2 September 2022
For your Virtual Reality experience you might choose a mixed bag of short items that sound interesting.
For example. last night, I thought I would put my headset on rather than watch TV for an hour and go through some of the experiences that I hadn’t yet found time to personally enjoy.
The first two I chose were experiences 31.4 and 31.5 within the Artistic range. Both by a Japanese choreographer, called Yui Kawaguchi. The first was ‘Shirokage’, translated as ‘white shadow’, where I found myself in a Japanese Rowan forest in the snow.
A small piglet led me down some stone steps into a grotto where two females danced with rowan branches. Mists and geometrical shapes swirled around me and I moved around the dancers and became more and more entranced by the mood that the Japanese music lulled me into. The entire performance lasted just a few minutes, whch left me hungry for more.
The second performance was called ‘Be Thou Still With Me’ by the same choreographer, which was longer, more complex, with one main female lead and different sequences, some on her own and others with a large group of other dancers. The mood of eeriness was set by a skull on a shelf whose lower jaw moved, conveying a sense of loss of a loved one and causing the main character to get up from her writing desk and rise up into the heavens to be closer to him.
The way that this artist makes use of VR is both original and inspired and gave me a sense of just how this media will encourage new forms of experimentation and communication of feeling. I particularly enjoyed the interplay she used between real life video sequences and the avatar character, which allowed us to see the person that the character was based on and see the relationship between them.
I moved on from these to Experience 2, a lecture from Oxford University about Earthquakes. I was now in a conference room and could choose a seat right in front of the lecturer, who stood before me as an avatar with a presentation screen behind him and a large area around him that was used throughout the lecture to show 3D objects such as globes and drones that floated past.
Geology is not my field of expertise, but I was left in no doubt by the end that this lecturer spends his life understanding how and where they happen so that lives can be saved in vulnerable parts of the world.
There are so many VR experiences to choose from like these. One Tuesday evening why not book an hour for yourself and explore this creative and inspiring world for yourself. Why not give it a try and book for one person?