How do you tell a first-person story about a tree? How do you give its wordless life a narrative, or explore its timeless inner world? Treehugger: Wahoma is an attempt to do just that for the giant sequoia. The exhibition, which launched recently at London’s Southbank Centre, mashes together virtual reality, data visualization, and installation art into one poignant, breathtaking experience, transporting participants through the nervous system of a 3,500-year-old redwood—one of the world’s largest living creatures, by volume.
“We’ve heard the experience isn’t that different from like, doing mushrooms.”
Treehugger was created by Marshmallow Laser Feast, an interactive creative studio based in London. The experience begins in a small studio space, containing a single, fabric-covered column that stands in the middle of the darkened room. The name of the exhibition only makes sense once visitors don their HTC Vive VR headsets: In virtual reality, the dark column suddenly blooms into a magical, multihued sequoia before visitors’ eyes.
,
,
In appearance, this virtual sequoia is stylized to resemble a sequoia you might find illustrated on some biology class blackboard, perhaps with a box of fluorescent chalk. Eddies of colorful lines diffuse through the soil, whorl through the air, and spread up through the trunk—a visualization of the surprisingly complex networks that cohabit a sequoia’s invisible micro-ecosystem. Soon, a thunderstorm bursts overhead, denuding the sequoia and its soil with rain. As the drops patter around you, you can actually see the sequoia’s subterraneous root structures swell and throb, sucking up the moisture and drawing it skyward through its trunk.
,
Source: Fastcodesign