Virtual reality has been touted as the perfect medium for everything from teaching prisoners how to live outside of jail, correcting vision problems, and making hyper-realistic games. With newspapers stuffed with articles about how useful the technology will be for our everyday lives, few have focused on how VR can offer a bold, new, and inventive vehicle for a format with less immediate use-value—visual art.
The National Film Board or Canada (NFB) is one of the first to recognize the medium’s potential for transforming 2D drawings. While many VR experiences fashion worlds built with 3D modelling, the NFB commissioned Montreal-based artist Paloma Dawkins to translate her on-paper creations into a colourful and absurdist world for the HTC Vive headset.
Her conception, named the Museum of Symmetry, offers one of the most vibrant art-based experiences in the Steam and Viveport stores. Taking viewers on a journey from jumping on billowing clouds to riding stingrays through portals of underwater light, Dawkins has built a fantastical romp that contrasts the limits of reality and believability in VR.
“The idea was that we wanted to create these five different rooms,” she tells the Georgia Straight at SIGGRAPH convention, an enormous event that focuses on computer graphics and immersive technology. “Each room was based on the elements, a geometric shape, a colour, and an emotion. The journey goes through the Platonic solids. The first part starts as a triangle, and then becomes a diamond, a cube, an icosahedron, and then a dodecahedron. Each one has its own characteristics. Aristotle assigned each shape a feeling—so the cube, for instance, is more earthy and stable and balanced. Its emotional resonance is with the colour green, so the part of the experience associated with the cube is about friendship, love, and nurturing. We wanted to make a story through these shapes.”
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Source: Straight