VR Experience at the Anna Kultys Gallery

During the break between terms, I visited a private view for the Juliette Sturlèse and Marjan Moghaddam joint exhibition at the Anna Kultys Gallery in Cambridge Heath, East London. I was invited to this last minute, but it became very relevant to what I am studying at the moment as it is a mixed reality exhibition – i.e. part real world, part virtual world.

This was an interesting experiment in terms of gallery design. The actual space itself is quite small, so the gallery has opted to make use of a VR headset to expand the amount of works they can show. There is definitely a stark difference between the physical and digital space, both in terms of what they can show but also the impact they both leave on the viewer. Personally, I still preferred the physical gallery space. The works shown physically were that of Sturlèse – her work is about sense of space, and was mostly made with astroturf among other materials, depicting abstract scenes and making use of lots of greens and blues. Although I found it somewhat difficult to find what specific message Sturlèse was trying to convey with her pieces, they were large, and they certainly gave me a sense of perspective, that I felt was missing from Moghaddam’s virtual works.

Getting the VR headset ready

Moghaddam’s art was displayed in a giant virtual gallery, full of digital sculptures and art hanging on the ‘walls’ – this was interspersed with old Iranian revolution songs that were linked to each piece. Personally, although the idea may have been a strong one, I found the presentation rather lacklustre. The walls and floor in the virtual space were very plain, and overall it just had a very unfinished feel to it. Maybe if more effort had been put into the presentation of the world around the art, I would have been more convinced by this digital exhibition space, however it felt like this way of showing the art was more of a novelty than it was something that genuinely added to the emotions and ideas behind Moghaddam’s work. I didn’t really get a sense of scale that I had experienced with Sturlèse’s work, and ultimately I felt unimpressed by the digital space, as I have been before when I’ve previously encountered these kinds of spaces (albeit on my laptop, not on a VR headset).

Maybe as technology develops, these sorts of ideas will become more impressive in practice, however at the moment I am still much more in favour of physical exhibition spaces.

First Crits for the Project

Our first group crits for our project so far also provided me with the chance to look at the first visual draft of the VR experience so far. Before we went up and presented what we have at the moment, Ana gave us all the opportunity to walk through the space on a VR headset. At the moment, it’s still quite basic but I’m very impressed with how Ana has managed to model the building so far.

Ana’s model of the outside of the building at the moment

So far the walkthrough allows the player to walk through the entrance of the building up to the lift in the tower block, and then to be transported to a different level of the building (this will eventually become 3 levels). At the moment the level that is available is just an idea of a surrealist landscape, but this will probably change at some point.

Annoyingly, although I had worked on a sonic idea for the experience in preparation for the crit, I didn’t have access to my laptop over the weekend before the session so I couldn’t upload it to the Google Drive for ideas to be presented, due to me moving over the weekend and accidentally leaving my laptop at my old home. The idea I wanted to present was based on a sequenced loop I had worked on at the synth desk in LCC a few weeks ago. I did try to come in early before the crit on the day to recreate what I had made but I wasn’t happy with the result so I decided not to upload it.

Overall, we had mostly good feedback on the sound assets and visual elements of the experience. One thing that was mentioned was that we might want to work more collaboratively on each aspect of the sound design, instead of dividing up roles and only focussing on one element each. This would mean that we all get to learn something about each aspect of the sound design of the experience, whilst also preventing certain aspects of the sound being left to the last minute if the person who is responsible for it doesn’t put enough work in. This is something we have taken on board, and we will try to work more collaboratively with each other when it comes to the foley, music, background ambience etc.

It was also useful to see how the other groups are getting along as we can compare their progress to ours and also take inspiration from the way they are working together.