Visual representation - ideas

[Smriths19]

Starting a thread where we can talk about what we want to display on the screens and the overall narrative of the project

[Smriths19]

VISUAL REP IDEAS

• A fully immersive space interaction. Includes planets, stars, nebulae, and wormholes.
• Starts off with massive displays of individual nebulae and a rogue planet. The user realizes that they are either in a) a new galaxy that has yet to be formed, or b) in a galaxy where things have gone terribly wrong.
• Walking through this galaxy is definitely confusing - but the user continues. When they move their hands around the screens, they notice the nebulae forming a shape. This prompts them to continue, allowing them to form stars and planets by bringing together the nebulae. They continue walking through this empty galaxy, creating multiple stars and planets.
• As they walk further down, they notice a black space that appears as a disturbance in space - there is a warped shape and a noise that lets users know that is in fact, a distortion in space (Scientific fact: wormholes are distortions in space)
• The user can interact with the wormhole. Move their arms around it to reveal a new color. The bigger the gestures get, the more the colors of the new galaxy are revealed. When all the users in the interaction (up to 5?) wave their arms together, the users are all transported to the next galaxy. (Reason why all of them need to interact with it at once: the display will change on both screens. So if one person gets sucked into the wormhole, the display can’t change for one person alone — thoughts?)
• The new galaxy has a few planets and stars in it already, along with many nebulae (that the users can interact with again and create stars). When users realize that they can create stars and planets by interacting with nebulae, they probably also realize that existing planets/stars can be broken down into nebulae. Combining nebulae from different stars and planets might form an improved planet/star perhaps? (Don’t know for sure how difficult this could be to implement).

Beyond this, we can either create another wormhole that reveals another galaxy but unless there’s something very different from the other two galaxies to display, it might get repetitive. If we want, we can create a wormhole that leads the user back to the first galaxy. At the end of the exhibit, we will have a fully-fledged galaxy created by all the visitors, having started from just dust and space particles. (Is this a good enough narrative? Do we need something stronger?)

• Further visual effects on wormholes: Since the gravitational pull is extremely strong near it, we can make the visual effects like so: when the user starts interacting with the wormhole, particles near and around the wormhole get sucked into it.

[hyang-gi]

Based on the discussion on 16/06/2023 and building on above listed ideas, a summarised version:

Create two worlds connected through a wormhole. Wormhole is present on a not very obvious spot, the rest of the world contains other elements in space. The wormhole is detected based on interaction, it can be a moving object that gets triggered by the number of people in front of it. At a certain number, the wormhole is activated, a warping kind of effect is resulted and the viewers get transported into another dimension. The wormhole now is shifted to another spot. Or might not be visible at all for a certain point. The viewers now get to interact and spend sometime into this world until the wormhole appears and a similar process is repeated.

Questions to consider:

1. how big is the world? it shouldn't be a repetitive experience.
2. are two worlds enough?

[hyang-gi]