GMU:VR Experience Designers/Gracia Quintero

The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri.

Headline text

Ever since mankind invented gods, there has been good and evil, Heaven and Hell. A glorious place, and a terrifying one; to enjoy either for the good behavior or be punished for the evil. With different religions there are different implications. But one thing these religions have in common is the fact of the “life after life”. We can find books like the Christian Bible and the Muslin Quran, where they talk about place of joy to live the eternity. Circa 1308–21, Italian author Dante Alighieri wrote about his experiences walking through the path of Hell, the Purgatory and Heaven. In each experience, he is guided by Greek poet Virgilio, and he is explained what happens in afterlife. My idea is based on representing all stages of his path and creating an image of what Dante might have seen in this walk. In Christian theology, Hell is the place where by God's judgment sinners go to pay for their unrepentant actions after dead. There, they spend the eternity in suffering. Same idea of concept is shared by Islam in Jahannam, refers to an afterlife place of punishment for evildoers. Hell, Sheol (in the Hebrew bible), “Gehenna” (in the new testament). This is the first approach to the whole project. Dante’s Divine Comedy is composed of three books: Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. But even before Dante starts talking about these three stages, we see his walk in the woods and Limbo. I focused on these two stages as they are foreground before the full experience. In this stage, the reader (in the original narration form) starts to get the new set of rules of the upcoming adventure. As I talked to my teacher, this first experiment was just a first approach of an even bigger project which will be filled with different sounds and images to play with the viewer’s emotions.

Divine comedy picture

The stages are: -Entrance, which I recreated for this project -Hell, which consist of 9 circles descending each time to a deeper punishment. I also recreated the first circle of Hell, Limbo. -Ante Purgatory and purgatory. -Heaven, which has stages and then Paradise.

Dante picture

Inferno Canto I:1-60 The Dark Wood and the Hill

Picture entrance of hell

“In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself, in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost. It is a hard thing to speak of, how wild, harsh and impenetrable that wood was, so that thinking of it recreates the fear. It is scarcely less bitter than death: but, in order to tell of the good that I found there, I must tell of the other things I saw there”. The first scene I created, I wanted to show my interpretation of Dante’s walk in the woods. Before he was even accompanied by Virgilio. The dark wood, the entrance, the way to the new adventure. I tried to recreate the loneliness in the darkness, the thick wood, and the only way into the upcoming path.

Picture1 Picture 2 Video

Inferno Canto IV:1-63 The First Circle: Limbo:

“Here suffer those who did not sin, yet did not have the required portal of our faith. Their punishment is the denial of Paradise.” — Virgil

Foto Proyecto limbo

There have been many interpretations of Limbo. The souls in this place are said to be in a numb state where they are lost in their own place. Left in the darkness to wonder around in their misery. Their punishment is not to be able to go to Heaven, not to enjoy the peace and joy of eternal glory. Souls here have regret, they walk around regretting the fact that they had no God, no real God.

My interpretation was based in the “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” on Netflix. But I changed it a bit. As souls here are in eternal destress and wonder. That is why when I created the characters, I didn’t give them any distinction to one another. Not even material for skin. They all look the same, as in the Christian theology, these souls are ignored by their God.

Video Proyecto

Future of the project

My idea is to connect the scenes of the three main stages of the project (hell, purgatory and heaven) with a gaze controller. I had tried to create the connection between the two scenes I already created, but on Wednesday 20th March my computer had a window update and suddenly the scenes folder was deleted from my files. I must admit I was way too confident on the computer and I didn’t have a backup file. So, I had to recreate the scenes from scratch in these two previous weeks. For this deadline, I planned to have sounds surrounding the scenes and, as said, the two scenes connected with the Gaze controller. I didn’t have enough time to recreate this connection, as I was working full time, and I had limited time to work on this. I hope to keep working on this project and actually get the results I have in my mind.