Micro Assignment #1: Virtual Object + Reading Response
After listening to the first hour of the Voices of VR podcast I was surprised by how many different applications there were for virtual reality, but I’ve also been somewhat pragmatic about what the future could hold for potential.
I was very much a teenager that didn’t have a lot of friends in school, but I had a lot of deep connections with people all over the world online. I would have loved to spend time in virtual spaces with them back then. As an adult though, I’ve realized how much corporations will capitalize on it.
When I think about a Ready Player One scenario, with a corporation running it, all I see is a privacy concern. All I can see is a corporation keeping logs of data that they could potentially access at any time eventually knowing a person more than they know themselves.
In contrast, I am intrigued by the possibilities for narrative and immersive play. I love the idea of being able to immerse someone in a story, and being able to give them a smell, a sight, and even maybe some haptics that goes along with the feelings they should be experiencing.
Overall, the first hour of the podcast has me very hopeful but also a little concerned. I’m looking forward to the second hour to try to see what else it holds.
Virtual Object: Tarot Card Altar
Link to the p5js sketch here
One subset of my work in IDM has been about writing about and examining ways that witchcraft and practice have survived through the use of the internet. My coding midterm was a tarot card reading that gave users a past, present, and future reading with card meanings.
The basis of this came from the idea that the midterm was due around Halloween and I’d been into tarot cards for the better part of a year. So I started working with a robust tarot API that offered multiple meanings for each of the 78 cards in the deck. With the help of my professor, I was able to ensure that the cards wouldn’t pull the same from the imaginary deck and shatter the illusion.
Users could select the new reading button to reset the reading and draw new cards.
I had plans to expand this as well. I thought about adding some onboarding screens in the form of a video and even adding some atmospheric mist to play into the spooky Halloween themes.
Combining this with an interactive fiction I started prototyping over the summer called Full Moon I thought that this could be an interesting basis for a virtual experience and maybe even something that could be used by virtual witchcraft practitioners.
