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SHAPESHIFTER

Virtual Reality Experience (WIP). At the beginning, the participant dons a motion tracking glove and head mounted VR display. When they look down at their own hand, they will see it represented in real-time as a disembodied hand of a 3D avatar. There is no other environment visible at this stage.

However, soon the hand begins to unfold like origami as the user moves their fingers and wrist, revealing abstract ‘pocket universes’ within it. These small worlds inside the hand rapidly expand and explode out around the participant, becoming a whole environment of moving shapes that surround the user on all sides in the 360 landscape.

One loses the relationship with action and response. The space continues to react to the bodies movement, but the links have been dissolved and distanced enough that one cannot track the relationships any more. There is a moment of loss and disorientation.

Then, after allowing the user to stay in the disorientation for a time, the experience begins to pull back in on itself. The disparate elements that have expanded outwards to become the encapsulating environment once again begin to collapse inwards towards the user. There is another moment, this of regained clarity, when the shapes begin to fold back into the self and the relations become trackable again.

Now the hand of the participant begins to assemble itself once more, becoming again firmly attached to the avatar body of the user. However, this time, the situation is reversed from before. Instead of the solid pieces of hand geometry that composed the body of the user at the beginning, the hand is now composed of small windows onto the other world-spaces they have seen during the explosion phase of the experience. They now can only see into these spaces, but the genie can not quite be put back in the bottle.

 

Inside out, outside in.

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