GMU:Critical VR Lab I/Yen Lung Chen

Randomness

The quality or state of lacking a pattern or principle of unpredictability^[1]

Concepts

The idea of this project is greatly influenced by the book I read in 2019, Fooled By Randomness written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Then I started to pay attention to observe how life events happened without any explanation or in a form of chaos where we only hold little control of our life even though we've been told everyone is special. However, these broken to pieces of memory emotions somehow can be free from spacetime.

Visual Settings

The randomness in life and its journey is expressed by being forced to one direction, and surrounded by the fragments of cinema trailers. These fragments imply the probability when the insignificant meet significant.

Black space was chosen because the black edge of the quad object is compatible with the white. Otherwise, I really want to go for the white space like the weapon room in the movie Matrix.

All the video clips on the quad game objects in position, rotation, time frame point are randomly chosen and created through the scripts.

Sound Settings

Spatializing audio from a video by the distance between the camera and the audio sources^[2].

Randomness Generator

Each time that building this application will render different fragments in a discrete position and rotation to illustrate the concept of randomness. The following clips are just a few of the samples.

Copyright statements

All the original clips were movie trailers released on Youtube.
The creator of the project does not own the copyrights of the video clips used in this project.
The original clips were cut for experimental but not profitable purpose.

Futher Development

The restriction of access to the Digital Bauhaus Lab and the VR devices due to the pandemic, this work is not able to be tested in the VR environment. I'd like to take another course in the future to get the implementation in more depth.
Current implementation required a more powerful computational machine in order to render extra video frame in a fluent manner.
The design choice of the movement of the camera could be further explorative, e.g. floating, sinking, flying experiences than pulling the camera in one direction.
Further examination of camera distortion affecting stretching clip ratio is needed^[3]^[4].

Credits

[1] ttps://www.lexico.com/en/definition/randomness

[2] ttps://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/mixed-reality/unity-spatial-audio-ch3

[3] ttps://answers.unity.com/questions/1327866/how-to-get-rid-of-default-camera-distortion-effect.html?page=2&pageSize=5&sort=votes

[4] ttps://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/PhysicalCameras.html

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