3D Virtual Worlds and the Metaverse: Current Status and Future Possibilities

Moving from a set of independent virtual worlds to an integrated network of 3D virtual worlds or Metaverse rests on progress in four areas: immersive realism, ubiquity of access and identity, interoperability, and scalability. For each area, the current status and needed developments in order to achieve a functional Metaverse are described. Factors that support the formation of a viable Metaverse, such as institutional and popular interest and ongoing improvements in hardware performance, and factors that constrain the achievement of this goal, including limits in computational methods and unrealized collaboration among virtual world stakeholders and developers, are also considered

Embodiment and the senses in travelogue filmmaking

This practice-based research presents an analysis of the representation of embodied experience in the travelogue film genre. It reflects upon the embodied and synaesthesic nature of the cinematic experience by tracing a shift in travelogue filmmaking from the ocular realism characteristic of early travelogue films to the emergence and proliferation of subjective approaches. Moreover, it analyses experimental travelogue films and the capacity of non-linear and non-narrative structures to express sensuous, embodied perception. 9 Meditations is the practice component of this thesis. It is an experimental travelogue film. Through its production this research explores the translation of embodied experience as a multi-sensory process into filmmaking practice. In the field of film studies, the travelogue has not been widely discussed outside historical approaches, and it has certainly never been discussed in relation to phenomenology and embodied sensation. This research articulates a new conceptual framework for both the production and theorisation of the travelogue film, as a form that is intrinsically related to performance, subjectivity and embodied perception. Moreover, this research concerns both the production process in filmmaking practice and the cinematic experience as grounded in synaesthesic, embodied perception. This approach brings to the forefront the capacity of audiovisual practice to both encode and produce sensuous knowledge

Video Screen as Matrix of Sensations. A Multisensory Approach to the Artistic Development of Responsive Video Membranes

The immateriality of moving images is manifest on a plethora of surfaces, shapes, and formats. Artists have access to a cornucopia of tools and medium to develop different forms of interactivity between the body and media, space, and time. Thus, since the 1960s artists have been pushing the limits of both the virtual and the physical worlds, expanding and transforming the static, two-dimensional frame while utterly, attempting to escape its tangibility. But, what if the video screens evolve into a responsive video membrane specifically designed for chosen moving images? How could this catalyst of sensations push creativity forward? And how would people embrace this innovative form of visualization as it moves them even closer to its subjects? In addition to involving an transdisciplinary inquiry into the artistic development of two responsive video membranes for projected moving images, this doctoral research comprised the ethnographic investigations on how the video display’s materiality, spatiality, and interactivity are key factors in altering perception and augmenting sensory, affective, and cognitive responses to a moving image. Finally, I propose a multisensory approach to the design of responsive video membranes where an emphasis is placed on the interplay among sensory modalities, sensory memories, associations and the sensory imagination. This realization emerges from studies in the fields of fine arts, anthropology of the senses, computer science, and mechanical engineering

VR Storytelling

The question of cinematic VR production has been on the table for several years. This is due to the peculiarity of VR language which, even if it is de ned by an image that surrounds and immerses the viewer rather than placing them, as in the classic cinematic situation, in front of a screen, relies decisively on an audiovisual basis that cannot help but refer to cinematic practices of constructing visual and auditory experience. Despite this, it would be extremely reductive to consider VR as the mere transposition of elements of cinematic language. The VR medium is endowed with its own speci city, which inevitably impacts its forms of narration. We thus need to investigate the narrative forms it uses that are probably related to cinematic language, and draw their strength from the same basis, drink from the same well, but develop according to di erent trajectories, thus displaying di erent links and a nities

What is the Avatar? Fiction and Embodiment in Avatar-Based Singleplayer Computer Games: Revised and Commented Edition

What are the characteristic features of avatar-based singleplayer videogames, from Super Mario Bros. to Grand Theft Auto? The author examines this question with a particular focus on issues of fictionality and realism, and their relation to cinema and Virtual Reality. Through close-up analysis and philosophical discussion, the author argues that avatar-based gaming is a distinctive and dominant form of virtual self-embodiment in digital culture. This book is a revised edition of Rune Klevjer's pioneering work from 2007, featuring a new introduction by the author and afterword by Stephan Günzel, Jörg Sternagel, and Dieter Mersch

States of suspension : exploring suspended experience of sound and light in popular music and imagery

This practice-based research project explores, defines and demonstrates the state of spatio-temporal suspension, or suspended experience, where abstract characteristics of sound and light in music and imagery coalesce to afford audience and performer the experience of liminal or “between” aesthetic zones, in turn providing a gateway into imaginative worlds. Informed by the author’s background in the performance and composition of forms of experimental popular music as well as graphic design and photography, the investigation utilises a combination of creative research methods and research-led analysis within a phenomenological framework to interrogate the physiological and neurological basis for this state. In order to better understand and define this concept, relevant creative exemplars including music and music videos, experimental films and site-specific installations are examined. The analysis draws upon a range of relevant philosophies and theories of perception relating to time and space, including phenomenology, liminality, the Japanese concept of Ma and heterotopia. Perceptual and psychological theories, including affect as felt experience and its role in aesthetics are considered, as well as embodied cognition in aesthetics and ecological approaches to perception. These theories and concepts consider humans as integral parts of a dynamic ecosystem of individual and shared information and perception, providing insight into the perceptual basis of suspension and why it is often encountered as a cross-modal experience. Through the analysis of creative works and the author’s self-observation and journaling of the audiovisual exploration of suspension in performance and practice, the research identifies compositional features that are prevalent in works that facilitate and enhance the potential for suspended experience. These features are explored and realised through creative works that examine how suspension is imparted through an audiovisual composition, how it is experienced by the practitioner through the recording process and as an improvised performance, and how the works are received and experienced by others, via examination of responses to specially designed reception tests. The findings are expressed in the conception and realisation of two major bodies of work: an audiovisual suite, Suspension Studies (2020), comprised of musical and visual studies of suspension as an immobile work; and a site-specific performance work, States of Suspension (2018), which affords audiences and performers an active aesthetic experience of suspension in situ. The enquiry contributes to the understanding of a relatively unexplored phenomenon in music and visual arts and intends to encourage further discourse and investigation into this topic