An Ocean of Air
This afternoon, Sylvia Pan and I went to see We Live in An Ocean of Air by Marshmallow Laser Feast. MLF are one of the UK’s most innovative digital creative collectives and have already built an impressive reputation for VR work. An Ocean of Air is their latest VR gallery installation.
Abstracting nature
The piece starts by explaining to you the basic interactions. As you breathe out through your mouth you can see your breath as a cascade of dots in many subtle shades of blue. This nice abstraction makes you conscious of your breathing (a good way to relax) but is also very beautiful, like floating confetti or sand. When we raised our hands we could see them also as a collection of dots, little, red corpuscles representing the blood flowing through our veins (sensed via a blood monitor clip on our ears). We could also see all the other participants, their red corpuscles and blue breath.
Once we had got used to our virtual bodies a virtual forest gradually appeared, dominated by a huge sequoia tree. I started walking around the forest. When I saw some one inside the tree I realised you can walk inside it. Walking through the tree was actually quite a stressful experience, it looked very solid and I felt an emotional resistance to going through a solid barrier, but once I was inside I could see a more abstract vision of the life force flowing through it.
Moving around the scene to change between abstraction and realism was a theme of the whole piece. The initial realistic forest have way to abstract flows of forces, but by moving away from the centre you could still see the whole thing as a branching tree.
Overall it was a very calming and beautiful experience.
Practicalities
But, being me, I was actually interested in the boring stuff, how the whole experience was organised.
I am often quite frustrated with VR in art galleries. Because it is a single person experience there is normally a long queue and once you get into VR you feel too self conscious of all the people waiting to really experience the piece.
An Ocean of Air, on the other hand was very well organised. For starters, you had to book a time slot, so no queuing. It was a multi-person experience, with many HTC VIVEs working at once. We waited outside where we could see the current group doing the experience as well at a projection of the environment behind them.
We were greeted by an attendant and brought into the installation where he gave us some instructions. More attendants helped each of us into what was actually a very complex VR rig. We could move freely in the experience so we needed a backpack to hold a PC connected to a VIVE Pro. We also had VIVE trackers around our wrists for tracking our hand positions and what looked like a leap motion for finger tracking. The combination also meant that our hands were tracked when our of range of the leap motion (for other people to see) but when I looked at my own hand I could see my fingers. The final element was an ear clip to measure blood flow.
All this meant it ran very smoothly, though it can’t have been cheap: many PCs and HMDs and a lot of attendants. They ran two whole rooms almost simultaneously. That meant more HMDs, but the attendants were used more efficiently, when one group was in the experience, the attendants could help the other group.
Abstract Social
The other benefit of having many HMDs was that it became a shared experience. We all came in together (about 6 of us, but it looks like it could take more at peak time). Once we were inside we could all see each other, but as abstract clouds of red dots that were just about recognisably human.
Sylvia made an interesting observation. As you walking in with a group of strangers you inevitably make small judgements about them. See them as young or old male or female. But once you are inside these things are no longer visible.
There was a strange intimacy about being together with others in this beautiful space. But we didn’t know anything about the other people, we couldn’t see them apart from as a cloud. They were just an abstraction of a person. When we are with other people we inevitably see their individuality, so it’s rare to see some one simply as a human. Sylvia noted that she felt much more well disposed to other people after sharing an experience with them, just as humans, without any judgement we might make about them from their appearance.
This is an interesting twist on VR as an empathy machine. This normally means experiencing something from the point of view of another individual. But maybe sharing something with other people, simply as other humans, without their individuality, can help bring us closer to people we might otherwise judge by how they look.
VR as Art
We Live in an Ocean of Air is one of the best examples I have seen so far of a VR art installation. It is a wonderfully produced environment that mixes the natural world with abstraction and creates a shared experience.
The installation is only running until the 20th January, but if you are near london I’d recommend you try to see it.
