Tag Archives: VR

Creating Sound Assets 2

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From the list of sounds required, I decided to first ceate the sound of a “moonjump”. I was confused by this being a required sound, as our game is set on a fictional planet in space, not the moon. I did not want to conform to the conventions of scientific space, where I would assume moonjumops make little to no sound due to the gravity of the moon and how that changes human movement.

I started creating the sound of these “moonjumps” using the sound of me jumping on rocks that we recorded in the foley studio as a group.

I started off by layering the initial “jumping” sound at varying speed and pitches, to create an alien-like sound that sound like it has been affected by a different effect of gravity than on earth. At this point, I decided I wanted to make a sequence of multiple steps, just dropping out some of these layers for some of the steps and manipulated the levels of them for each step, in order to make it sound more realistic that the player is jumping on this unkown planet.

I then moved onto creating the “button sounds”. The button sounds we recorded in the foley studio were very “clicky” in my opinion. Although this is obviously realistic to the sound a button actually makes, I felt it did not fit the theme of the game. I decided to repurpose one of the layers from the moonjump sound I made, and use synthesis to create a more melodic button sound. I then pitched the synth at different pitches, so that each sound could be used for a different button.

Reflections on virtual reality

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My first experience of VR was when I was fifteen, on a school trip to the O2 in Greenwhich. Individiually, one by one, we were given a headset, and made to sit in a chair that could spin 360 degrees, in a small dome-like temporary structure. I watched my classmates, they seemed terrfied. They were screaming, and jumping up off the seat. I was prepared to be frughtened. My turn came, and I was not. The figures looked false and intangible to me, I would liken the experience to going to the Planeterium. I did feel a little ill from the expereince, a feeling similar to motion sickness. I decided on this day that I do not like VR.

Years later, I spoke to someone about this experience, and they too said that in their virtual reality experiences, they too felt motion sickness. I also experience nausea when playing video games, but not when watching long films. I discovered a term called “cybersickness”, which can make people ill due to causing a disruption in bodily function. When the human body is static, but the brain in percieving that it is moving, such as when using virtual reality, confusion is caused in the body, bringing on sickness (in some people).

I thought about how if this cybersickness is a sensation that commonly occurs, how is virtual reality still prevailing? There are VR experiences where the user is able to move physically with the virtual movement, or the user can choose to have a much less immersive experience in terms of the visual.

The game that my group have created is very immersive, but the player must stay in one place to play, using the controls given with the headset to navigate the virtual world. I wonder how cybersickness will affect the experience of our game.

Decoloniosing VR: reading ‘A Journey from Virtual and Mixed Reality to Byzantine Icons via Buddhist Philosophy’.

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“We are witnessing the shaping up of a world more and more devoted to separation” – Paulo S. H. Favrero.

Favrero’s article is a propsotion of viewing emerging digital words, such as those created in Virtual Reality, through a decolonialist lens. As we are living in an era of post-globalisation, to avoid a growing separation and disconnect from our wider global community, it is imperative to invest in decolonialist thought.

When looking at art, a decolonialst lens is often overlooked, as it is politicised. Drawing on ideas from Sara Ahmed’s On being Included (2012), accepting an institution (institutions, whether that be the gallery or the university, is where art exists and is validated) as built on colonialst structures is to admit to an inherent racism / bigotry, which has brandished the image of what we have come to accept as art. To admit the bigotry would be to unlearn this “brandished image” of art, and therefore everything academia has built in the field of art would have to be deconstructed and rebuilt.

With Virtual Reality being so wrapped up in modernity compared to other art forms, it is easy to apply decolonialist though to the way in which we view our experiences in VR. Favrero proposes that VR is to be looked at through the lens of Buddhist Philosophy. Virtual Reality is largely image based; in Buddhist philosophy, and other religious contexts, images function as “portals”. Favrero is therefore proposing the idea that Visrtual Reality is not just a visual experience that we appreciate for its aesthetic qualities, but rather a world which we immerse ourselves in and can naviagte, completely seperate the one we’d just come from, before placing the headset over our eyes.

In Buddhist thought, seeing invloves the whole body. Virtual Reality is based on a similar concept, where it draws attention to the space between ‘the self’ and ‘the other’- attention is being drawn to the relation between the body and the mind. Not only is this alluding to the aforementioned Buddhist thought, but also the principle of non duality. Virtual reality provides a fragmented map of reality, or the scene that you are being placed in. Fragmentation is what bring Buddhist philosophy and VR close to each other.