Charged Utopia VR
Exploring Embodied Sensemaking in the Virtual Space
Internship Project at Interactive Institute Swedish ICT (former RISE) // Feb 2017 – June 2017 // Coached by: prof. dr. ir. Pierre Lévy // Company coaches: dr. ir. Jeroen Peeters & dr. Ambra Trotto
Charged Utopia VR is a Virtual Reality experience exploring the possibilties of embodying the notions of morality, ethics and decision making in a virtual environment. The VR experience is based on an interactive one-time event Charged Utopia designed and curated by RISE Interactive on the islands of Norrbyskär in Northern Sweden during August of 2016.
The exhibition consisted of a series of interactive installations on the islands that told stories of the islands’ past as the home of a large sawmill and worker community, in the late 1800’s and the first half of the 1900’s. These installations were designed to use the past as a lens for the present and vice versa: visitors were confronted with both the history of the islands, as well as issues of a more contemporary nature, such as the European refugee crisis. Through embodied interactions with the installations, visitors were triggered to form personal reflections regarding complex societal topics such as immigration. In the exhibition, embodiment was key in order to elicit engagement and trigger personal reflections.
In Charged Utopia VR, I explored how we may transpose this engagement with morality, ethics and decision making into a new, virtual experience designed in a virtual reality environment that could be experienced anytime, anywhere.
More information can be read in the published work in progress TEI publication: Charged Utopia VR: exploring Embodied Sense-Making in the Virtual Space
Reflection
In this project, I have not only been working with VR technology itself, but I also tried to position this project on a somewhat higher level of what VR technologies will mean in the future. Through research I developed an interest in how to design for an ethical dimension and more human approach within the virtual world, and started to consider this project as not only a design project, but also as a research project. Here I started to grasp a better understanding of what research through design actually entailed.
Expertise Areas: CA, TR, US, DRP, MDC
