TERRA
‘Terra’ is an immersive audio-visual experience that broaches questions of ecological awareness and human culpability. It features a curated immersive journey through a collection of digital artefacts in the form of point clouds. These data sets represent historical spaces tied to negative human behaviour which precipitated the eventual ecological collapse of the fictional world.
Idea
The idea for the project was developed from the inspiration of Timothy Morton’s concept of hyperobjects; objects which have a vitality to them but can't be touched, such as race, class or climate change. The intention was to contextualise one of these hyperobjects by creating a sense of perception of the issues of climate change which we face in our own world today.
Method
LiDAR data was chosen for its fragmentary and imperfect aesthetic which helped portray the frailty of the digital spaces and their underlying story. The point clouds were edited and visualised in Unity and a narrative was produced to accompany the experience and tell the story of the demise of the lost world. Recorded narrative and interactive sound design were implemented in spatial audio, using the Wwise middleware, to better develop a feeling of immersion for the viewer. Game mechanics such as audio-reactive visuals were employed to create a sense of fallibility and fragility of the explorable spaces.
Takeaways
The experience was presented at a Masters degree show and was awarded the highest group mark out of all entries. As the project was carried out at the start of the COVID pandemic it was unfortunately not possible to present an in person VR experience. The initial intention therefore was to deploy the experience as an online game using the WebGL API. However WebGL is unable to support threaded audio and so a downloadable desktop game was opted for instead. If the project were to be developed further it would be good to try hosting it online using a system capable of threaded audio processes such as the Web Audio API.