Hello, and welcome to our creative process.
Last year we dove head first into a new research theme: 'The role of Body Language in VR', investigating the possibilities of human (e)motion and non-verbal communication in virtual reality. It turned out to be a year long journey full of prototypes & epiphanies. Over the next three weeks we'll be trying something new: completely documenting the whole creative process in a series of 10 blog posts. Before we dive into this process, let’s start at the beginning.
In early July 2018, our friends from fellow game-studio Improvive came over for a visit. They showed off the VR multiplayer system they were building. Improvive is specialises in multiplayer games in VR, and they had been perfecting their own system for a while now. It featured full-body avatars, worked with Rift, Vive and Windows MR headsets, and could easily serve as the base for any type of game. The game they were working on, Hide and Freeze, showed the fun of being physically together in VR. This being our first time in multiplayer VR, we were struck by how simple interactions like waving hands and patting each other on the head already had this very embodied and intimate feeling. You could really read human personalities in each other's movements.
This sensation of human personality through simple avatar movement was an eye-opener for us. We kept discussing why it felt so personal. The chance to suddenly see someone’s head and head-movement brought over so much more expression. Hesitation, frustration, tenderness, these are not grand gestures, they are conveyed through nuance., which became visible in a game!
This made us realise two things:
By working together with Improvive we had the chance to experiment with online VR multiplayer. A lot of Monobanda’s work revolves around social physical interactions, so VR multiplayer would seem a no-brainer for us to dive into. But online functionality is costly and labour intensive to build from the ground up, so we simply never had the chance to build it for experimentation purposes. Improvive on the other hand, had this fully functional toybox for us to explore.
Body language in VR games is a very inspiring study subject! As VR matures, more and more people will interact with each other online in VR, with avatars that carfeully track their real physical movement. This opens up a whole new form of online communication, Body Language! This first playtest left us so inspired that we immediately realised we should experiment with it, maybe even turn it into an artistic research project. We started out with writing our thoughts down, on which you can read more in the next post. These thoughts evolved into a funding submission we sent to Creative Industries Fund NL, which in turn was honoured, enabling us to engage in artistic research exploring the future possibilities of body language in social VR.
In our next post we formulate the first thoughts that served as the backbone for our funding application and further research direction.
In this series of blog posts, we will take you through our research into body language in VR. In our next post we’ll talk about our first conceptual ideas. This research was a collaboration with Improvive and funded by Creative Industries NL.
About our collaboration partner Improvive:
Improvive specialises in solutions for VR multiplayer. Using their expertise, they have created solutions for collaboration, therapy, dance and museums, and are still exploring new possibilities in providing full solutions for helping others through interactive interventions.
Art is this post by the amazing Sonja van Vuure