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experiences extremely powerful sources of discovery, learning, and inven-
tion with real-world value.
The Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab is doing something a little
different; it's exploring how humans interact in VR. From the program's
mission statement (2013):
The mission of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab is to understand the
dynamics and implications of interactions among people in immersive
virtual reality simulations (VR), and other forms of human digital repre-
sentations in media, communication systems, and games. Researchers in
the lab are most concerned with understanding the social interaction that
occurs within the confi nes of VR, and the majority of our work is cen-
tered on using empirical, behavioral science methodologies to explore
people as they interact in these digital worlds.
They list as a special interest the exploration of “face-to-face” commu-
nication in such worlds.
Although many projects since the early 1990s have been described as
“virtual reality art,” few actually meet the criteria for the medium (the
“turbo” problem again). Searching for images of virtual reality art yields more
images of art
about
virtual reality than art that
is
virtual reality. The words
have been used to describe everything from motion capture in animation
to work with LEDs to time-lapse photography to “immersive” MMORGs.
There are a few notable exceptions such as
World Skin: A Photo Safari in the
Land of War
(an immersive installation created in 1997 by Maurice Benayoun
and Jean-Baptiste Barrière). For my money, the most powerful VR art is still
Char Davies' work back in the mid-90s. The problems are cost and logistics.
Dramatically less expensive hardware has recently been introduced, includ-
ing the Canvas portable CAVE (Cave Automated Virtual Environment) from
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with software free of charge
(Rush 2006). A VR 3D viewer introduced in 2013 retails for $300 (the high-
end ones cost upwards of $45,000). The CAVE environment, especially in a
low-end implementation, is likely still to have diffi culties representing more
than one interactor's POV well, and there are diffi culties with motion paral-
lax. But we have seen that CAVE-based work can still deliver most of the
qualities of immersive VR. I hope to see a new effl orescence in VR as new
tools become available to more artists and designers.
