Title, Duration, What Model of the VR Hardware you used.
I and Sienna booked 2-hour-slots for three successive weeks. I used Oculus Quest 2.
What kinds of Interaction did you experience? What did you feel?
I enjoyed three genres of VR contents: Games, Animations and Immersive Environments.
Game: The one I enjoyed the most is a RPG puzzle-solving adventure game called Moss2 (Pity that the VR headset doesn’t have Moss 1). Quite different than the other VR games I played – such as snow-sliding or music-cube-slashing ones – this game has intricate models, grandiose environment, clever and sophisticated interaction and a convincing storyline. The game environment is carefully designed, with relatively high freedom of exploration on the players side, and plenty of objects to interact with. As the player goes on the journey with the little mice – the protagonist of the game, the scene changes in style and size and it always feels like entering different worlds: the corridor of a deserted castle, the grandiose throne room, the underground vault with mountains of golden coins, the avatar-ish mystical world with glowing plants, the tree house, the church of humans and the church of the green elves… With VR, each scene seems exceptionally real and I feel that I would linger in the game just to admire the beautiful sceneries. As for the interaction design, the game utilizes almost every control button there is on the play stick of both hands, and is very creative in those control – I wouldn’t have see them coming, but after the techniques are introduced they make very good sense and are natural for the player to use.
I wasn’t a big fan of games, but this one is good enough that I would want to book a slot for it every week – I think that says something about both the VR medium and the game design itself:)
Animation: I watched an animation called Namoo with the VR headset. It is a different experience from watching TV or seeing a film in cinema, even IMAX – it’s better. It’s more immersive, more engaging, and provides more perspective of watching for the audience, thus making it more interesting to see. The story is about the journey of life of a man, and in the end there is a scene when the man sits onto a tree and ascend towards the stars – and the audience flys with him, higher and higher through the clouds up into the sea of shining planets. I find that scene very touching. It is a perspective that never would have happen in cinema or on TV – the sense of flying up and leaving the ground must happen in 3D to be real – and it does feel very realistic. It makes me wonder about the future of storytelling through media and the vastly different ways we can utilize VR to tell a story and convey a feeling.
Environment: I played a game that allows me to enter different environments to see the sceneries and interact with the animals – there are scenes of shallow sea, ocean, meadow, forest, snowy forest, desert, blue moon swamp, the universe, Jurassic age and Chinese bamboo forest. I enjoyed these sceneries much more than I anticipated – when time is set to night, the sky is dark and the flaws of the models unnoticeable, everything feels so incredibly real. I am a lover of nature, and the scenes are so immersive, sound designs so good that it takes no effort for me to believe myself being in that natural environment it depicts and starts to relax and explore. I love how every scene has its own unique style and energy. In the Jurassic scene when I see the pterosaurs soaring in the sky instead of birds I really was struck by the sense of being in another era. Having experienced this, I have much confidence and anticipation of how well VR will develop in the future. I can’t wait to play the games ten years from now – I just know that they will be so good.
Just a side-note – watching terror movies/playing terror games in VR could be seriously deadly. They can be so real to inflict a heart attack. I just wouldn’t want to try THAT.
Can you say the content is artwork? If you need to change it to an artwork, what would you improve conceptually/technically?
Art is in my definition a truthful expression of the self – or more generally, a unique perspective to see the world. I think the contents I experienced are in the sense more commercially driven and in their interaction they are more focused on telling the story than conveying something abstract and personal – in exception of Namoo. This animation story is complete, cohesive and gives us a perspective to look at the protagonist’s life through the artist design – which makes it personal and convey a deeper meaning than just the happenings themself.
To change the games to artworks, I think there must be a unique way of seeing the world – take Moss 2 for example. The environment is carefully designed and decorated, but there is intrinsically nothing new – there has long been castles and treehouses, and they have no deeper metaphors contained in them – in a sense, all is how it seems, yet art is in my opinion something not as how it seems. The storyline of the story too, is cohesive yet bit of a cliche inside – the story of a hero’s journey, the little mice conquering different worlds to save his people. I think art has to have something intrinsically individual – and truthful to it. For example, if the creator of Moss 2 had himself been a warrior who has gone through an adventure in life, he would then create the story with his unique perspective, and convey his learnings out of it – then I would call it art.