Immersion:
The experience of entering into the simulation or suggestion of a 3-dimensional
environment
Concept:
Artistic creation has built on the possibilities of total sensory experience
immersion and engagement of all the senses in the totalization of the
artwork.
Immersion engages the suspension of disbelief in the viewer to render
the experience more believable, possibly even “realistic.”
As though you are actually there.
“Experience
Theater”
Since the
1960s, computers have been used to create immersive, 3d experience in
cyberspace.
What is
cyberspace?
Where is cyberspace?
How do we interact between cyberspace and the physical world?
Cyberspace:
“Cyberspace is an immersion into another world, a simulated world
you can view and touch directly. Cyberpsace is a human-computer interface,
but it is also a mind-space, the way mathematics and music and myth are
mind-space – mind-space you can walk around in and grab by the handles.”
– Howard Rheingold
Are we disembodied?
Recent examples:
Osmose, Ephemere, Char Davies
Landscape One, Luc Courschene
Mori, Randall Packer
A Brief
History of Virtual Reality:
Caves of Lascaux, Sensorial
Wagner,
Total Artwork
Morton Heilig,
Sensorama
“you are no longer identified with some actor who was having your
experience, you had the experience yourself.”
Ivan Sutherland,
Ultimate Display
William
Gibson / cyberspace
“Cyberspace:
a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate
operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts…
A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer
in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in
the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data like city
lights, receding. “– William Gibson, Neuromancer
Scott Fisher
/ NASA and telepresence
Jaron Lanier,
Virtual Reality
“Seeing the representation of your hand suddenly changes your perspective.
You now have a perceptual anchor in the virtual world. You’re actually
inside the computer because you can see your hand in there. To move about
the tinker-tooy world, you simply point with one gloved finger in the
appropriate direction and the angle of your thumb controls the speed of
your flight. The computer had been taught to recognize that gesture as
the desire for movement. Other gestures were possible; for example, closing
your fist caused you to grab any object that your hand intersected. As
long as you kept your hand closed, the object stayed stuck to it. This
allowed you to move objects around. Opening your hand released the object.”
– Jaron Lanier
Jenny Holzer,
Bosnian Virtual Experience
“Somehow this simple landscape is forcing home an emotional truth
that the nightly news has numbed us to by the way it reports facs. The
barren huts are the homes emptied by “ethnic cleansing.” The
voices are the actual words of the perpetrators, victims, and witnesses
of rape and murder in Bosnia. You are not watching this on TV; you are
there. You are a silent witness to the devastation.”
CAVE
Reconfiguring the CAVE, Jeffrey Shaw
Mark Pesce,
VRML
3D on the Net |