Transcriber: Translate TED Reviewer: Leonardo Silva
When I tell you to think about VR,
you might think of some fantastical reality,
or perhaps you're in space,
or maybe you're in a zombie apocalypse.
But a lot of what people see when they first encounter VR is not this,
but, in fact, something that looks a little bit more like this, which is sad.
This is a missed opportunity
because this is not a good first impression.
There's so much that you can do with this.
VR is a black box
and you don't know what you're going to get until you put on that headset.
So, for VR, the experience begins before the experience.
And that's why installations are so important.
They provide context and give you an anchor to hold onto.
They're the door through which you go into and come out of an experience.
This is what I do, I'm a developer and an installation artist,
and this is my project Firewood.
Already, from the physical objects,
you can see that there are leaves and there's a fire and there's warm light.
It gives you some context, some ambience to hold onto
before you even go into the experience.
You should already feel something when you look at this.
But that's not all because, once you go into VR,
your body still persists in the physical world.
So you need to pay attention to the nonvisual elements.
Sense and touch are two powerful senses that persist while you're in VR.
This is an installation that I did.
It's completely nonvisual.
It relies on scent and touch.
And these towels I had soaked several times over in beer.
It smelled so strongly of a bar.
I'm pretty sure it really annoyed my roommate
because our apartment smelled liked a bar for about a week.
But when I tell you to close your eyes,
and you're sitting in this weird, plastic, fabric-y thing,
and you smell beer and I tell you you're in a bar,
it's going to be a lot more believable.
So I designed Firewood such that there's this physical fire
that lines up with a virtual fire,
and, in doing so, I discovered a few things.
Some people would stick their hand into the virtual fire
and then they would recoil,
because they realized that there was feedback.
Some people would do the same thing, but they wouldn't touch the physical fire,
and after they came out they said,
"Did you put some kind of heat emitter in there?"
Which I didn't, and that's the power of the brain.
Now,
I like this idea of installations as doors into the virtual.
So let's say you walk into a room and you're going to an installation,
and this installation is ...
of a door.
Well, there's a lot of fun things you can do with a door, right?
Everyone knows what a door is.
You walk through them every single day.
I bet that you don't know how many doors you've walked through today
because it's almost so insignificant.
But that's the magical thing.
Because they're so prevalent,
there's this entire cannon of interactions with a door.
You can knock on a door,
or you can eavesdrop,
or you could even ring a doorbell.
And all of those things can mean something different in VR.
Suddenly, there's this freestanding door,
and what if I can move it?
I can push it against the wall or push it onto the floor.
Well, to make it easier on myself, let's put it on some rails,
and suddenly I can just slide this door wherever I want.
And if I put it on circular rails,
all of a sudden you can play with a cannon of circles.
So, if we think of circles, I think of a clock.
Suddenly, you can apply this concept of time to this door,
and you can scrub through time.
Why not go to the era when the Romans ruled,
and you can go and see the Coliseum in its heyday.
Why not go to the Jurassic era and see the dinosaurs?
VR installations are a two-way street.
The physical installation, and a good physical installation,
should influence the virtual experience.
And then when you go through a virtual experience,
when you come out, it should also, in turn,
color the physical installation again.
In doing so, you anchor your audience.
Continuity is key here.
You don't want to leave people from an experience looking at this.
This is boring.
The first thing you see is also the last thing you see,
so we need to make a good first and last impression.
Installations are magical
and they build a kind of integrated reality.
Just as doors integrate rooms into a building,
installations integrate physical and virtual worlds
into a whole human experience.
Thank you.
(Applause)