Abstract
In response to the growing climate crisis, Luminiferous Funeral is an interdisciplinary Virtual Reality game-art work with a physical sensory perception installation. This work explores the invisible erosion of climate change and environmental breakdown by offering audiences an opportunity to dialogue with nature and seeks to focus participants on the inner communication with oneself about the essential nature of life and death. The relationship to nature is harnessed by our open-source framework in which we seek collaborative interactivity from others - encouraging them to journey within their local nature space and document their phenomenological relationship with the environment through sound clips, sketches, video, photographs, and other forms of digital media. Through communication with corresponding environmental and climate scientists, and by combining this user-centric data input with known local climate and weather models, the playable game-art is continuously evolving - downloadable game patches periodically transform a player’s virtual world. With a Zen inspired ideology, our cloud-based Artificial Intelligence systems employ Natural Language Processing on texts describing Eastern and Western philosophies of nature, power, fear and love, space and environment - crafting responses into poetic expressions, and physical interpretations of, this ongoing accumulation of climate content used to create the downloadable game.
Supported by Graham Wakefield and the Alice Lab, York University.
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Notes
- 1.
The authors acknowledge the pejorative connotation of describing one as vegetative, and although alternative vocabulary has been established, we retain this terminology to connect to the art project “Awakening of PVS patients”.
- 2.
threejs.org—a JavaScript framework for building online 3D and Mixed Reality content.
- 3.
WebXR is a standardised format for adapting the existing WWW framework to include VR and AR content - together they are known as XR.
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Acknowledgments
Funding for this project is provided by a VISTA: Vision Science to Application scholarship, a CFREF program, the Centre for Vision Research (CVR) at York University, Canada; a CIBC Student award fund; the Susan Crocker and John Hunkin scholarship in the fine arts; RA funding from Dr. Doug Van Nort (DisPerSion Lab, York University, Canada). Both authors would also love to give many thanks to Dr. Graham Wakefield (Alice Lab, York University, Canada) who has provided both RA funding as well as incredible support as a primary PhD supervisor.
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Vollmer, S., Ho, R. (2021). Luminiferous Funeral. In: Bisset Álvarez, E. (eds) Data and Information in Online Environments. DIONE 2021. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 378. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77417-2_24
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