FMP

Im going to continue experimenting with a ragne of ideas for the meantime and see what sticks/what I like and could do a lot with, becasue at the moment I have no clue what I’m going to do for my final piece. Im focusing my project around the idea of virtual reality and how we know whats real. This came from my sustainable futures project where i looked into a different world almost where the lines between whats real and whats not is blurred becasue virtual reality is so realistic and I worked on creating a 10 second advert for channel four that advertised a documentary surrounding this research.

What is Virtual reality and how does it work? – Virtual reality allows the user to be immersed into a virtual world, unlike regular screens in front of the user which do not allow for such an experience. VR can include 4 of the 5 senses, including vision, hearing, touch and possibly even smell. With this power, VR can can take people for a virtual world fairly easily.

How does VR trick us into believing were somewhere were not? – The first way VR does this is with the stereoscopic display. This works by displaying two slightly different angles of the scene to each eye, simulating depth. This along with other ways to simulate depth like parallax (farther objects to you seem to move slower), shading and techniques create an almost life like experience. The angle of the weapon is slightly different on each side, as is the crosshair, but when you actually put on the headset and play the game, everything lines up perfectly. The way the stereoscopic screen looks varies platform to platform as each headset differs a bit in the way it displays content, the above image is from a game made for Google Cardboard using Unreal Engine.

Another thing thats really interesting is that your technically completely blind to the actual word around you when you put on a headset, yet you open up this endless possibiity of places to go at the same time. technology has got so good that with a few accessories and a VR headset, you can see, smell, touch … and be tricked into believing your somewhere your not. This is where im going with my project, I want to focus on glitching as a way for people to know whats real and whats not.