forms. And "systems that represent reality" could also be a description of our experiences mediated by our senses, ie. the whole of what we experience as external reality can be seen as virtual, as constructed/created by our brains/imagination. In which case we must include consciousness itself as part of virtual reality. 

In this theoretical or metaphorical sense, the line between the real and the virtual is not at all clear. The brain is not a device that necessarily distinguishes the virtual and the real, as it creates stories about:

  • itself 
  • its life 
  • its own history. 

as it interacts with its familial context to create stories about:

  • its family 
  • its life 
  • its history 

as it interacts with its society, both micro and macro to create stories about:

  • its nation 
  • school, work, gang (peer group) 
  • family 
  • medialand (fact) 
  • medialand (fiction) 

Other issues that don't seem clear to me are, who is really inhabiting reality: 

  • Those in the ivory tower of academia? 
  • Those on the streets - mean streets? 
  • Those in power - inside the beltway? 
  • The people of America - the haves? 
  • Midwesterners - in the boonies? 
  • New Yorkers? 
  • Californians? 
  • EuroTrash? 
  • Third Worlders? 
  • Second Worlders? 

And when do I feel most alive?/real? And are the two synonymous? 

Growing up in the middle class in England, certainly didn't feel real. Our careful, clever, literary, repressed, civilised life seemed very light-weight compared to my observation and imagination of working class life with real emotions, real love, real expression of feeling. 

My parent's world was safe, unsexual and kind. We were all very careful to deny any depression/ anger/madness.  It was most important not to hurt or upset anyone. Which resulted in everyone trying to guess what everyone else was thinking and wanting and suggesting that we do that. Very virtual.

My school was riven with class fault lines. Things existed there that we did not admit of at home, there was sex, dirty talk, danger, the possibility of physical violence. 

How was I meant to navigate these places? Which one was real? It seemed necessary to create areas of relative reality, knowing things were not as I was told they were, but going along with the fiction depending on the context. Always already in a virtual world. 

As a child I hid in books; realities that were pleasingly coherent. I walked alone in the woods and knew that being alone felt most real to me. As I grew older I was very open to political theories that pulled away the "fabric of reality" to reveal other truths and realities underneath. I liked theories that examined the conflicting versions of reality, to see how they were constructed, by who, how much influence they had and what context or arena they wielded power in. And I wanted to be part of that process, putting my version of reality out. 

Clearly because my grasp of power (the power to fix reality) is very virtual, I started my attempt to formulate/create reality as I thought fit, in a women's studies program using the medium of academic writing. But I found it increasingly frustrating. A clear argument tends to be very linear, even causal. Adding too many caveats, convolutions and interlinking complexities, can destroy its elegance and utility. I didn't feel it was the right tool to model the rich, multi-dimensional, open-ended "thing" I wanted my model of reality to be. 

So I moved on to fiction, which I believe is a very powerful way of creating chains of significance, cross references, contradictory messages, parallel arguments. I continue to think its a very successful method of simulating/representing/ reality in a way that embeds it in both a horizontal context - dealing with metaphorical and psychological seepage across disciplines, across borders, across societies and cultures - and in a vertical context - dealing with historical forces. 

Nevertheless I got bitten by the hypermedia/multimedia bug. It appeals to my sci-fi mentality. I believed/believe  that maybe it is a good place to play with non-linearity.  I liked the mixing of media, I thought that hypertext could maybe make the web of connections clearer in any complex argument or story. I also thought that maybe this world was one in which I could find, at the end of a course of study, a job that would actually interest me. The school I applied to, turned out to focus on VR. 

I don't think that VR is necessarily a better or more complete way to do what not only art but life does: create, recreate, analyse, focus on, fantasize about, extrapolate from, represent, take to absurd extremes, all the rules and methods and stories in all our abundant realities (interior and exterior). 
I mean film has 2D graphics and a time dimension.
Novels use symbols to represent four dimensions.
How many dimensions has poetry?
How immersive is painting?

I mean we could argue that recording devices have progressively improved from pictures and pictograms, from oral to written records to repeatable print to digital information. From painting to cameras to film to film with sound. And VR continues this progress, adding two new improvements - 3D graphics and the promise of interaction. 

I am not sure that any of these methods actually do a better job of representation than any other - just a different job, and different kinds of data and information benefit from different methods of recording and replaying.

What's exciting here and now is figuring out what exactly is this new medium good for, best for. For me the question is whether I can create in VR, a simulation that is as good, as immersive as a novel or a short story - is as interesting, as engaging as a film. And the challenge is to figure out what the technical aspects of this new media do for the content - what aspects of our world can interactivity, 3d sound and graphics, really winkle out.

At the moment VR is rife with translations from other media - and as those translations settle in some will evolve and work and other won't. At the moment we're trying to grow both a practise that works and an audience that it works for. 

And what do I "get" from this medium?

For me VR has presented a new way of writing - programming also uses a set of symbols and rules to create a world. It's a very godlike activity - two familiar metaphors of God seem to apply - in one God sets all the machinery in place, then starts the world running; in the other God sets up the rules, of physics, of evolution, starts the program and watches what happens.

Because for me the essence of VR is interactivity, all my personal efforts revolve around how, why, what to make interactive. Because my background is in narrative and I believe very strongly in the power of narrative to draw the user in, to immerse, I want my interaction to exist in a narrative structure.

So I am trying to create a virtual creature - a simple intelligent system that will engage the user at an emotional level. My starting points are simple - one is people's habit of anthropomorphising inanimate objects, and often finding them difficult and unbiddable. So I'm relying on this tendancy as I create my frustrating creature. Secondly in the VR system I'm using the information I get about the user is the location of the tracked parts of his/her body. That is the sensory information my "Thing" can get, and that's what I base the intelligence on. My narrative is structured around the interaction that is possible between this "Thing" and the user.

This is an experiment and a small one. In story-telling we identify with the protagonist. All I'm trying to do is to make that identity absolute - to give the user the very real illusion that s/he is the protagonist. And this protagonist is reacting to and coping with the world I have made, reality as I think it may be, in all its complexity, in all its virtuality.

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