Vuja Dé
Virtual Reality Experience, 2018
Vuja Dé is a three minutes virtual reality practice that incorporates the intuitive process of breathing and conveys the daily spiritual value through the communication between mind and body, real and virtual.
The practice is a designed life journey, which is meant to be a poetic representation of the cycle of life in a non-place liminal space. The users connect the inner-self and outer world through the process of breathing as the navigation in the world.
Life starts with a breath
Death starts with its absence
In between is life
01.
interaction
WHAT?
The users breathe to navigate the world, breathing in to float upward, breathing out to fall. By incorporating this intuitive process of breathing, the users create consciousness embodied into the practice. As they breathing, they facilitate awareness to evoke their personal memory and make emotional connections crossing the boundary of virtual and real.
HOW?
Use the built-in microphone of the Oculus headset to capture the breathing data as the input. Conduct FFT analysis in Unity to get rid of other data and keep breathing spectrum only. Use the viewer's breathing as the audio back.
OUTCOME?
Breathing is the way, our inner self connects to the outer world. When the practice end, the users take the emotions happen in the virtual world back to the real, rediscover an aspect of themselves, being alive in the world which they have forgotten, and feeling how extraordinary the ordinary life is.
02.
Story
A non-place space journey is divided into three spaces, birth, road, and dream. Birth is a floating perspective in the unformed universe. The road is a roamer perspective in a mirrored forest. The dream is a spectator perspective in a sunset moment
liminal space
I. Birth
When you first come to this world, you are protected by a huge invisible bubble,
like your mom, like the vibration of the ocean.
The world is unformed until you start to breathe.
The world unfolds as a floating perspective.
And it starts to change when you start to breathe deeply.
You breathe to slowly fall down.
you see flowers start to grow and creatures around you.
You fall down and down until you see a forest, and land on the Road.
II. Road
The road in life is always dangerous.
The forest represents the struggles of a long life—our conflicts, our goals, and our failures…
In this perspective, you are a roamer, a wanderer…
The orangish dim light is the virtual representation of yourself. No matter how hard you chase it, it will follow your rotation at the same speed.
Only when you stop rotating and stare at it, and breathe, slowly breathe. It will stop here, bringing you out of this forest maze.
III. Dream
The dream is the orangish light.
it is gorgeous just like the sunset in our daily life.
This scene is unfolding from a spectator's perspective.
the speed of the sun setting corresponds to the rhythm of your breath.
when we feel it, we tend to slow down, to take a moment to pay attention to the beauty that surrounds us.
It is a moment of relief in our real day…
And we are aware of a daily cycle.. the sun sets, it rises, it sets again.
In this life journey, you breathe to change the space, the space influence you, is the interplay between you and space, real and virtual.
after the journey, you may feel lost, relief, emotional, and maybe nothing. But I still hope it could be a chance for you to learn, feel, adapt yourself in a virtual world and feel the real.