Category: The Poetics of Space

For my final project in Poetics of Space, I made a piece called monumoment. A portmentau of monument and moment, this piece creates a monument dedicated to the audience, memorializing the moment the audience engages with the work. I consider it a kind of sculpture and sound installation inside of a virtual reality space.

The technique involves recording audio from the user, using the Oculus Rift’s built in microphone. When a button is held down, the user can record themselves speaking. Upon release, that audio clip is saved in the program. I developed a system inside of Unity to do the following:

Continue reading “Poetics of Space Final Reflections”

My midterm for The Poetics of Space attempts to address the blank space of the Unity development environment, but also the blank space of starting the act of creation. This is a heavily auditory experience, so please watch with headphones:

TPOS Midterm: Green Apples

Continue reading “TPOS Viewfinder Midterm: Green Apples”

Here is the refined version of my re-creation project.

TPOS Re-creation, v2

There were a few technical hurdles that I encountered in optimization and adding to the piece that I’d like to talk about in class. But in general, this was a good way really first dive into Unity.

For our first go at Unity, we’ve been tasked with re-creating a space. I’m going back to a ravine I would play in during the summer when I was a child, and found an old abandoned house in the middle of nowhere.

Continue reading “Re-creation space, v1: House in a Ravine”

For our depictions of space assignment, I used Google Blocks as my main tool. I have used Tilt Brush before, but was very interested in trying the block-centric/grid oriented opinions of Google Blocks.

Being able to manipulate the geometry was great, and there were a lot of practical structure building tools that I found myself wishing for while in Tilt Brush. Things that might be complicated to describe in words were intuitive to perform in the Oculus, and I’d be more than happy to return to Blocks as a content creation tool.

Part of the assignment is not giving away whose story we were tasked with interpreting, but I will include a link to the hosted Google Blocks VR at the bottom which will have the information included.

For now, here is some documentation of the piece:

 

And here is the hosted Blocks URL ***spoilers!*** this has the full info:

https://vr.google.com/objects/9mTGqmT2DN3

(This is another plus for Google Blocks, which I wound up sharing in the class Slack)

Jinhee and I did our “Creating Presence” experiment in Washington Square Park. We had both separately considered that sound was a good way to create presence (especially with a modest budget for time). After some discussion thought that sensory deprivation can help in boosting the sensitivity of other senses, and that this could be used as a tool in creating “presence” in a user.

“Close Your Eyes”

Using a headphone splitter, we were able to create a little guided audio tour using two headphones, two microphones (one for the speech, one for the listening to ambient noises), and the Zoom to record everything while also being the amplifier for the tour guide and tourist.

The idea was for the tour guide to give a “blind” audio tour of Washington Square Park. The tourist, closing their eyes and being lead by the tour guide, holds a shotgun mic in order to hear directionally around them.

The tour lasted approximately ten minutes. You are invited to close your eyes and listen to a short historical tour of Washington Square Park.

Direct download the mp3 here.