VR1–Whimsies Attic
Personally, I am not a big fan of playing games or VR games. I do not find it appealing or engaging. I prefer real-world experiences and find virtual experiences time-consuming and less fulfilling. Additionally, realism stands out to me. Compared to realism, numerous researchers have claimed that escapism has a relationship with negative outcomes, such as depression, time wastage, negative mood, social anxiety, loneliness, and self-discrepancy.
This my first time getting the knowledge of “what is behind the VR scene”. I had very little experience on playing VR games because you had to find someone accompany with you… I sometimes got a headache while wearing a VR headset. I had experiences on watching immersive exhibitions before:
TeamLab Borderless is a world of artworks without boundaries, a museum without a map created by art collective teamLab. TeamLab Borderless is a group of artworks that form one borderless world. Artworks move out of rooms, communicate with other works, influence, and sometimes intermingle with each other with no boundaries. Immerse your body in this borderless art. Wander, explore with intention, discover, and create a new world with others.
This was the first immersive-projector work in shanghai, which was filled with my favourite artist-Van Gogh’s artworks. I quite loved the experience the first time. It was very immersing because you could not find the scale of yourself. And then because of the development of technology, I found it a bit more common… But for sure, it would be a nice experience for the first time…
I think VR technology is new to me, as I felt like I am a retro woman. I quite like ”The Research”, it reminds me the scene in Dune and Ant-Man. I was chatting with one of the vr students after class and we talked about how scifi compositions were made in films. As they never tried modular synth before, they were very surprised how these things sounded like. And, not to offend anyone, I still feel like electronic was quite ‘new invention’ at this stage.
Sounds in VR?
For effective virtual realities, “presence,” the feeling of “being there” in a virtual environment (VR), is deemed an essential prerequisite. Several studies have assessed the effect of the (non-)availability of auditory stimulation on presence, but due to differences in study design (e.g., virtual realities used, types of sounds included, rendering technologies employed), generalizing the results and estimating the effect of the auditory component is difficult. In two experiments, the influence of an ambient nature soundscape and movement-triggered step sounds were investigated regarding their effects on presence. In each experiment, approximately forty participants walked on a treadmill, thereby strolling through a virtual park environment reproduced via a stereoscopic head-mounted display (HMD), while the acoustical environment was delivered via noise-canceling headphones. Including an appropriate soundscape or self-triggered footsteps had differential effects on subscales of presence, in that both affected overall presence and realism, while involvement was improved and distraction reduced by the ambient soundscape only. (Wolfgang Ellermeier, 2020)