Category: Collaborating

Surrealism aims to revolutionise the human experience. It balances a rational vision of life with one that asserts the power of the unconscious and dreams. The movement’s artists find magic and strange beauty in the unexpected, uncanny, disregarded, and unconventional. At the core of their work is the willingness to challenge imposed values and norms, and a search for freedom.

Step into a world where imagination knows no bounds and dreams come alive in a stunning virtual reality experience. In this captivating adventure, players will be transported to an attic filled with immersive objects that hold the keys to surreal dreamscapes, waiting to be unlocked.

Imagine standing in the centre of a room surrounded by a diverse array of fascinating objects—a breathtaking painting that seems to pulsate with life, an ancient book whispering forgotten tales, and a mysterious computer glowing with untold secrets. Each object holds a portal to a unique and mesmerising dream world, where reality bends and dreams become tangible.

I have found this unit very enjoyable and it has been very good to work in a group as I am not normally involved in group work for my creative practises. If I could do the unit again I would spend more time creating sounds with other team members as I only really did this during the end of the unit and it was really fun and helped me improve on the work I was doing by getting another person’s point of view on the work. I also wish I had used more of the university’s resources and used the multitrack recorders more when recording samples so that I could have easily recorded the sounds for the space. I think that in the future I will engage myself in group work a lot more as I really liked the creativity that it brought out of me.

Beautiful psychedelic sound produced by movement and produces visual with VR headset. Leslie Deere. Long droning sounds that change slightly over time. this is inspiring for my VR sound work as it makes me think about how we could use the form of movement within the experience to create, manipulate and edit sound. Colour theory, therapeutic use of colours and sound.

Encoding formats – Vorbis defaults to 37%, AT9, Opus looses compression to 63%

Loading modes – Assets with compressed loading modes are loaded within the beginning. Decompressed are modes are decompressed into memory when loading. Streaming loading mode are continuously loaded, might buffer.

Potential disconnect between the sound and the experience. Disassociation.

Sound and the flow of time. Music can make time go faster but doesn’t change the immersive-ness. However sound effects can make the experience more immersive.

Vorbis Streaming.

In Virtual Reality the panning is replaced with HRTF, more accurate directional cues. Distance Attenuation. For VR should master with head tracking, how the mix works with head tracking.

DearVR. Oculus VST.

More effects ,more buffering.

Ethics within VR, when creating our project we should abide by ethics followed in the real world within our project. We have to keep our integrity and not create anything that would make others uncomfortable or offended.

Uncanny valley – how humanlike robots can elicit an emotional response to an object/robot. Takashi Minato coined the term and created a scale to show how as AI/Robotics get realer our reactions and responses to them change and we get progressively weary and uncomfortable with the object if it looks too real and not right. He found that there are robots and objects that we are comfortable with such as teddy bears, non-realistic robots and the bunraku puppet which is a traditional Japanese puppet with a humanlike face that people in black body suits control.

Unreal Engine have created the MetaHuman which is an engine that can easily scan human expressions and facial features within minutes and then transfer them into the engine so that they can be warped and changed to be suitable for film, video games and other forms of media. The models look scarily realistic and play into the Uncanny Valley theory.

Sonic sensibility

Escher effect

VR being used in health industry, doctors being trained in VR, VR can be used as therapy and can be used to treat PTSD with veterans to take them more comfortable and accepting to their past experiences that might be negatively effecting them in the present.

Forensic architecture is a site ran by Goldsmiths university that uses technologies such as unreal engine to show various incidents of war and crime and shows you reenactments of events.

Today we had a meeting on what we are going to do for the rest of the project. Rosa showed us what work she had done and we had a try at playing the work in progress experience on her headset. The sounds that have been integrated into the game have all been downloaded and our sounds are not in the game so far. I am going to start working on the sounds for the computer and bedroom sounds. I will need to make some ambient sounds, sounds for the guitar and piano.

Sam Rolfes

High Reality

Sothebys – Masters of Surrealism: This is a non-interactive experience that showcases surrealist art. You are taken through art pieces by Salvador Dali, Paul Delvaux, Andre Masson and Rene Magritte. The experience was made by Sothebys a fine arts company and used to advertise the art pieces that they have for sale. The experience was good but lacks the interactivity that we want to include in ours.

As the virtual reality group create the first scene for the virtual reality experience, us the sound group have to focus on gathering and recording sounds that will fit the room. I have worked on creating general ambient sounds for the bedroom, such as rain that can be heard from outside.

Spirit of place – The only time I have truly felt spirit of space within a man made structure has been at Segrada Famillia in Barcelona, Spain. The building was made by Antoni Gaudi in 1882. When stepping inside it is as if you are at one with god and is very spiritual, no other building has ever made me feel like this.

Our VR experience is going to be linear and the player is going to have to go through the rooms to progress within the experience, therefore we are going to follow a linear sound structure and sounds will play as the player interacts or passes items within the experience.

Ambisonics order – how many microphones we’re using. 0,1,2,3. Mono Audio is ambisonics on level 0

A-Format vs B-Format

XYZW – Up, Down, Left, Right, Width

What is Ambisonic(s)?
• Surround recording and playback technique, Michael
Gerzon 1970s
• Little commercial success so far, patents expired
• Independent of playback loudspeaker configuration,
scaleable
• 2D and 3D sound-fields can be synthesized