Virtual Unreality
A sense of misplacement
I have always felt uncomfortable with the idea of virtual reality. I have a strong issue with the concept in itself, as well as with each of the terms and especially with their association with one another.
For a start, three-dimension simulated environments are real, not virtual. Reality does not necessarily have to have the attribute of being physical and physically tactile in order to exist: most things in life cannot be touched nor felt and only exist in our minds. Moreover, in an attempt to foul us with their reality, three-dimensional simulated environment are often trying to persuade us of their existence: they make the effort of mimicking the physical environment, including solidity, materials, lighting and “collision detection”. They invariably fail at that - as they are never quite good enough.
Reality, like intelligence, is far too complex to be fully captured and recreated artificially, via computer programs: as much as artificial intelligence, a fully believable, interactive and non-linear three-dimensional simulated environment is impossible to achieve (Hollywood can make us believe artificial reality, but only from a fixed camera angle and using a linear story).
It is not a matter of technical limitations: one would like to believe that given enough modelling, texturing and lighting time, combined with infinitely powerful rendering engines, the near-perfect simulations of The Matrix could be recreated (I mention The Matrix on purpose, for its combination of artificial intelligence and synthetic environment). Yet, the details, the nuances, the pseudo-randomness of it all, would still, somehow escape them. Life, that is, would escape them.
The trouble lies in the very essence of software, which must - as a general condition - be designed and written to foresee everything. Including, this is the really absurd part, unpredictability. Software may be designed to somehow learn and change its initial behaviour over time, to become, to some extent, unpredictable. The problem is that even such extreme possibilities must be designed and tested. As soon as some true unpredictability kicks in, one which hadnʼt been anticipated by the software designers - reality as you may call it - software breaks with the near mystical suspension of disbelief disappearing away in the cracks.
To me, that is not what life is about.
Figures of speech
For all of these reasons, the idea of a reality which defines itself as virtual (“in effect or essence, if not in fact or reality”) has always appeared to me as an oxymoron, ever since my initial exposure to it back in 1997 and up until today, when my work has taken a different direction: there is no escape from reality into an alternative world. More than that: there is not, at least in myself, any desire for such an escape.
From the dawn of the philosophical debate in ancient Greece, which was in essence a quest to define reality, reality itself has has offered only partial explanations and has escaped final definitions. It has proved a very ambiguous concept, with most commentators referring it as the factual and physical representation of things, which is necessarily a partial vision: so many of the things we experience every day cannot be touched and yet they do exist.
In this context, combining the terms virtual and real creates further ambiguity, as the first terms pretends to be creating an alternative to the second, in virtue of the creation of real-looking environments. I argue not only that such environments will never look real, but also the converse that they are not virtual: they are fake and yet they do exist.
Get unreal!
In my own early research, I immediately discarded the self-pretentious realism of computer generated, non-linear interactive environments. I was not interested in spending time on detailing textures, making sure that the lighting was perfect and realistic nor in chasing the ultimate polygon optimisation in order to achieve the highest frame rate.
For me, three-dimensional design is a state of the mind, not a trick played on the eyes. I trained as an architect and I worked in architecture for over twelve years: I have been thinking in three dimension ever since I can remember. I have studied classical and contemporary architecture during both my academic career as well as my professional life and discovered how space is designed and imagined by architects using two-dimensional instruments: the plan and the section. Thatʼs how professionally trained space designer control and verify what their minds suggest to them. More. Thatʼs how we communicate the sense of space in order for it to be built.
Engaging with virtual environments has been for me a way to expand on solid architecture and to get beyond its physical buildings and spaces. A way to explore what you can imagine and experience, when spaces become metaphorical and abstract and when you leave your body behind, forget about up and down, solidity, gravity and other constraints.
Abstraction is the key to all this. Using lines and surfaces, like when you do a drawing, you can suggest ideas of spaces that carry with them strong connection to the physical world, yet they do not try to mimic it - at which they would inevitably fail.
Rooms can be created as simple wireframes. Walls can float, you donʼt need any ceilings or doors that open and close. The notions of up, down, left or right are all up for discussion and may change multiple times. So can the notion of small or large, fast or slow. Objects can be upside down. The content of “rooms” can be contextualised depending on multiple factors - such as time and absolute or relative location. Once you get away from pretending to recreate a realistic environment, you gain a lot of power and flexibility.
Iʼm not talking about gimmick: it all comes to necessity and user experience design. You donʼt simply abuse the freedom from constraints, solidity and gravity because you can, itʼs quite the opposite: you donʼt use it unless you must, but you should not forget you can use such freedom if you need. Weight, speed, boundaries: they all become dynamic concepts, which you can use as part of your own, personal toolbox.
Designing for sanity
"I was like a mad carpenter making a box. Were he ever so convinced that he was King of Jerusalem, the box he would make would be a sane box". I always loved this quote by Joseph Conrad ("The Shadow Line"): to me it means that if you have craft, knowledge and method, you can be as free (or as mad) as you want in doing what you do. Me, Iʼm an architect: I design spaces. When Iʼm dealing with simulated spaces, for as wild as I may decide to go, the end result will always at least suggest the idea of a space, despite the abstraction and the lack of the physical heaviness of bricks and mortar.
My digital spaces have always been made of bright lines and transparent surfaces, where things happen; they were never to bear the heaviness of the physical world, not its being static. These spaces observe and react to what people do within them, adapting to movement and behaviours, according, of course, to the rules I had established in advance. They display dynamic content in a dynamic context: itʼs like designing an art exhibition where the display of the works changes according to what visitors and interested in, what they have seen before, what they have looked at most intensively, and so on.
My spaces have never been intelligent, in the sense outlined above of non-predictability.
Yet, they have surprised visitors as they kept moving in and out of them, as the space layout changes, rooms adapt and follow peopleʼs movements, become smaller or larger and walls, like projection screens, display different content depending on a dynamic idea of context.
The world of ideas
I appreciate this is all getting very abstract: I apologise to my readers, but also make no excuses, as this is on purpose. My virtual unreality spaces are abstractions of physical environments, married to a dynamically evolving idea of the architecture of information and the building of knowledge.
In my work, past and present, this is best applied to Museum environments and I have been lucky enough to be able to experiment a fair bit with extending museum spaces into the digital realm, always in three-dimensions, although not always using three-dimensional representations.
Iʼll mention a couple of examples.
