I’ve written about and spoken at conferences, summits and panels on the importance of reinventing the term ‘mixed reality’, reclaiming it from its association as hardware technology. The term mixed reality (MR) has evolved over time to transcend human interactions within specific technological constraints and affordances. Two simultaneous realities occurring is all we need to imagine a mixed reality. Where you are now, reading this text is one, and the text on the page another. This extends in more complex ways to public installations and exhibitions.
Presenting a poster at a conference in VR live with a projection of the virtual world behind me
In public mixed reality VR installations, together with colleagues internationally an increasing amount of care and attention has been paid to the design of pre, during and post experiences of Virtual Reality. There is a growing acknowledgment with VR creators and research that investigates how a person in VR can also have an external reality occurring that influences how immersed they are within VR. The Digital Dream Play most recently explored a mixed reality setting by streaming actors on a green screen stage to Youtube. We added a third dimension by using software to virtually co-locate those actors onto a virtual background. Without question the pandemic of 2020-21 provoked innovation as we all had to adapt our work in a most difficult and heart-breaking situation.
Ongoing work with dance producer Small Stage since 2018 has resulted in several mixed reality innovations. A highlight was a series of augmented reality dancers captured using motion capture and whose choreography was part of a live outdoor street production. Audiences could download the app after the show to ‘take the dancer’ with them.
More recent experiments have involved staging dance and both capturing and streaming it through the point of view of a drone. Small Stage Drone Dance #5 [Invited Composition]. Shadbolt Centre for the Arts, Vancouver, Canada.
Pennefather, P. (2020). Small Stage Drone Dance #1. [Invited Composition]. Shadbolt Centre for the Arts, Vancouver, Canada.
Persistent collaborations with Riecke and his students at the iSpace Lab at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts & Technology have resulted in the co-creation and dissemination of a pre-during-post VR experience designed to simulate the overview effect that astronauts feel when they look down at the earth from space, and Body Remixer; an immersive mixed reality VR public installation that allows participant virtual bodies to deconstruct into thousands of particles and recombine merging with others either in VR or in the physical space nearby.
Desnoyers-Stewart, J., Stepanova, E. R., Riecke, B. E., & Pennefather, P. (2020, April). Body RemiXer [Curated Virtual Reality Exhibition]. Recto VRso: Intenational Art and Virtual Reality Festival, Laval, France. https://rectovrso.laval-virtual.com/en/home/
Mixed Reality
I’ve written about and spoken at conferences, summits and panels on the importance of reinventing the term ‘mixed reality’, reclaiming it from its association as hardware technology. The term mixed reality (MR) has evolved over time to transcend human interactions within specific technological constraints and affordances. Two simultaneous realities occurring is all we need to imagine a mixed reality. Where you are now, reading this text is one, and the text on the page another. This extends in more complex ways to public installations and exhibitions.
with a projection of the virtual world behind me
In public mixed reality VR installations, together with colleagues internationally an increasing amount of care and attention has been paid to the design of pre, during and post experiences of Virtual Reality. There is a growing acknowledgment with VR creators and research that investigates how a person in VR can also have an external reality occurring that influences how immersed they are within VR. The Digital Dream Play most recently explored a mixed reality setting by streaming actors on a green screen stage to Youtube. We added a third dimension by using software to virtually co-locate those actors onto a virtual background. Without question the pandemic of 2020-21 provoked innovation as we all had to adapt our work in a most difficult and heart-breaking situation.
Ongoing work with dance producer Small Stage since 2018 has resulted in several mixed reality innovations. A highlight was a series of augmented reality dancers captured using motion capture and whose choreography was part of a live outdoor street production. Audiences could download the app after the show to ‘take the dancer’ with them.
More recent experiments have involved staging dance and both capturing and streaming it through the point of view of a drone. Small Stage Drone Dance #5 [Invited Composition]. Shadbolt Centre for the Arts, Vancouver, Canada.
Pennefather, P. (2020). Small Stage Drone Dance #1. [Invited Composition]. Shadbolt Centre for the Arts, Vancouver, Canada.
Persistent collaborations with Riecke and his students at the iSpace Lab at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts & Technology have resulted in the co-creation and dissemination of a pre-during-post VR experience designed to simulate the overview effect that astronauts feel when they look down at the earth from space, and Body Remixer; an immersive mixed reality VR public installation that allows participant virtual bodies to deconstruct into thousands of particles and recombine merging with others either in VR or in the physical space nearby.
Desnoyers-Stewart, J., Stepanova, E. R., Riecke, B. E., & Pennefather, P. (2020, April). Body RemiXer
[Curated Virtual Reality Exhibition]. Recto VRso: Intenational Art and Virtual Reality Festival, Laval, France. https://rectovrso.laval-virtual.com/en/home/
The Fun Palace: Carnival of Mixed Reality at the Centre for Digital Media in Vancouver, Canada presented 11 installations, performances with dancers and live actors offering an eclectic mix of realities,. https://thecdm.ca/events/2019-06-25/the-fun-palace-carnival-mixed-realities