Description
Jung In Jung, with Paul Blackham · 2021
A multiplayer VR sound performance built on the Oculus Quest’s hand-tracking: no controllers, no instruments, and no microphones — gestures of the bare hands trigger the sound, and several participants share the same space over a network.
The design is deliberately anonymous and non-verbal. Participants cannot speak to one another and do not appear to each other as themselves, so everything that passes between them has to pass through movement and sound. Jung frames the project as an experiment in what kinds of contact remain when identity and speech are removed — it was made during pandemic isolation, as an InGAME research and development project, with 3D artist Paul Blackham on the game art, and was shown at the PlayAway festival and at V&A Dundee. The source code is published.
⚠ The co-presence here is networked rather than physical: participants share a virtual room over Normcore networking, may or may not be in the same building, and what each perceives of the others is a pair of tracked hands.
source — the artist’s project page · Abertay University research entry
images: Jung In Jung, junginjung.com