Structures in Harmony - A Collaborative VR Experience
In 2017 I pitched my idea for a cooperative, audio reactive art piece to the VR studio Wevr. They liked the idea and agreed to fund my work on the project. The work featured a unique (for its time) co-op experience that allowed participants to interact with one another in a shared physical space. The project was considered for the Sundance Festival's New Frontier program and made it to the final rounds of deliberation.
The project was born of philisophical questions surrounding the Mind Body problem. How is it that non-conscious matter can combine and create a unified subjective experience with a qualitative aspect? Is consciousness an illusion or is the "Hard Problem" real? Is the mind a biological computer or is it something else?
In this VR experience, participants must vocally harmonize to instantiate strange entities made of particles. Next, players cooperatively guide and organize the many entities into ever larger "living" forms.
The project was technically difficult to implement. There were many challenges to overcome including complex particle effects, creating a one to one correspondence between the physical and virtual world along with other networking related issues.
Structures in Harmony was created, designed and developed by Jeffrey Domitrz.