With the upcoming week bringing three full days of workshops where I am helping a new, exciting Norwegian VR startup with designing their future virtual B2B social platform and this years’ RealTime Conference program soon to be announced, I thought it would be nice to reflect on what I am most passionate about when designing virtual spaces. Last year generously gave me several opportunities to talk about exactly that - although not in the ways I had expected!
That strange year
The year of 2020 was a strange one by all accounts. For the past couple of decades I had been traveling the world several times a year to computer graphics and XR conferences like SIGGRAPH, FMX, View Conference, Mundos Digitales, End User Event/Connect, Steam Dev Days, Laval Virtual, ISMAR, Oculus Connect, SplitX, and many more. To many of those events I would have been going as a speaker, a panelist or an organizer and other times just as a regular attendee. In 2020, like for most everyone else I know in the industry, I traveled nowhere but virtually in my mind sitting in front of my PC screen and web camera or jacked into one of my numerous VR headsets stepping into some virtual expo or XR showcase with fellow attendees.
Virtual events as the new normal
One of the cities I was supposed to have traveled to for a brand new event was Paris for what would be the biggest event I attended in 2020. It wasn’t SIGGRAPH, although by number of attendees it would have been, no - it was the inaugural RealTime Conference taking place on April 6-7 with more than 24 hours of content across several time zones for two days. I had been asked by co-founder of RTC, Jean-Michel Blottiere and fellow architecture track co-host Alex Coulombe to join their team and had accepted, looking forward to a forward looking new event that addressed innovations and challenges in the use of real-time technologies across numerous verticals.
RTC would be my biggest event in 2020 simply because of the number of hours I sat in-front of my camera as a co-host, panelist and speaker for the architecture track and then as a regular attendee for many of the other sessions. For this conference I gave a talk titled “The Art and Science of Virtual Architecture ". In it I discuss how I use lessons from environmental psychology and visual storytelling to shape the space I created for the Norwegian VR company Dimension 10 as well as that of other virtual architectural spaces of mine. For me, comfort in VR is a key goal to achieve with my design and I discuss how one can use architectural design to create more comfortable environments as well as what tools that are available to us to evoke desired emotions, thoughts and actions in the users to ensure that the virtual spaces we design shape the human experience in positive and inspiring ways.
The power of podcasts
The pandemic has forced many people and organizations to innovate and I have seen podcasts, a medium that had been on the rise for a few years, skyrocket in popularity. Another conference I was supposed to attend was BOECKBX, the Future Tech Business Convention in Copenhagen, organized by the one-man-army of Fabian Böck. The plan was to join a panel with fellow VRchitect Andreea Ion Cojocaru from Numena discussing “Crafting real and virtual architecture in real-time”. With the physical event impossible to stage Fabian went on to organize literally hundreds of amazing podcast like video talks with technology and business professionals around the world and I had the pleasure of yet again talking about my approach to designing virtual spaces.
In the spirit of Frank Lloyd Wright
In 2019 I was so fortunate to have been selected for the Fallingwater Immersive Design Residency, held at the uniqe location of Fallingwater in Pennsylvania, architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece. Here I met with fellow resident Aki Järvinen, whom later that year went on to start work at Digital Catapult in the UK. When at Fallingwater he mentioned he ran a podcast about immersive design, and especially Virtual Reality and asked if we could do one on my work. When we later planned the recording he suggested we record it inside the space I designed for Dimension 10 and I thought it a brilliant idea since the stay at Fallingwater resolved a designers block I had and the architecture of FLW had such an empowering effect on the design. In the episode we discuss how VR designers should draw from centuries of work in architecture into their thinking when constructing virtual spaces.
If you read this far and did not click any of the images above to get to the talks and podcasts here they are as plain URLs:
https://vimeo.com/468867559
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8ojfvEojOc
https://soundcloud.com/discovrdesign/season-3-episode-2-vr-and-architecture-with-kim-baumann-larsen