Weightless Bricks Act I: Production
An immersive installation envisaging how future virtual work practices may become more tactile, intuitive, and embodied in physical acts.
Mixed Reality | Speculative Design
A location-based VR experience commissioned by the Royal Academy of Arts in London in December 2018, and supported by the Netherlands Stimuleringsfonds for digital culture. The installation was installed as part of the RA’s Invisible Landscapes: Imagination (Act III) exhibition from February-March 2019.
Experienced through a virtual-reality headset, viewers adopted the first-person perspective of a virtual architect, and were led through a series of mixed-reality spaces. Participants explored an abstracted work-life scenario extending virtually from the Royal Academy’s architecture studio, where the creation and inhabitation of physical architecture had become fully entangled with its digital sibling.
A series of hybrid interactive architectural fragments and objects sat at the core of the experience, encouraging surprise moments of wonder, and linking experiences of the two worlds together. As a participant, your past day’s digital labour stored on silicon became embodied in a weighty piece of silicone fruit, calling out to you to be picked and processed, which grew into your sassy yet demanding guide throughout the bizarre meta-studio.
With:
Paula Strunden
& David Flook
(Soft Bodies)
& David Flook
(Soft Bodies)
For:
The Royal Academy of Arts
Supported by:
Stimuleringsfonds for Digital Culture, NL
HTC Vive
Year:
2019
Sound Design:
Voice:
Tom James
UX Coding:
Fabian Strunden
Fabrication:
BMade
Special Thanks:
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Caption Title
Participants would typically spend ten minutes traversing the virtual architecture studio which had been precisely aligned with its familiar physical counterpart. Their journey would begin by stepping through the fireplace and beyond the wall.
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Caption Title
The immersive environment was designed to be heavily sensory, with the intention of transforming traditionally abstract digital interfaces into something embodied in objects and pieces of architecture, so interaction could become more intuitive and make room for empathy. How can we potentially learn about digital assets and spaces beyond their appearance, perhaps instead through their weight, texture or smell?
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