The voice we hear through time

Trying to deepen on  the question of how to use spatial, sound and interface design for creating an interactive storytelling experience, my project will address conceptually the creation of a contact surface for people to generate empathy with others on a simulated abstraction for the feeling of being isolated.

For this project I want to do an inmersive virtual piece which can be experienced with a group of people in a synchronous or asynchronous format. The participants will be transported individually to a virtual maze of sound and visuals which they have to walk and decide how to travel along the forked paths of a claustrophobic and isolated journey. With the help of a microphone they can answer for some audio prompts, which will be stored inside the maze. The participants will start hearing and gazing prescences on the maze as if there were ghosts chasing them, just for finding at the end it wasn’t ghosts but other people who traveled the same path as them.

This project is product of my reflections on how do I want to use my technical and production skills for creating my own corpus of artistic work. It’s important for me because while I’ve worked before doing interactive work with interfaces or generative systems, this feels like the first time I’ll be in charge of the narrative which must speak for what I want to say. I’m nearly obsessed with fiction narratives which use ergodic storytelling, and I want to take that approach and the feeling of multiplicity to my interactive and digital work, using the tools I know and exploring new ones for adding to my skill set.

I want the outcome of this project be a finished piece which can be exhibited in other places and being used for applying to festivals over the world, really want it can have a balance between the technical, the aesthetical and the conceptual.  I hope it will have a good impact within the people I know and that can give me the feedback for iterating over it and present it to larger audiences.

Some of my inspirations for this project are:

Ficciones A short stories book which addresses the ideas of infinite narratives and multiple storylines. Specially The garden of forking paths and The library of Babel.

Eternal Return a VR piece which also uses physical objects for augmenting the sensory experience.

Hopscotch (Rayuela) A novel written in a way it can be read in different order.

Le vertige das autre VR piece where you have to walk a vertiginous maze.

The machine to be another experience of changing bodies with other person

The void Inmersive VR experience within a physical space

AI Dungeon AI generated interactive fiction

Sleep no more Inmersive theatre experience

Night Walk for Edinburgh is a sound and video walk with site specific prompts

House of leaves a novel exploring different layers of reality

This references are related to my project in different aspects, some of them are directly addressing narrative techniques I want to emulate, others are conceptually helping to figure out how the project will be and finally some of the technical ways to do it.

Recalling some work I’ve done and their possiblecontribution for the process of this new one I can list the following:

Muro articulado A virtual replica of a Hebert Bayer sculpture I did on Unity and turned itno a 360 video

Some maze experiments in Unity

Secret forest a collaborative web experience allowing people to play together in a shared space

Underwater a web interactive experience on storytelling through spaces

For doing this project the key steps will be:

    • Storyline methodology
    • Creating virtual space
    • Building the connection for many users

After starting I must decide which will be the better platform for doing this taking in account time, previous knowledge and equipment availability.

The techniques used for this will be creating the visual part wether on Unity or Three.js depending on the final output which can be VR for headsets or Web VR. For creating the visual part some 3D modelling work must be done, the sound part will be dealing with spatialized audio and connection between participants depends on the interaction they will have.

The techniques used for this project will be creating the visual part on Unity or Three.js depending on the final output which can be VR for headsets or Web VR. For creating the visual part some 3D modelling work must be done and the sound part will be dealing with spatialized audio and generative  composition.Connection between participants depends on the interaction they will have, it can be solved storing some data from previous interactions or creating a “multiplayer” scenario where many people can experience together the piece.

Choosing the platform will depend mainly on which materials I can be sure to have access during the semester and also the summer, if I can’t get a VR headset on both the best will be continuing to deploy the experience as a web-based piece.

The areas I feel with most confidency are programming and working with sound, the ones that I should work on are storytelling, conceptualizing and maybe will struggle a lot with the 3D modelling part which I’m not familiar.

Some of the technologies I want to explore is creating VR experiences, augmenting sound, real time communication, generative algorithms and machine learning for interactive storytelling.

Tags: #virtualreality #sound #isolation #empathy #maze