Hovering: An Extraterrestrial VR World Built from Terrestrial Artifacts

By Anthony Ciannamea of 79Ancestors

HOVERING is now available on Within. Learn about its creators’ stories, production process, and inspiration below.

TERRITORIES began as a celebratory call-to-action for musical friends and family to compose soundtracks for “imaginary landscapes.” This laid the foundation for over a year of collaborations amongst a diverse set of musicians, designers, and performers. One musician, Detroit-based producer and drummer Shigeto, contributed a track titled Hovering. Before we’d even heard it, we knew Shigeto would push the project toward our goal perfectly — he’s known to incorporate sound textures collected from field recordings into his tracks, building musical compositions in layers that evolve over time.

In addition to creating unique soundscapes, we wanted to create a visual component to envisage the ethereal landscapes conjured in the music. That’s where Conor Grebel enters the story. A visual fx artist and director who typically starts his creative process with natural artifacts found on hikes, Conor and Shigeto were an ideal pairing. The result, Hovering, is an audio-visual sci-fi tale about a comet storm simultaneously destroying and creating a planet’s life-giving water supply.

Here’s how Conor, Shigeto, and their team brought their vision to life in VR:

Imagining a Setting and Plot From Sound

Hovering intends to express the feeling of “floating in a dream… not in control of where you are going… focused on the world below you,” says Shigeto, so Conor constructed a story of precisely that: controlled chaos in space. Inspired by the role water has had on planet Earth, the setting and plot stem from real science and personal mythology. On surface level, it’s a sci-fi experience of a comet’s impact on a planet, but at its core, it’s a re-telling of our own planet’s history.

Design wise, near 90% of the textures and models in the experience were taken from real world objects. In this way, the actual experience is a balance of music inspired from nature and visuals derived from nature, mirroring the element of balance in the story’s plot.

Creating Modern Art from Historic Artifacts

Put simply, Hovering is an extraterrestrial virtual world built from terrestrial artifacts. In order for us to make that statement, a number of technological and creative experiments and feats had to take place. But first, Conor made tremendous effort to scan the physical world so that he could represent its elements — specifically the planet surfaces, walls, rocks and more that live somewhere on a hike in Marin County — in the purest form possible. Not only did this lend to an experience created completely with original content, but it lent to an experience that imagines a new, virtual landscape, without neglecting our real one: Earth.

Conor created stunningly original visual effects by combining both modern digital and traditional analog techniques, often using nature and chemical reactions as his main subject. Much of the work utilized photogrammetry, a technique which takes a large number of equally exposed photos of an object and creates a high density point cloud reconstruction of that model in 3D. Using the photos and point cloud it creates a high density mesh and properly mapped texture of the object. This was an equally laborious and fun process for Conor, who has always collected beautiful rocks and minerals, and in this case, got to admire them up close in 50 or so photographs.

That takes us back to a piece of our mission: honoring craft and respecting nature’s role in modern design. When we craft digital experiences, such as VR worlds, from handmade or natural materials, we believe it can help us connect more on a human level. Knowing that our mission of heightened human connection is one we share with Within, we’re thrilled to share the world of Hovering in the Within app for humans all across Earth to experience.

Warmly,

Anthony

Anthony Ciannamea, the Co-Founder and Creative Director at 79Ancestors, is a filmmaker and designer inspired by the intersection of technology, mythology, and mysticism in storytelling.

79Ancestors is a label and creative studio. It is a cross-disciplinary label — creating and sharing highly-personal objects and experiences, from cinema to performance, music composition to code. The intersection of art forms is in our founding DNA and as we approach every project, our mission is to create new forms of music while still preserving those core artifacts, personal objects and field recordings.

Read more about the Territories VR project here.