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reluctant (or too jaded) to participate. At the same time, a performance may
frustrate those who wish the explore the project on their own. These issues are
characteristic of many virtual reality presentations. With any VR presentation,
the choice of setting will affect the audience's perception of the piece, and will
influence their tolerance for nonsense.
Finally, the story engine is tuned so that there will be some sense of pro-
gression when there is long term interaction. Scenes are realized as a result of
certain props, actions are realized by introducing suitable elements. “Sensible”
constructs are coded into the relationships between props and scenes, and be-
tween actions and their target elements. When these constructs appear, they
reassure the user that there may be other associations hidden within the non-
sense. Tuning also determines how likely the coded constructs are to transform
into more difficult collections.
Closing comments
This project is documented and presented as an artistic exploration into in-
teractive storytelling. As an author and artist I feel that the current emphasis
on simulation and photorealistic representation in the realm of “interactivity”
needs to be critically reevaluated.
Themainsourceof“intelligence”inDr.K-isthecognitiveabilityofthe
participant herself. The ability of a human mind to recognize and understand
symbols, even when those symbols are distorted and occluded, is key to the
operation of a minimal representation. This has led me to a difficult question:
Can one convey meaning [have connotation] without creating symbols
[without denotation]?
Where is meaning generated within a narrative? One can manipulate the
associations of objects without denoting the objects themselves: “There exists
an entity that performed an action.” If the action is resolved as being of a threat-
ening nature, the entity will likewise be perceived as threatening, without any
change in representation. Likewise, the action can become threatening with-
out change in representation if the elements associated with it have threatening
characteristics. But these subtle interactions are not possible with the typical
models of representation - in particular with the current model of virtual re-
ality and the efforts of photorealistic visualization. Virtual reality presents all
associations at once, from any viewpoint. This leaves little room for new or
alternative associations.
If these associations are made to be mutable, as has been attempted in Dr.
K-, one can exploit that critical moment of interactivity when the unresolved
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