tactility.startHere — Discovering the Fourth Dimension in VR

Pressing the brush to canvas carries a certain weight.

1) tactility.startHere;

Imagine that you grab a flip book and open the cover. Your thumb is placed gently on the edge of the book. The pages are completely white, and the only thing printed on the first page is the letter “A”, which appears to be in Times New Roman, 12 pt. font. You allow the pages to scrape past your thumb, starting the flipping motion. The very action of opening, feeling, seeing, hearing, and sometimes smelling the book evokes emotions that only gripping a bound set of pages can do.

As a traditionally trained painter, drawer, and amateur graphic designer, I have a deep appreciation for the act of pushing a pen to paper to see a shape emerge. I believe that this satisfaction from the five senses applies across all practices—it is analogous to the satisfaction of slicing an apple and hearing the flesh crackle, the satisfaction of pressing two Legos together with a resounding ‘clack,’ and even the satisfaction of pressing down the ‘enter’ key to see the cursor jump to the next line. These are the kinds of human experiences that we share and cherish: those that are concrete or contact-driven.

2) abstraction.continue;

Back to the flip book. As the sheets fly by, you watch the “A” slowly change shape. First the crossbar thickens until it matches that of the wider stem. Then the serif morphs to become linear, sans-curvatures. You eye the book in wonder as it runs through all possible font iterations for the letter “A,” in a curious, nearly Library-of-Babel-esque way.

This imaginary animation runs in the back of my mind very often. Picturing this infinite reel of font types causes me to sit up, keep my feet grounded, and eyes wide open. It keeps me in the moment, because it reminds me that technology has rewired the way we think and design. It makes me consider the possibility of a “design singularity,” most easily represented by the aforementioned “font book.” While design used to be limited by human motor capabilities, the shift to digital vector graphics makes design comparatively “light” and primarily based on visual signals. We are no longer imprinting physical marks on paper.

While architectural design was once limited by human motor capabilities, digital vector graphics allow for increasingly faster design iteration turnovers.

3) stalemate.continue;

There is a shift towards the precise as vectors are defined by equations, yet now the precise is rendered in an abstract platform rather than ruler-guided lines. The tablet replaces the drafting table and the stylus replaces the pencil. Creatives are offered software like SOLIDWORKS, AutoCAD, and Adobe CS. The proliferation and ease with which designs can be drafted, exported, and shared dictates an ever accelerating inclination towards design trends and equilibriums. Within a decade, web design has moved from Web 2.0, to skeuomorphism, to flat.

Creatives are offered software like SOLIDWORKS, which provides high-precision drafting and rendering capabilities.

What does this mean for the future? Two-dimensional design will be exhausted in a matter of years, or the movers-and-shakers of said niche will move to the next big thing: virtual reality. With its recent capability to “hack the mind” and pending release of Oculus Rift, there may be a day when creatives will be given a new way to draft, all in the convenient format of floating objects that can be modified with the tug or pinch of the fingers.

Consider : architectural modeling in real-time | 3D clothing design “flattened” into templates | removal of linear perspective in art through 2D “snapshots” of sculptures

4) extension.continue;

Most design occurs in three dimensions. Given a piece of paper, we draw a point—one dimension. We add a line—two dimensions. We fold the paper along the line—three dimensions.

Now, humor me. We remove earthly constraints. We add virtual reality—we add a fourth dimension.

We add the imagination.

Thanks for reading!

If you enjoyed this post, pop the little green ❤ below.

Tiffany Yue is a Pivot-al storyteller. Take a look at her portfolio at www.tiffanyyue.com.

Pivot is an media outlet dedicated to advancing the pursuits of the technology community. We produce high quality and meaningful content to highlight achievement, inspire innovation, and light a fire. Make sure to follow us on Medium, Facebook, and Twitter to stay up to date with the newest content.

Pivot, the University of Pennsylvania, and Weiss Tech House are separate entities.