Synthetic Worlds, Synthetic Strategies

This text will attempt to delineate the underlying theoretical premises and the definition of the output of an immersive learning approach pertaining to the visual arts to be implemented in online, three dimensional synthetic worlds. Deviating from the prevalent practice of the replication of physical art studio teaching strategies within a virtual environment, the author proposes instead to apply the fundamental tenets of Roy Ascott’s “Groundcourse”, in combination with recent educational approaches such as “Transformative Learning” and “Constructionism”. In an amalgamation of these educational approaches with findings drawn from the fields of Metanomics, Ludology, Cyberpsychology and Presence Studies, as well as an examination of creative practices manifest in the metaverse today, the formulation of a learning strategy for creative enablement unique to online, three dimensional synthetic worlds; one which will focus upon “Play” as well as Role Play, virtual Assemblage and the visual identity of the avatar within the pursuits, is being proposed in this chapter.

Humanness, Elevated Through its Disappearance

Developments in electronic communications are drastically changing what it means to be human and to interact with humans. The value of recent technological developments to artists is more than doing more, faster and better; it is also the ability to highlight and elevate humanness in new ways through art, even by appearing to replace the real with the virtual. New tools don’t simply replace humans, they allow human creators to shift into new realms of creation: creating dynamic systems and worlds instead of static products. This chapter will give consideration to the different types of presence manifest in various communications formats, stage presence in technology-mediated performance, and several artworks that bring new light to the artist’s approach to virtual worlds as a kind of counterpoint with reality.

Kritical Art Works in Second Life

The chapter outlines the curation process for both of the exhibitions; presents the artists’ ideas and works; and with the panel’s insights, (some of whom are somewhat skeptical of an artist’s intent where SL work is concerned) draws them together into a new reading of art in Second Life.

The Meditation Chamber

The Meditation Chamber is an immersive virtual environment (VE), initially created to enhance and augment the existing methods of training users how to meditate, and by extension, to realize the benefits from meditation practice, including the reduction of stress, anxiety and pain. Its innovative combination of immersive virtual reality (VR) and biofeedback technologies added interoceptive or dimensions of inner senses to the already sensorially rich affordances of VR. Because the Meditation Chamber enabled users to become aware of autonomic senses that they are not normally conscious of, and to manipulate them in real-time, we found that it did enhance users’ abilities to learn how to meditate, particularly those who had never meditated. We describe the Meditation Chamber, scientific methods of evaluation and findings, and discuss first-person phenomenological aspects, its long-term applicability for users who have chronic pain, and future directions.

Spatial Design and Physical Interface in Virtual Worlds

We would like to propose a new spatial model, the “Contents Oriented Space”, conforming to the physical senses experienced in the 3D virtual worlds, as well as providing an appealing spatial experience, and present a design methodology making use of this new model. There are three necessary conditions for such “Contents Oriented Space”: 1. The contents are visible from the outside; 2. The contents are directly accessible; 3. By being directly accessible, the contents become “spatial”. By applying such a spatial model, it is possible to realize the architectural space in the 3D virtual worlds, conforming to the physical senses experienced in such environment, at the same time providing an attractive spatial experience. It is a new design methodology, able to be widely applied in the architectural space design for the 3D virtual worlds in general. The experimental use of the proposed methodology in the physical interface expanding this design methodology is also currently on going.

Learning from Baroque

The development of ubiquitous computing has brought up the emergence of a new type of space, sensitive and neither fully material nor totally virtual, within our environments. This essay discusses, from a cultural perspective, aesthetic and philosophical issues related to what has been called “mixed reality spaces”. It aims to show how early examples of interactive art can be found in Baroque architecture and, through analysis of the perceptual means used in some of those works, proposes a strategy for bringing aesthetic depth and relevance into mixed reality installations. Depicting philosophical implications between vision and touch and their consequences for aesthetics, this essay proposes that, while designing mixed reality installations, artist operate a radical shift from the vision to touch in order to create meaningful experiences and preserve freedom for the participant.

Social and Citizenship Competencies in a Multiuser Virtual Game

Colombia is a country that is growing in technological and economical areas, but cultural diversity, armed conflict, and everyday violence are forces that lessen the progress. The Ministry of Education proposed in 2004 standards for citizenship competencies that intend to teach children and youths abilities to live peacefully and respect the others. These standards have encouraged multiple initiatives and innovation to achieve goal in social and citizenship competencies. A research group of Universidad de Caldas created and evaluated a serious virtual game to support this policy. The game is a multiuser virtual game called Civia that shows a metaphor of collective challenge. Peaceful interaction, participation and respect are values required for survival in the game. Players can take individual decisions that affect positively or negatively the collective status, but an overall positive balance is needed to maintain collective resources. It was expected that collective auto regulation led to the learning of patterns and competencies to live peacefully together. Currently, there is no consensus in the research community about what and how video games can take learning outcomes and behavioral effects. An evaluation of the game shows positive results; however, some concerns about the complexity of everyday life about social interaction and learning transferability arise. The authors discuss findings according to proposed theories and models about effects of video games in education and behavior.

The City of Abadyl

In the City of Abadyl we try to explore a complex digital space in a setting that invites to participation. We provide a detailed and complex, yet open world that can be utilized in order to generate scenarios for the temporary co-creators of Abadyl, who would then interact in an optional environment and in the end producing new artefacts. Abadyl is a database that contains all the gathered information in different file formats, it is a storage facility for all of the physical artefacts, it is a website used for communication and documentation, it is a map for navigating the City. This combination of interactive situations and artefactual production we called “fieldasy”. We are concentrated on developing collaboration in the production of new media and it´s artefacts. We try to produce artwork that actually incorporates surprising visual and technical proposals that are unusual, enriching and engaging. By building prototypes and iterate it over time and amongst the co-creators, it let us explore this area in a fruitful way, moving between artistic intentions/screen writing, artefacts and digital generated expressions and script/code writing. Here the virtual object can challenge the physical with qualities that is very hard to achieve in the physical world, and in that conflict, new expressions can be developed. Today Hybrid creations have become a method for working with cultural production not only with different elements of form, but as blending identities of the creators as well. In our prototype work we focus especially on interactive installations and stage design; we realize that the digital design process both demand new forms of conceptualization and prototyping activities to support the design of the expression of the final artwork itself – and maybe in the long run propose a updated and appropriate design theory in this field.

Semantic Entities in Virtual Worlds

This chapter explores how a parallel semantic knowledge base describing the virtual world can improve the utility of virtual world environment by enabling virtual agents to interact and behave like their peer human participants. To a computer, the virtual world is nothing but a set of triangles derived from tessellated shapes comprising the virtual environment. The burden of instrumenting physical interaction is placed on algorithms to check physical constraints and object properties for each time step. These 3D object properties can be defined in a domain knowledge base where semantic descriptions of these objects contain not only physical properties, but relationships, inheritance, polymorphic properties, past history, course of action, acceptable effects, desired objectives, and purpose, resulting in a much richer architecture for defining the behavior of and interactions between various virtual entities.

Pervasive Virtual Worlds

Digital media have become pervasive. Most of ordinary tasks in everyday life, from leisure to work, are mediated through electronic devices and their respective digital content. The variety of tasks and their integration into computers and portable devices allow us to think about media as a ‘society of media’; a collective of media elements that exchange information and act upon those exchanges. In a society of media, the world is constituted by the hyperspace created by digital media and human uses. Within this context, an interesting role of digital media is that they ‘virtualize’ human senses and capabilities. Historically, the notion of ‘virtuality’ has been associated to seminal media concepts such as virtual worlds, which imply the use of interactive computer graphics imagery (CGI) to perform simulation and immersion. Another concept is virtual reality (VR), which has fostered prominent developments including generated environments, multimodal interaction, 3D modeling, and digital animation.