I have an amazing idea.
I feel like a lot of VR installations, cool as they might be, are often unnecessary. Yes I know it’s “art” and art is subjective but lets just be real, some of it is dumb. I am in the boat that there ARE stupid questions which I feel is a similar boat to the one I’m explaining now which is, just because you CAN do something, doesn’t mean you should. The only reason a lot of VR things are done is because they CAN and its NEW. Which yea I know you don’t always know what you should or shouldn’t do until you do it, but I personally feel like you should actually identify what will be added by making it VR and if that outweighs what you will be losing like accessibility or possibly turning someone away from VR. I really felt this with Datamoshing. Its a glitchy video effect that I love where you corrupt 2 videos together to form a super glitchy transition. This is a great effect and combined with masking and keyframes can be greatly expanded upon… However, it became too accessible and everyone started doing it to random things for no reason. Because of this it lost a lot of its novelty and is now sort of looked at as old news. Anyways, I guess what I’m trying to get at is that this idea benefits specifically from VR. Alright so lets get into it. You know how museums have giant dinosaur skeletons? Well I noticed that when viewing them I don’t see it as a dinosaur, I see it as a whole different thing. I don’t look at the bone structure and envision how the muscles would’ve attached or how the stomach would hang. I simply see a giant skeleton as a finished product. It’s also not scary to see a skeleton. Apart from the film “Night at the Museum” I’ve never imagined a giant dinosaur skeleton chasing me. I look at a skeleton as more of a man made structure rather than a once growing living animal with thoughts and instincts. What if in front of these giant skeleton structures, there is a VR headset that when you put it on, you are no longer in a museum, but in the middle of a Jurassic jungle with plants and bugs surrounding you. In place of the skeleton is now a living and breathing T-Rex that’s sniffing the air and looking around. It towers over you in a surreal way. A way that generates a level of fear/anxiety even though you know 100% you aren’t in danger. The type of feeling that isn’t visibly noticeable until someone startles you and you jump a bit higher than normal. Another way this could be expanded on is when they have multiple skeletons frozen in a fight. This one when you put the VR headset on the fight is actually happening right in front of you. You see one massive animal topple over as a T-Rex attacks, ripping out chunks of flesh while it snarls and growls. You hear the losing animal screech as it calls out for help from its tribe. You hear its tribe calling back from behind you and you turn around to see the alpha of the tribe barreling right past you towards the T-Rex to save its partner. And this is just one of the many scenes that could be done. It’s exciting and gives you a real perspective of scale for these giant beasts. Standing in front of a T-Rex skeleton lets you know what it feels like to stand in front of a T-Rex skeleton. This would let you know what it feels like to stand in front of a T-Rex.
A BETTER COOLER MORE FUN AMAZING PROFITING LIMITLESS IDEA WOULD BE……
When I was younger I would travel with my family to North Carolina to visit my Grandma. Sometimes on the way back we would pass a Dinosaur park to which I always NEEDED to stop and see. Now that I’m older I suspect that whether or not we passed the Dinosaur park was not random at all and instead a loving fathers detour. Man I love my Dad. Basically you would pay an entry fee and then walk around this forest on these asphalt trails. As you walked you’d see giant life sized dinosaurs existing just how they would’ve. Even though I had been many times, it was always surreal to spot them in the bushes or by the trees. I want to recreate this within VR. Imagine the same exact setup with trails through the woods but now you are handed a VR headset at the beginning. You put it on and are in a VR prehistoric environment with never before seen plants, bugs and creatures. The trail in your VR headset turns, bumps and elevates exactly how the trail in real life does. As you walk along the path, you’re surrounded with intense sounds from bushes rustling, bugs buzzing, wind in the trees, heavy foot stomps, light pattering through the brush and a variety of roars/screeches and calls. There is a great sense of unknown as you are blasted into a foreign environment. You are curious and excited yet cautious and uneasy. I would work with historical pros to make the experience not only exciting like Jurassic Park but more importantly educational and accurate like Prehistoric Planet. As you walk you are intrigued by not just the giant dinosaurs that you see in clearings but also the small things like a prehistoric frog hopping off the path as you approach or a carnivorous plant closing up trapping bugs inside. Whether its big or small you are captivated by it because it’s new and real. The experience would be programmed like a game rather than a predetermined video. It would play out a lot more random and natural than a set storyline. Think of this like a raw open world and NOT like a 2D platformer. Obviously the experience wouldn’t be completely random, you would need to assure that everyone gets to see what they came for so let me explain. It would be programmed like a game so the AI dinosaurs know where you are but not WHAT you are. They look at you with the same confusion/caution that you would to them. And yes I mean look at you. For instance, you are walking past a group of Triceratops grazing, you make noise, whether that be talking to point them out to your team or stepping on an unavoidable bunch of sticks and leaves creating a crunch, the Dinos get alarmed and raise their heads to look at you. Eyes and head following you as you move. Not like a video either, like they actually look right AT you and maybe if you make too much noise or move to much they turn and run away. As you continue you begin to see bigger and bigger creatures until eventually you stop because there is something pushing its way through the trees ahead on the trail. You see snapping and birds flying as a T-Rex steps out onto the trail, stopping briefly to turn his head towards you as he’s trying to figure you out, he decides he’s not interested and walks off the trail snapping and pushing down trees as he goes. Maybe you also have a version where he is chasing a smaller animal across the trail and you hear the deep thudding of the footsteps as they approach freezing in your tracks as they quickly get louder and louder. The main thing is that no matter where you are looking, there is something to see. Everyone has a slightly different experience and will see at least one thing that no one else saw. The car ride home will be full of everyone sharing and explaining something they saw that the others didn’t while the others do just the same back. This would greatly increase re-visits as people would notice something new each time. The other great part is that you could have different trails and experiences for all age ranges. One for younger kids that could involve helping a baby dinosaur find its mother. It follows you along the trail getting distracted chasing giant dragon flies or taste testing all the various plants, liking some and shuddering from others. This gives me the ambitious idea to add gloves to the tour so that you can actually pet the dinosaur or maybe reach up and pick it a fruit that it can’t reach. I feel as though this wouldn’t be logical, but it is important to keep in mind as a possibility. You could also have a trail that is no dinosaurs, just bugs, smaller mammals and plants. My favorite idea though is one where you walk through the day the meteor hit. It starts out normal as you walk through the jungle. Eventually you get to a lookout point where you have wind and a great view. Then you see the small sunlike figure in the sky as it grows larger and larger. (I think in real life the meteor hit so fast that if you blinked you wouldn’t have even seen it. It would be a lot cooler though if you watched it shoot across the sky, getting hit with an intense heat lamp as it passes over. Maybe we could do this part in slow motion to show how fast it was actually moving. Of course we could do it inaccurately like a movie would where you watch it slowly/dramatically streak across the sky but I think that would defeat the whole purpose. I want this to be a real representation of how it actually played out. I think its eye opening to see how such a thriving earth that existed for an incomprehensible amount of time can be completely demolished in the blink of an eye. I also think it would be cool for when the meteor hits, the ground you are on shakes. Then depending on demand, maybe the story continues where you watch the earth grow very dark as the air born ash blocks the sun. Maybe you are now hit with cold air as the temperature drops and snow/ice covers the ground. Watching every last dinosaur die out. I want to keep this more dinosaur than human in the historical sense but it might be cool to have you go through a super fast time lapse pausing briefly at important moments just to give you a visual connection of this land to the one before. Also it would be very eye opening in terms of time perspective. Humans are a drop in an ocean in terms of time spent on earth and most people know that, however I feel like its something that you can not ever fully understand/believe and this would help us get closer to actually experiencing the raw scale of it.
David skipped class today (Monday) because of “off-site meetings”. This is the second week in a row where we had no instructor on Monday. I really hope David somehow makes up both classes. I was also so excited to come to class and tell everyone about my sick dinosaur idea. Now I have to wait until Wednesday. Which will be fine it just really takes the wind out of my sails.