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Note: in direct link with the previous post about vr, this interesting evening discussion next April at the Bartlett School of Architecture about the relation between architecture and videogames (by extension, the architecture of videogames? and/or the architecture in videogames?
Or If we go for older references in our own work, this reminds me of projects in which we explored this relation between architecture and artificial environments of games or interactive 3d spaces, like for exemple the MIX-m project (2005) or even La_Fabrique (1999 (!))... Hum.
REALMS is an evening discussion on the relationship between video games and architecture held at the Bartlett School of Architecture as part of the London Games Festival 2017. As games become ever more complex and immersive, and architects increasingly adopt game technologies for visualizing and exploring their design ideas, Realms asks what the shared future of the two mediums may be. Might architects turn towards realizing ideas in virtual realms in the face of financial pressures, and what can we learn from the weird and wonderful spatial experiences that games can offer us?
REALMS is an evening of informal talks from architects, writers and game developers followed by a panel discussion and audience Q&A. It will provide a platform for the free discussion of how architecture and video games may develop together both technologically and culturally. As part of Realms we will also showcase architecture student work from the Bartlett that deals with the relationship between architecture and video game space.
The panel of speakers for REALMS is:
Darran Anderson - author of Imaginary Cities, and writer for Killscreen/Versions. @oniropolis
James Delaney - founder of Blockworks, one of the world's leading Minecraft builders. @BlockWorksYT
Catrina Stewart - architect and founder of Office S&M and architectural designer on BAFTA award winning Lumino City. @CatrinaLStewart
Maciek Strychalski - game developer and founder of SMAC Games releasing the upcoming Tokyo 42. @Tokyo42Game
Philippa Warr - writer and author, currently working at Rock Paper Shotgun. @philippawarr
Entry is free on a first come first seated basis.
Address: Room G.12, Bartlett School of Architecture, 22 Gordon Street, London, WC1H 0QB.
Refreshments will be provided.
Realms is supported by the Architecture Projects Fund of the Bartlett, UCL.
Note: Obviously, it was just a matter of time before something like this (virtual virtual reality) happened! "Virtual reality" is part of "reality" isn't it? So why not represent it as well, as part of vr... Etc.
Which brings us to the 20 years old question: when will we start trigger new experiences with VR that are not necessarily linked to some kind of representation, even if this representation is an "hallucination", or some sort of surrealistic visual narrative as stated here?
But this question addresses the paradoxal limitations or presuppositions of the media itself, so to say. It seems to open doors to alternate realities, but at the same time, it is entirely based on perspective, human vision and sound perception. It is in fact quite limitative and hard to overcome, but nonetheless dimensions of human perception that have been challenged for a long time by artistic practices of different sorts.
"A game about VR, AI and our collective sci-fi hallucinations."
"In the near future, most jobs have been automated. What is the purpose of humanity? Activitude, the Virtual Labor System, is here to help. Your artisanal human companionship is still highly sought by our A.I. clients. Strap on your headset. Find your calling.
Pssst. . . Sure, you could function like a therapy dog to an A.I. in Bismarck and watch your work ratings climb, but don’t you yearn for something more: adventure, conflict, purpose? Escape backstage into Activitude’s system by putting on an endless series of VR headsets in VR. Outrun Chaz, your manager, as he attempts to boot you out PERMANENTLY. Along the way, uncover the story of Activitude’s evolution from VR start-up to the “human purpose aggregator” it is today."
There is a great, undiscovered potential in virtual reality development. Sure, you can create lifelike virtual worlds, but you can also make players sick. Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey and VP of product Nate Mitchell hosted a panel at GDC Europe last week, instructing developers on how to avoid the VR development pitfalls that make players uncomfortable. It was a lovely service for VR developers, but we saw a much greater opportunity. Inadvertently, the panel explained how to make players as queasy and uncomfortable as possible.
And so, we now present the VR developer's guide to manipulating your players right down to the vestibular level. Just follow these tips and your players will be tossing their cookies in minutes.
Note: If you'd rather not make your players horribly ill and angry, just do the opposite of everything below.
Include lots of small, tight spaces
In virtual reality, small and closed-off areas truly feel small, said Luckey. "Small corridors are really claustrophobic. It's actually one of the worst things you can do for most people in VR, is to put them in a really small corridor with the walls and the ceiling closing in on them, and then tell them to move rapidly through it."
Meanwhile, open spaces are a "relief," he said, so you'll want to avoid those.
Possible applications: Air duct exploration game.
Create a user interface that neglects depth and head-tracking
Virtual reality is all about depth and immersion, said Mitchell. So, if you want to break that immersion, your ideal user interface should be as traditional and flat as possible.
For example, put targeting reticles on a 2D plane in the center of a player's field of view. Maybe set it up so the reticle floats a couple of feet away from the player's face. "That is pretty uncomfortable for most players and they'll just try to grapple with what do they converge on: That near-field reticle or that distant mech that they're trying to shoot at?" To sample this effect yourself, said Mitchell, you can hold your thumb in front of your eyes. When you focus on a distant object, your thumb will appear to split in two. Now just imagine that happening to something as vital a targeting reticle!
You might think that setting the reticle closer to the player will make things even worse, and you're right. "The sense of personal space can make people actually feel uncomfortable, like there's this TV floating righting in front of their face that they try to bat out of the way." Mitchell said a dynamic reticle that paints itself onto in-game surfaces feels much more natural, so don't do that.
You can use similar techniques to create an intrusive, annoying heads-up display. Place a traditional HUD directly in front of the player's face. Again, they'll have to deal with double vision as their eyes struggle to focus on different elements of the game. Another option, since VR has a much wider field of view than monitors, is to put your HUD elements in the far corners of the display, effectively putting it into a player's peripheral vision. "Suddenly it's too far for the player to glance at, and they actually can't see pretty effectively." What's more, when players try to turn their head to look at it, the HUD will turn with them. Your players will spin around wildly as they desperately try to look at their ammo counter.
Possible applications: Any menu or user interface from Windows 3.1.
Disable head-tracking or take control away from the player
"Simulator sickness," when players become sick in a VR game, is actually the inverse of motion sickness, said Mitchell. Motion sickness is caused by feeling motion without being able to see it ? Mitchell cited riding on a boat rocking in the ocean as an example. "There's all this motion, but visually you don't perceive that the floor, ceiling and walls are moving. And that's what that sensory disconnect ? mainly in your vestibular senses ? is what creates that conflict that makes you dizzy." Simulator sickness he said, is the opposite. "You're in an environment where you perceive there to be motion, visually, but there is no motion. You're just sitting in a chair."
If you disable head-tracking in part of your game, it artificially creates just that sort of sensory disconnect. Furthermore, if you move the camera without player input, say to display a cut-scene, it can be very disorienting. When you turn your head in VR, you expect the world to turn with you. When it doesn't, you can have an uncomfortable reaction.
Possible applications:Frequent, Unskippable Cutscenes: The Game.
Feature plenty of backwards and lateral movement
Forward movement in a VR game tends not to cause problems, but many users have trouble dealing with backwards movement, said Mitchell. "You can imagine sometimes if you sit on a train and you perceive no motion, and the train starts moving backwards very quickly, or you see another car pulling off, all of those different sensations are very similar to that discomfort that comes from moving backwards in space." Lateral movement ? i.e. sideways movement ? has a similar effect, Mitchell said. "Being able to sort of strafe on a dime doesn't always cause the most comfortable experience."
Possible applications: Backwards roller coaster simulator.
Quick changes in altitude
"Quick changes in altitude do seem to cause disorientation," said Mitchell. Exactly why that happens isn't really understood, but it seems to hold true among VR developers. This means that implementing stairs or ramps into your games can throw players for a loop ? which, remember, is exactly what we're after.Don't use closed elevators, as these prevent users from perceiving the change in altitude, and is generally much more comfortable.
Possible applications: A VR version of the last level from Ghostbusters on NES. Also: Backwards roller coaster simulator.
Don't include visual points of reference
When players look down in VR, they expect to see their character's body. Likewise, in a space combat or mech game, they expect to see the insides of the cockpit when they look around. "Having a visual identity is really crucial to VR. People don't want to look down and be a disembodied head." For the purposes of this guide, that makes a disembodied head the ideal avatar for aggravating your players.
Possible applications:Disembodied Heads ... in ... Spaaaaaace. Also: Disembodied head in a backwards roller coaster.
Shift the horizon line
Okay, this is probably one of the most devious ways to manipulate your players. Mitchell imagines a simulation of sitting on a beach, watching the sunset. "If you subtly tilt the horizon line very, very minimally, a couple degrees, the player will start to become dizzy and disoriented and won't know why."
Possible applications:Drunk at the Beach.
Shoot for a low frame rate, disable V-sync
"With VR, having the world tear non-stop is miserable." Enough said. Furthermore, a low frame rate can be disorienting as well. When players move their heads and the world doesn't move at the same rate of speed, its jarring to their natural senses.
Possible applications: Limitless.
In Closing
Virtual reality is still a fledgling technology and, as Luckey and Mitchell explained, there's still a long way to go before both players and developers fully understand it.There are very few points of reference, and there is no widely established design language that developers can draw from.
What Luckey and Mitchell have detailed - and what we've decided to ignore - is a basic set of guidelines on maintaining player comfort in the VR space. Fair warning though, if you really want to design a game that makes players sick, the developers of AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! already beat you to it.
Before there was MySpace, there was GeoCities, the vast metropolis of glitchy amateur websites, pulsating with gif animations, that were the hub of digital culture for countless late-'90s teens. If you haven't found yourself in some cobweb-coated corner of the internet in a while and landed on one of their sites, that's because Yahoo shut down U.S. GeoCities two years ago, just 10 years after acquiring it for $3.57 billion at the height of the dot-com boom.
Pained by the potential loss of the record of 35 million participants' personal expression, the Internet Archive Team launched a project to save the GeoCities data for posterity, releasing a 641-GB torrent file worth of GeoCities data on the one year anniversary of its closing last October. Now this year, Dutch information designer Richard Vijgen has plotted that data along a scrollable world map of all those ancient GeoCities. He's calling it The Deleted City, "a digital archaeology of the world wide web as it exploded into the 21st century." It lives as an interactive touchscreen data visualization.
The project gives a visual representation to the change in thinking and living through the internet that we've undergone in the past decade and a half. Before the internet was understood as a (social) network, GeoCities conceived of it as a city, where "homesteaders" could build on a digital parcel, grouped in "neighborhoods" based on topic. (Celebrity oriented sites were grouped together in "Hollywood," for example.) The Deleted City replicates this logic by organizing the old websites along an urban grid. Thematic "neighborhoods" that had more content associated appear bigger. As you wander the city, you can zoom in to get more detail, and eventually locate individual html sites.
While GeoCities lives on in the popular imagination as the punchline of design and tech jokes—there's even a website to paint over slick 21st-century design with a GeoCities patina—Deleted Cities draws attention to the the way that it helped many people pioneer the web, and captures a slice of web history in a dynamic and elegant way.
International supermarket giant brings virtual goods to subway commuters in South Korea, eliminating the need for a physical store.
Shop and hop: Commuters in South Korea pick out the night’s groceries in a virtual mart; the content of their carts are waiting for them when get home.
Credit: Tesco
Where the rest of us see subway walls, Tesco's South Korean supermarket chain Home Plus sees grocery shelves. In a trial run, Home Plus has plastered a subway station with facsimiles of groceries, labeled with a unique code for each product. As commuters pass by on their way to work, they can use a mobile-phone app to take pictures of the products they want, then check out. The groceries are automatically delivered to their doorstep by the end of the work day.
The virtual grocery store has been a hit among more 10,000 customers, with Home Plus reporting a 130 percent increase in online sales. The experiment is just one of the increasingly innovative ways mobile devices are being used in retail. Location-based smart-phone advertising is seen as a potentially valuable way to reach new customers. Some companies in the United States are also using indoor positioning technology as a way to guide shoppers to products and show them special offers. And software makers are exploring different ways of paying for products by smart phone.
In Home Plus's virtual store, each image of a grocery item is accompanied by a quick-response (QR) code, a boxy geometric image that encodes data—the product and its price. When each code is scanned, the item goes into an online shopping cart. Customers then use their phones to pay before hopping the train to work.
People have long been able to scan QR codes with their smart-phone cameras to access whatever information the code holds. And online grocery shopping has been around even longer. Still, the grocery industry has seen little technological innovation since the implementation of the universal product code (UPC) bar code in the 1970s. As of 2008, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that just 0.2 percent of the food and beverage industry's sales were made online. This new strategy could allow retailers to target highly specific audiences. The success of Home Plus's project may prompt other retailers to think about new approaches to shopping that could cut overhead expenses.
Whether or not virtual markets catch on, some experts think radical changes in shopping are right around the corner. "For sure, your cell phone will be the graphical user interface to the shopping services," says Abel Sanchez, research lead at MIT's Intelligent Engineering Systems Laboratory. "Think of the early days of the Web versus today. In the early 1990s, the Web was one way, like a paper book. Today, the Web is full of interaction; it's how we do our jobs. I think the supermarket will go through a similar transformation."
Personal comment:
Just to pinpoint how people are getting accustomed to mediation and digital reality.
In both the comments section on the piece and through Twitter comments and emails, people have kindly been pointing out other examples of online museums that are of interest. Here are three that stood out:
Guggenheim Virtual Museum (vintage: 2001): “The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum has commissioned the New York firm Asymptote Architects to design and implement a new Guggenheim Museum in cyberspace. This is the first phase of a three-year initiative to construct an entirely new museum facility. The structure will be an ongoing work in process, with new sections added as older sections are renovated. The project will consist of navigable three-dimensional spatial entities accessible on the Internet as well as real-time interactive components installed at the various Guggenheim locations.
As envisioned by Asymptote and the Guggenheim, the Guggenheim Virtual Museum will emerge from the fusion of information space, art, commerce, and architecture to become the first important virtual building of the 21st century.”
muSIEum (vintage: unknown, pre-2009): This online reconfiguration of four Viennese museums “…displaying gender, criticizing the conventional hegemonial ordering of things”, and “bringing out the different storylines that could (have) been told with the same objects from a standpoint counter-acting the cultural hegemony of the patriarchal view”. An intervention that is needed not just in Vienna, I’d wager. In German only.
MIX-m (vintage: 2001 – 2003): “MIX-m stands for MIXed-museum. It is a contemporary art museum that exists both in physical and digital spaces, in localized and networked environments. MIX-m plays with the dimensions of its architecture: a mix between a real museum space (here, the Bâtiment d’Art Contemporain in Geneva) (1:1), a digital space based on the dimensions of its host (1:x) and a model of this game-like environment (1:50). MIX-m has the ability to re-locate itself into this existing exhibition environment, transforming, mixing and extending it into new territories. It offers therefore a variable environment to create art installations. These works, commissioned by MIX-m, can now define and modulate their presence inside an extended space spectrum: physical-digital, real-simulated, localized-networked.”
Read Moving the Museum Online on Rhizome, and join the discussion there or send me a Tweet (@mkasprzak) with your own suggestions of other virtual museum projects that exemplify either the lack in current physical museums (as muSIEum does), an additionality (as with the Guggenheim), or a hybrid space (MIX-m).
Remember the movie Lawnmower Man? Here's why we're not even close.
The early 90's were awesome. Bill Watterson was still drawing Calvin and Hobbes, the tattered remnants of the Cold War were falling down around our ears, and most of Wall Street was convinced the Macintosh was a computer for effete graphic designers and Apple was more or less on its way out.
Anyway, at that time Virtual Reality was a Big Deal. Jaron Lanier, the computer scientist most closely associated with the idea, was bouncing from one important position to another, developing virtual worlds with head mounted displays and, later, heading up the National Tele-immersion initiative, "a coalition of research universities studying advanced applications for Internet 2," whatever the heck that was.
Google Trend shows the steady decline in searches for "Virtual Reality"
Even so, some sensed that the technology wasn't bringing about the revolution that had been promised. In a 1993 column for Wired that earns a 9 out of 10 for hilarity and a 2 out of 10 for accuracy, Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab (who I'm praying will have a sense of humor about this) asked the question that was on everyone's mind: Virtual Reality: Oxymoron or Pleonasm?
It didn't matter if anyone knew what he was talking about, because time has proved most of it to be nonsense:
"The argument will be made that head-mounted displays are not acceptable because people feel silly wearing them. The same was once said about stereo headphones. If Sony's Akio Morita had not insisted on marketing the damn things, we might not have the Walkman today. I expect that within the next five years more than one in ten people will wear head-mounted computer displays while traveling in buses, trains, and planes.... One company, whose name I am obliged to omit, will soon introduce a VR display system with a parts cost of less than US$25."
Affordable VR headsets were just around the corner, really? And the only real barrier to adoption, according to Negroponte? Lag. Computers in 1993 just weren't fast enough to react in real time when a user turned his or her head, breaking the illusion of the virtual.
According to Moore's Law, we've gone through something like 10 doublings of computer power since 1993, so computers should be about a thousand times as powerful as they were when this piece was written - not to mention the advances in massively parallel graphics processing brought about by the widespread adoption of GPUs, and we're still not there.
So what was it, really, that kept us from getting to Virtual Reality?
For one thing, we moved the goal posts - now it's all about augmented reality, in which the virtual is laid over the real. Now you have a whole new set of problems - how do you make the virtual line up perfectly with the real when your head has six degrees of freedom and you're outside where there aren't many spatial referents for your computer to latch onto?
And most important of all, how do you develop screens tiny enough to present the same resolution as a large computer monitor, but in something like 1/400th the space? This is exactly the problem that has plagued the industry leader in display headsets, Vuzix. Their products are fine for watching movies, but don't try using them as a monitor replacement.
Consumer-level Virtual Reality, it turns out, is really, really hard - not quite Artificial Intelligence hard, but so much harder than anyone expected that people just aren't excited anymore. The Trough of Disillusionment on this technology is deep and long.
That doesn't mean Virtual Reality is gone forever - remember how many false starts touch computing had before technologists succeeded with, of all things, a phone?
And, just a coda, even though the public long ago gave up on searching for Virtual Reality, the news media never got tired of it. Which just shows you how totally out of touch we can be:
Une autre version /produit du web en 3d, ici avec construction automatique de mondes/chambres à partir de pages web (le fonctionnement est assez similaire à Knowscape (! même très!): une page dédiée d'où on load les pages). Les liens fonctionnent et le système additionne en plus tout le reste de l'attirail des mondes en 3d (chambres, avatars, îles désertes, import d'objets, etc...), les design étant assez horrible et prévisible.
As reported at Google Maps Mania, Google has released new Street View imagery in France. Google had already released Street View imagery in July for the Tour de France. Now they have more complete coverage for the following cities: Paris, Toulouse, Lyon, Marseille, Nice, and Lille. Most people are aware you can view the Street View imagery in Google Maps, but you can also see these new spherical panoramic photos inside Google Earth with a 3D interface.
To see the images in Google Earth, turn on the Street View layer and zoom in a bit to see the camera icons over France. You can fly to a city covered with the Street View icons to find an interesting site. Then click on a camera icon near your desired location. Click "Show Full Screen" or double click the icon to enter the Photo Viewer mode. This mode lets you look in all directions using the mouse or keyboard arrows. You can also zoom in and out with the mousewheel. See a video demonstration of the Google Earth Street View imagery.
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Personal comment:
Je n'avais pour ma part pas encore vu "street view" dans Google Earth et ça reste quand même assez impressionnant tout ce travail de mapping. Assez "Sysiphien"! -
En s'approchant des icones d'images, vous verrez les "boules" de type Quicktime VR apparaître (la rue Daguerre et Plan B- Paris, dans l'image du bas). Double "click" sur la boule et vous entrez dans l'image puis possibilité de naviguer d'image en image (une images tous les 10m environ...). -- La vue de GE avec les boules fait d'ailleurs un peu penser à des vues dans l'env. digital de Brillantmont où il y avait ces sortes de "carrés" d'immersion dans le campus de BM.
This blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research.
We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings.
Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations.
This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.
