I had an interesting experience in a doctor's office today. There
were these gizmos on the wall, and I was trying to deduce their
purpose as though I was an alien from another planet. They had cords
running into a wall - did that make it a part of a larger organism?
One of them didn't have a cord - did that make it a self-contained
organism? If I assumed that one of these devices was a weapon or a
power tool, how could I try to use it without blowing myself up?
Then I saw a box of rubber gloves, and an icon of a human hand on the
wall. I guess if I had anything remotely resembling an appendage
system, I could deduce the existence of human hands, and recognize
that these wall objects were designed to be held. And also that the
grips were omni-directional and awkward for a human hand to hold, so
therefore the objects were probably not dangerous. Whereas a pistol
or a power saw has only one way to hold the object, so that you won't
hurt yourself.
Now if I were a gelatinous blob and moved everything with electrical
discharges, then perhaps I would never have even noticed the hand
icon, and would have been more interested in the interface of these
objects to the wall.
This exercise of "alien thinking" holds a lot of artistic
possibilities for virtual worlds. We could make worlds that
"function," but deducing the way that such worlds function is left as
an exercise for the user.
A related approach: allow the users to assume characters of different
biological types. Ex: a human, a dog, an 8-eyed spider, a blind cave
fish, a sea anemone. Try to build a VR world that can handle all of
these different sensory modes, and see how the users interact with
each other.
Form that are distinct and easily recongnisable from different
angles and distances, yet capaple of holding suble variations (So that you
can have a form symbolise a category, then distinguise between the
different individual parts through minor variations in the form).
The distance requirement that you suggest, would seem to be very much
a "landscape architecture" approach to symbolic meaning.
But this is probably better suited for trial and error than discussion. :)0
Well there is a chicken-and-egg problem of "form follows function."
Without a specific function to talk about, it's hard to discuss form.
With that in mind: you have been talking about developing "spatial
languages" for VR purposes. What kind of functionality are you trying
to achieve by that?
I agree that if the functional goal is "international symbols for
e-mail," then that's not artistically very interesting. But it seems
that you [Torbjoern] are gesturing towards something more interesting
than that?
Cheers,
Brandon