VR EXPERIENCE - 2019

11 Minutes

Cycling back and forth from home to college every day is boring and a total blur. I usually rush to class on time, trying to remember everything from the journey. My journey is frustrating, dangerous, and sometimes impossible. I am only one of the millions who have daily trips like this.

Objective

In this project, I was challenged to take the mundane and make it enjoyable. I chose an ordinary, routine event like cycling to and from class every day and presented it so anyone else could experience my eleven-minute journey.

approach

I decided to share my journey through a book with several short chapters or scenes. Each chapter recounts what I experienced in a specific part of my journey and is written through my first-person narration. Each chapter contains an image that hints at the area I am going through. I decided to capture a VR environment of each part by using a drone. Each VR environment included my A to B points and callouts of something interesting I have mentioned in the book. The callouts are inspired by the street vernacular such as graffiti and tagging, that I encounter on my journey. I use the visual of a pigeon throughout this project as it stands as a symbol of urbanism and the view point of the VR experience through the eyes of a flying pigeon.

QR Experiments

I wanted to create unconventional QR codes that act as images for my narrative book. I made a new functional visual QR code using and manipulating a CSS code I found online. These QR codes are unique for every chapter and take you into a contextual VR environment hosted on kuula.com.

Outcome

The outcome of this project is a physical journal/storybook that leads the user from physical media into a digital experience and a narration that spans various media types. The integration of printed and digital experiences is made possible using a custom java script by an Austrian researcher, Lachlan Arthur. The code embeds a self-explanatory QR code into the pixels of a bitmap, making the QR code appear more like an image. I utilized the script to create these QR images as chapter images.