Virtuelle Realitäten entwerfen

Mit weit geschlossenen Augen. Virtuelle Realitäten entwerfen (With Eyes Wide Shut. Designing Virtual Realities)
31 May and 1 June 2017 · KISD, TH Köln, conceived with the Institute of Media and Design at TU Braunschweig

The interdisciplinary conference at KISD asked how mobile virtual reality technologies change spatial experience and self-perception, and what consequences the dissolution of the boundary between image and body has for designing in design and architecture. The VR application With Eyes Wide Shut, which I co-developed, was demonstrated there.

At the time, the largest technology companies were pushing their new VR headsets into the mass market and promising users complete submersion in immersive image worlds; with the latest generation of head-mounted displays, the advertising agreed, virtual realities would finally become “real”. But which real-virtual realities are being spoken of here, what characterises them, and how do they differ from mere image spaces?

A physical image, bounded outwards by its support and frame, establishes a distance between image and viewer. Perception through a VR headset impedes such distinctions: stereoscopic depth capture and the lag-free tracking of head movements reinforce the impression of being not in front of an image but inside an image space, among things and interacting with them. These new entanglements between the “mode of being of tactile space” and the “mode of effect of visual space” (August Schmarsow, 1896) change not only the object but fundamentally the process of designing. The focus of design interest shifts to the shaping of specific spaces of action that arise from the interplay of bodies, technical things, and physical environments.

Researchers and designers from design, art, and architecture, computer science, philosophy, art history, media and cultural studies, and theatre, film, and television studies addressed these questions across disciplines.