Moving Realities by Lori Landay is an experiment with using movement (gesture, everyday movement, kinetic control in XR experiences, and dance) for expressive purposes in interactive and immersive media. Moving Realities prioritizes accessibility through WebXR, explores ideas about capturing performances, likenesses, and environments, and will produce a framework that can be used by others. It will be an interactive 3D environment, accessible through web browsers, mobile devices, and VR headsets, in which to explore connections between motion and emotion, freedom and control, and the paradoxical constant of change.
Through music, dance, and visual elements, Moving Realities dramatizes a narrative arc about a collapse of urban life, humanity reinventing itself from nature, and re-emerging from Plato’s Cave of echoes and shadows. The interactive 3D environment will contain both an audiovisual kinetic experience and also documentation and critical reflection of making it, combining theory and practice represented in navigable space inspired by both Vannevar Bush’s Memex and virtual spaces from Second Life to framevr.io. The vision is of a playful, creative, not-possible-in-real-life space that transcends the art gallery metaphor prevalent on many virtual platforms, while still maintaining recognizable navigable 3D space.