Blogging on Reading on VR and Placeholder

All of the things that were discussed in the reading were very interesting to me because I have done some work looking into VR. Last semester I worked on a project in Foundations in Digital Culture where my group worked to design a machine that would work all the senses to have you believe you were in the fantasy world. We had our own form of a HMD that was meant to be light to prevent you from noticing it was on. It also had speakers built in so you could hear the world and communicate via a condenser mic. There were several other aspects to the project such as a body suit that allowed you to feel the world and a omni-directional that allowed movement in the digital world. While reading about Dancing with the Digital Dervish it reminded me of the final project I had done in Projection Design last year in which we worked with several dancers from the theater school to create a dance piece incorporating technology. In my particular piece rather than having the dancer where a special suit such as in Digital Dervish we used a camera hidden in the audience to record the dancer live and download her form onto the screen and into the digital world where she danced with a prerecorded dancer on screen. The process also warped her body to become lines of code adding to the technical feel of the piece. The next frontier is most certainly going to be the digital world. With things such as the Oculus Rift, Google Glass, and Microsoft Hololens we are getting more and more used to incorporating technology into our lives and bringing online closer to our regular lives. Everything is shared on the internet now that it is a surprise more pieces are not done in virtual reality like how Digital Worlds has been doing for years. I have heard about artists who are now doing live concerts from their studios rather than going on tours which is just the beginning. Soon enough they will start to have virtual concerts where they can make their shows even more spectacular with limitless possibilities.  One thought that I started to have while reading about Placeholder and Osmose was a way to add another layer to the immersion by raising the users into the air when their actor wasn't on a solid surface. By lifting they gently like when in water their physical body wouldn't feel the floor and start to take away from the feeling of floating. They could raise and lower according their height in the game just like the crow flying up higher and higher.