VIRTUAL REALITY

 In Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, land about the size of a football field is melting away into the river every day now — the consequence of large-scale sand mining as well as China’s dams upstream. For local residents, the land snaps off suddenly, sometimes in thy imagery and film that Chiyin Sim shot in the Mekong Delta in 2017 of a village just five days after a devastating erosion — to bring the viewer to the dark of night, and robs them of their homes, livestock and ancestral shrines. This VR piece uses photogrammetry on the site of the landslides, and allows local villagers who lost their homes to speak directly to the viewer. The abstracted aesthetic reminiscent of granular particles transposes us into a night-time, riverside landscape. Narrated by Vietnamese writer Khai Don, who collaborated with Sim in field, we are taken on a journey to a site of erosion and contemplate the effects of rapid global urbanisation. As we shine a torchlight on a house that turns into ruins, we hear Khai Don’s poetry as well as local folk songs and lullabies Sim recorded in field. They sing of life along the Mekong River, presciently contemplating its precarity and lamenting loss — leaving us resonant notes as we grapple with the complex and often-irreversible effects of human extraction and climate change.

Social anxiety is a phobia of social situations. It is more than simply being ‘shy’ and can instead prevent any and all engagement and attendance in lectures, seminars, and the social aspects of university. Social anxiety therefore has implications for academic performance, future employability, and enjoyment of university. First Generation Students (FGS) are particularly vulnerable to social anxiety in the university context and its negative sequelae due imposter feelings and worse preparedness. There are different definitions of FGS; ultimately you are a FGS if you are the first in your family to go to university.

Cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), specifically graded exposure techniques, are an effective method of reducing social anxiety – but doing this work in the real world has numerous practical barriers that prevent its implementation i.e. time intensive, lack of control over the environment, confidentiality issues. Virtual Reality (VR) offers a platform to overcome these barriers and still produce benefits. This project will use cutting-edge VR to deliver a CBT-based intervention that aims to reduce social anxiety, increase social confidence, and improve educational engagement in socially anxious FGS.

The aim of this research project across three top-tier global universities is to investigate immersive virtual environments (IVEs) as a tool for improving pro-social perspective-taking towards out-groups through the heightened quality of participant responses. These responses will range from non-conscious physiological processes to overt behavioural and cognitive responses. Through the use of VR-based telemetry we can assess the quantitative data of participant reactions (biological and proxemic data) inside virtual scenarios, cross-referencing it with qualitative responses in post-treatment surveys. Another objective is to improve the interactive behaviour of virtual avatars in the experience so that they react appropriately in response to participants’ actions. The social science goal of the research tests out mechanisms for facilitating perspective-taking in IVEs.

There are two aspects to this work. The first is a room-scale VR experience for the Vive that recreates the interior of a “casa de la memoria” (memory house) from Granada, Colombia using photo and videogrammetry. These memory houses are community spaces for collective mourning for those who died during the five decades of the Colombian conflict. Volumetric guides escort the user around the space, presenting different aspects of the conflict to them, along with personal objects, photos, scrapbooks and souvenirs that users can pick up and interact with. There are also beacons within the museum that, when the user approaches, materialize other witnesses to the conflict as 3D scans with their original audio, who also paint a more complex picture of one of the world’s longest-running conflicts in the year that the peace accord was finally implemented. The second is over a dozen 360 videos featuring survivor testimonies recorded all over Colombia, each of whom accompany us as they guide us through the spaces that their memories of the conflict are associated with.

Produced with the support of the Images and Voices of Hope NGO, the Fledgling Fund and the Open Society Foundation. Part of an exhibition at Colombia’s Centre for Historical Memory in September 2017 and the Medellin Book Fair 2017.

An interactive experience that explores the fatal shooting of Michael Brown on August 9, 2014 by Officer Darren Wilson using a combination of graphic journalism, audio, photographs and virtual reality. It allows you to move through an immersive recreation of the incident in Ferguson, Missouri and view the events based on multiple, contradictory eyewitness accounts.

The aim of this piece is to compare and contrast the eyewitness reports and allow you to see how this single incident has given rise to such a wide range of perspectives. First published in 2015 by Fusion for the Oculus DK2 and then later released on mobile for iOS and Android. Read more on the Fusion page here.

In 1967, the photographer Gordon Parks, shot “A Harlem Family” for Life magazine. This series of photographs would form some of his most significant images, set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement. 50 years later, little has changed.

Looking beyond the outcomes of conflict, police shootings and social stereotyping, this project will address the context for violence, introducing a viewer to a world of monotony, limited opportunity, and social stigma,mapping the spaces with a combination of 3D scans, Parks’ original photos, and 360 video.

Produced in partnership with Magnum photographer Harriet Dedman and the Gordon Parks foundation using Matterport’s state of the art 3D scanner. Exhibited at The Gordon Parks Foundation in Pleasantville, NYC from Feb-April 2018.

For more on the project, visit the website here.