The Art of Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality is something that has been promised in the world of technology for a long time. In the 1970s and 1980s when I was working in the animation industry in Los Angeles there wasn’t such a thing as a computer animator.

In 1982 Tron came out which had the first computer generated animation but it was so technical that it was more about writing lines of code than art. The bright light of computers doing graphics caught many eyes including John Lasseter who went on to become a creative director at Pixar and now head of animation at Disney. But there was a time when John saw the promise of computer animation and it created a cognitive dissonance between him and  Disney. He moved on to Pixar and the rest is history.

Working on computers I was fascinated with the apparent limitlessness of what could be done with silicon. And what a fascinating time to come in to computer graphics – at the beginning. A friend of mine from the Los Angeles days went on to win an Oscar for the cutting edge computer design work he did on Disney’s Tarzan in 1999. In the 90s I worked with cutting edge virtual reality software at the time, beta-testing on Silicon Graphics Cosmos software. But the promise of virtual reality was still a long way off as the computer hardware wasn’t powerful enough at the time.

So here we are in the 2010s and the computer hardware is now able to create amazing virtual worlds in striking visuals. I thought about going back into VR but I came to the realization that it’s much easier and takes less hardware to share a ‘virtual’ reality as we have brains that interpret our ‘reality’ and that it can be more inclusive to connect with others and share the ‘meatspace’ and learn more from one another.

This is why my series of installation art right now is called “Quantum Overtones”. When we share a space with others, we each bring to it our history, experiences and knowledge from our brief lives on this planet. And even though we share the same space, we bring our own unique perspective, which can have different meanings and values.