“Lucid Space Dreams,” one of the world’s first HD virtual reality music visualizers, brings the audience to an imaginary dreamscape filled with a myriad of celestial bodies, underwater creatures, and surreal scenery. In this two-minute long video, a user can experience taking a stroll along the dreamlike pathway. After I tried it on Oculus Quest, the first thing I noticed was that this VR video doesn’t have any user interaction other than turning one’s head. Since its title is not just a generic dream but a lucid dream, it’d be much more interesting if it gives users more interactive options. Another notable feature is that, most of the objects visualized here seem pretty a long way away—and by doing so it minimizes potential parallax. After the pathway ends, I’m cast in the middle of the space as if I’m floating through the outer space; mystic background music also intensifies as the video progresses. It was my favorite part of the project because it gave me the immersive experience that I could hardly ever imagine realistically. Overall, the way how they weaved together a various visual and audio elements was fascinating.
“In the Eyes of the Animals,” a sensory visualization of how other species view Grizedale Forest in the North of England, is a new and striking project in terms of not only its graphics but its concept. We can’t see the way how frogs, owls, and mosquitoes see the world; it’s impossible to imagine it even. Virtual Reality, however, allows us to explore what’s beyond our realm of human vision. As most of the stereoscopic issues happen because we are trying to model human vision, it might be an interesting approach to deviate from the traditional ways and get inspiration from non-human vision components. The fact that users cannot see what Grizedale Forest actually looks like was a downer for me. It’d be more interesting if a user can switch between different perspectives, like changing camera filters. The piece is set to a binaural soundscape, the developers said, but I couldn’t tell a stark difference between this audio and other stereo soundscapes (probably I should’ve turned the volume up.)
3. The Big Picture: News in Virtual Reality
A flat TV or a computer/mobile screen has been the only way I could catch up the news. And here comes the project “The Big Picture: News in Virtual Reality,” which presents a vision of how the news of future will be like. This project brings the viewers to an actual scene so that they can see what the news is all about—in this video, the news is about Puerto Rico and Los Angeles. It has a lot of potentials to reshape the current journalistic media, as immersive experience it gives is far greater than being an idle spectator of matters. As this project is a prototype, there’s still room for improvement; sometimes the commentator’s words have passed me by, as I was a way too focused on glancing around what’s happening. If there is a better way of improving this sort of information overload, I’m definitely interested in subscribing this channel.