Much has been described and developed in the manufactured worlds of the virtual and the technologies of visual (sensory) augmentation. What is happening in the mean-time, but far less explored, is the growth of a form of transpositional reality. While much of virtual reality exists to present a new world to the individual, the use of live video allows us an opportunity to explore the world as it is, from from a perspective that we can not ordinarily enjoy. This is already coming into use in the form of virtual tours of real-estate as well as live virtual experiences of concerts and events, but these uses of the technology are hardly visionary and only scratching the surface of what is possible now, let alone any consideration for what could be done creatively using future technology. Below are some elementary explorations of what I mean in this framework. These lend themselves to significant expansion, however, not only within their specific concept, but through the possibilities of admixture - recombining their diversities from the first concepts.
SELF-PERCEPTION:
My work Extensions of Self is a very basic level exploration of this idea. It allows two people to move and interact with each other/themselves from the alternative perspective of the other. It’s this form of out-of-body transposition that I find most intriguing in the current iterations of the field. This has been explored in movies such as Strange Days in which there’s an underground network of memory peddlers. And any number of body swapping prior works (although primary from a fixed position).
What’s it like to actually view one’s self from the perspective of another, or just to momentarily exist as another? What does it feel like to see your own body as a form a astral projection - floating and bodiless? What do you look like from another height?, from the side?, behind? not reflected? and to see these perspectives shift as another’s view shifts. In the medical world we've already seen views from the inside, but what about the opportunity to inhabit your inside (see the next layer on scale)? To feel what moeves through your body internally as you experience it as visual (or sensorial) external.
Conversely, we return to what does it mean to be not you. Of course, this has been heavily explored in many varieties of the avater, but how much do we get the experience beyond this. A great deal of immersive cinema touches on such concepts, but a prescripted walkthrough &emdash; and most often one with some unrequested need to prove it's immersion by having other talk at you from all directions for some reason &emdash; while interesting (in having been shown to help build empathy, ie) hardly compensates for the full experience of live interactions (most commonly, and often better, tapped into through any number body swapping comedy films in all of their 2d glory).
Issues of scale have been considered through time immemorial. Giants and elves &emdash; scattered in folklore throughout the globe. Virtualities of scale &emdash; through the map or any number of scientific models &emdash; micro to macro. Through the 20th century, numerous technological adances have allowed us new, fictional (if accurate), perceptions of our expanded realm.
Many cameras are scale independent – they operate as a point rather than a volume. It is simple enough to shift the perspective to allow views that provide a variation to what we are used to. Simply moving a 360 camera closer to the ground allows a perspective of a small rodent. Push two cameras closer together and the shift in parallax further heightens this effect. With sufficient design one could experience the view on an insect scale. Controlling such a device while immersed can shift one’s perspective on what’s important on a micro scale. Conversely place two cameras at height and widely separated and enjoy the perspective of one at greater scale [1].
Moving beyond what can be done with the common (visual light) cameras, we can expand to combinations with other technologies. Ultrasound technologies have already advanced to the point of third dimensional motion. While this is a relatively low resolution technology, it’s ability to provide a live voxel rendering of the interior of the body gives intriguing possibilities to start allowing individuals to have their own journeys through their bodies in real-time. Alternatively, we have sensors which allow viewing the world in IR or UV. How might our perspectives shift if we were able to interact with the world, live, but with the variations and damages that are not visible to human eyes? Sound perceptions and mapping have long been an exploration of the accousmatic designer. Can our brains remap our space to the perceptual level of other species? Can our technologies attempt this?
Meanwhile, are the sensorial expansions of our technologies (through beyond-human-frequency-perception high-powered LiDAR, ie) causing unseen disruptions to the biosphere. It may take transposing ourselves to another organisms experience to fully produce the necessary empathy to know the scope of such issues.
Transpositions need not be physical, or not solely so. If one takes the above concepts, and accentuated the natural technological lag, one can explore a temporal space multiple times and from different perspectives each time. This echoes the discussion on scale. Properly explored, what might it be to relive an experience from several viewpoints (an updated Rashamon, but here I find it more interesting to explore the trivial moments, than some forensic exploration). What if instead, one were to watch their own movements and try to follow them. The game Red Hot already plays with the concept of time accelerating and decelerating, but what’s the effect of seeing the world on a different time scale, but fully immersed, rather than simply viewing a passive time-lapse.
In expanding to what may, only now, be becoming possible &emdash; as volumetric video collides with AI generated frames, perhaps their could even be any accelerationist video. To begin immersed in current time, trying to move about in a timeframe faster than reality. The collisions of prediction and reality (physical, psychological, and a both real and predicted times) can create some of the most havoc inducing transpositions I can imagine between the now, the future, the real, the virtual, the physical and the expected.
What would be our view the of the world from a giant's-eye view, at a giant's time scale that we might then move through?
SCALE:
VIRTUAL ABSTRACTIONS OF PHYSICAL SPACE:
TIME:
What's our world to a fly, at a fly's lifespan?
[1] XKCD “Depth Perception.”