Osmose, a virtual reality created by new media artist Char Davies. This is a walk-through video of the interior environment that she had created 1995 for the purpose of virtual experience. Below is an explanation of the project Osmose.
Osmose (1995) is an immersive interactive virtual-reality environment installation with 3D computer graphics and interactive 3D sound, a head-mounted display and real-time motion tracking based on breathing and balance. Osmose is a space for exploring the perceptual interplay between self and world, i.e., a place for facilitating awareness of one’s own self as consciousness embodied in enveloping space.
Immersion in Osmose begins with the donning of the head-mounted display and motion-tracking vest. The first virtual space encountered is a three-dimensional Cartesian Grid which functions as an orientation space. With the immersant’s first breaths, the grid gives way to a clearing in a forest. There are a dozen world-spaces in Osmose, most based on metaphorical aspects of nature. These include Clearing, Forest, Tree, Leaf, Cloud, Pond, Subterranean Earth, and Abyss. There is also a substratum, Code, which contains much of the actual software used to create the work, and a superstratum, Text, a space consisting of quotes from the artist and excerpts of relevant texts on technology, the body and nature. Code and Text function as conceptual parentheses around the worlds within.
Through use of their own breath and balance, immersants are able to journey anywhere within these worlds as well as hover in the ambiguous transition areas in between. After fifteen minutes of immersion, the LifeWorld appears and slowly but irretrievably recedes, bringing the session to an end.
The user-interface is based on full-body immersion in 360 degree spherical, enveloping space, through use of a head mounted display. In contrast to manually based interface techniques such as joysticks and trackballs, Osmose incorporates the intuitive processes of breathing and balance as the primary means of navigating within the virtual world. By breathing in, the immersant is able to float upward, by breathing out, to fall, and by subtlety altering the body’s centre of balance, to change direction, a method inspired by the scuba diving practice of buoyancy control.
The public installation of Osmose includes large-scale stereoscopic video and audio projection of imagery and sound transmitted in real-time from the point-of-view of the individual in immersion (the “immersant”): this projection enables an audience, wearing polarizing glasses, to witness each immersive journey as it unfolds. Although immersion takes place in a private area, a translucent screen equal in size to the video screen enables the audience to observe the body gestures of the immersant as a poetic shadow-silhouette.
*** information cited from:
http://www.immersence.com/osmose/index.php
