VR Artwork for the National Broadcasting Company Yle. Yle web-article here.
We believed that it is a possible to build virtual world that can react to the experiencer and evoke emotional states. The purpose of the project was to support binaural sound with visual stimuli, colors, and shapes. The goal was to generate a response to the spectators emotion and carry it forward by reinforcing or modifying it.
It is a VR - Art and it produces binaural sound with synchronized 3D visualizations in real time. The aim of the work is to cause spectators emotional states based on scientific studies of binaural sounds, colors, and shapes effects on brain function. The spectator can impact the progress and transformation of the work by changing the direction of the gaze. The end product is a program that can be presented by VR hardware. The VR work is built with the Unreal game engine.
The game engine as a platform works great for creating this type of work. On the other hand for example, in terms of graphics, it is very difficult to do anything other than a “game-like” style. The three-dimensionality and the shaders are done by the same algorithms as used in games and hence it affects the visual style. However I try to avoid using realistic 3D graphics. By sticking clear in abstract visuality, we give the experiencer permission to throw himself into the fairy tale and imagination of the world. If we are stuck imitating, for example, photorealistic landscapes of the prevailing world, at the same time, we are losing something of the potential of this new technology. Why mimic existing when you can create something previously unseen. We learnt that it is possible to visually amplify the feeling produced by the binaural sound and thus create a therapeutic experience for the vr-spectator. We learnt that it is possible to create immersive sounds and visuals in a 3D space so that they are at least partially interactive and constantly changing. We learn to create a presentation that is never the same and it responds to the experiencer. Because the movement formed by the experiencer does not yet tell enough about his emotional state, we weren’t able to take use for examble the controllers that would be genuine about the experiencer's current state of emotion. In addition, using the controllers would have taken away from the meditation and stuck to logical thinking. For the same reason, using for example menus would not worked, because we very rarely are aware of our internal state of emotions unless they are very intense.
The Artwork can be downloaded for free at Steam