Concept Development: Possible Futures

A important concept in early development was the use of VR as a lense into imagined worlds. The work of Dunne and Raby on Speculative design was particularly persuasive. Their techniques include:

+ Fictional worlds

+ Cautionary tales

+ What if… scenarios

+ Counterfactual histories

+ Thought experiments

+ Reductio ad absurdum

+ Artefacts from the future

+ Pre-figurative futures

+ Small things big issues

+ Tell worlds rather than tell stories

These aspects are employed as alternative aesthetics that engage us in different ways, questioning technology, ideology, and technological vs social imagination

Metaverse

Metaverse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse

Internet Metaphors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_metaphors

The Metaverse, as traditionally imagined, would be an unfiltered firehose of humanity. The Metaverse that people are actually trying to build would be, in a meaningful sense, a social network. Most of its value is bringing people together socially, and letting them communicate with their friends and make new ones. Putting everyone together into the same chaotic chatroom has less value than intelligently providing spaces where friends can hang out, as web-based social networks have proven. This concept would be engaged with a speculative frame in VR by posing the question of how algorithms would mediate our interaction and communications, with people and machines that are sharing the space.

http://lucidscape.com/ found this data visualisation quite stimulating, the debug view is quite attractive too

Jaap Drupsteen’s music visualisations are fantastic, particularly the one below was of interest at around 3:40 where the concrete structure is morphed into a twitching jittering mass of nodes. This was to be imagined as a transition of aesthetic to be employed in a VR experience to draw the users attention to the concepts of the experience.