Real Reality
With the rise of AI and new and easily accessible technologies, the digital worlds that we can create are becoming more immersive and photorealistic. In our current hyper-technological experience, we spend a large amount of time connected and “inside” these digital worlds, what would happen when our reality becomes a secondary stage in which we experience life? What if these digital worlds are more truthful, fun and engaging, than the actual world that we inhabit? This can also makes us think about how we define reality in the first place, and why we need to escape into another one at all.
We enter a dark room, where we can find a monolitic VR headset hanging in the middle, barely illuminated by a dim spotlight. As we put the headset on and we enter the VR world, we are now in the same room, well lit, and surrounded by art pieces.
This exhibition demonstrates how some new tools (that were non-existent 6 months ago), can help us create new realities.
There is a new landmark method for creating photorealistic environments and objects called
Gaussian Splatting. The basic idea is to embed a point cloud with probabilistic distributions of color, position and direction, thus intead of rendering triangles, we render gaussian distributions in the form of ellipses. You can find more information here.
My idea was to combine this new technique with exisiting VR solutions (Oculus) and with GenAI art (StableDiffusion). I used TouchDeigner to make the whole system work in real time. I got some inspiration from Yulie, Olli Huttunen,
Lyell Hintz, and Tim Gerritsen. I also used Lumalabs, SuperSplat, Jawset Postshot, and other several tools to create, clean and embed the splats into the system.
Special thanks to Wild Perra for the soundscape.