The Treachery of The Metaverse
Towards the end of December 2021, I reflected on my disappointment with the JAMMs and related project work getting trashed just at the point where I could give it my undivided attention. To exorcise the ghost of that dream, and in something of a dark mood, I started making an ‘exit homage’ with the working title:
It got something out of my system by getting it as far as the image above, which was created entirely in Unity. I’d like to continue with it at some point by converting it into a small VR scene. However, I realised that doing disgruntled-looking VR wasn’t exactly a good starting point for Head In a Box. I decided to leave it where it was and started looking for a new thing to get stuck into.
Firing up a new time machine.
I’ll admit that the past continues to lurk just beneath the surface of my mind, particularly the fragments that I have as photo evidence. I see a picture of say, my room as it was when I lived in Romsey during 1985 to 1988. The pictures show something, but the images are not great. Smart phones would be another three decades in arriving, so my evidence for having lived in a room, the place that was the focal point of my life, security, my home, has been mostly memories and a small number of photos.
These fragments tug at my heart-strings. I know that I have the power of modern technology at my disposal, I just need to develop the necessary skills to demonstrate my thinking. In 2020, I began experimenting with these fragments using Dreams and its VR functionality to recreate Hampton Road’s bedsit circa 1993.
I grew frustrated that the software made replicating the art on my walls such a bloody chore. This was partly why I left that experiment there. Then the degree happened, so the ideas briefly surfaced while I considered my final semester project. Realising that what I was thinking was very personal and probably not the meatiest idea for closing the degree, I opted to show some creative flair with The Psychehedron instead. Personal psychogeography experiments in time travel would just have to be in a later chapter of my creative journey.
January 2022 has arrived. I was considering the advice of Blender Guru; Andrew Price. In one of his videos, he mentioned the path of recreating everyday objects using the software to hone 3D modelling skills. I thought that this was a great tip, so I decided to add my own twist by remixing this concept into my previous homes project. I think at this point in the description, I should add a starting point or two:
The Sherlock of Homes
These images show a simple bedroom, not yet full of life’s ephemera and clutter. It is by no means the place where I began, but these photos are the first and only photos of a room in which I had lived. By this I mean that all bedrooms from 1971 to 85 were not captured in any way, I have one image of my bedroom that I took when I lived in Thorpe Road,Norwich, but it’s mainly the toys on the shelves above my bed.
I know that I’ll have to really do a deep-dive and pull the pre-Romsey locations out of memory at some point, but for now, I chose the images above as a starting point.
I’d started exploring the photo of the pinboard a few years ago. Using photoshop and some Google searches for more obvious imagery, I made the following collage:
So, postcards which look fairly detailed are images where I was able to sleuth a match and find the original art. It was easy finding H.R Giger paintings, search strings for ‘Kissing Japanese+1980s’ helped locate another, as did ‘Cat with heart-shaped glasses’. I’m not saying that this was all plain sailing, Giger aside, the other jpegs took a fair degree of trawling to identify. Since then, I’ve periodically dipped into searching and have occasionally stumbled upon a match. The problems I’ve encountered have been amplified by the fact that blowing up a blurry image of a postcard, then attempting a Reverse Image Search normally isn’t sufficient for algorithms to identify the blurry enlargement. Perhaps you roll your eyes at this process. To me, it has been fastidious detective work and the fact that I cannot deny that I’m just a stickler for detail.
Until recently, I wasn’t sure how to approach the 3D modelling of the pinboard. Should I make the shape, pop geometry on the face of it, then carefully map the images of the postcards in one large UV unwrap?
NO.
Someone advised me that you just make a surface, then for the sake of sanity, just make movable postcards and position them as you would in the real world. This is how the scene began:
History Digitised
I’m slowly furnishing the room with models which begin to tell the story of how teenage me lived during that era. It is a slow and methodical process, a meditation of a kind. What has become increasingly clear, is that Blender’s render engine Cycles allows me to view the room in an almost uncanny way when I navigate the space on-screen. It looks and feels like having a computer controlled camera which offers a window into a long-gone past. Every time I add a new detail, the past becomes a little more authentic-looking.
Fortunately, I’m patient and methodical, so I continue to add these details whenever I have a pocket of creative time. I think I’m also a glutton for punishment, as I know that I’ll eventually need to take all of these textured models over to Unity to begin working them into VR. I know that the current tech will strip away degrees of realism in order to optimise performance. In this light, I view these current efforts as seeds, because I’ll water them with practice and creative discipline to build my 3D skills. I’ll patiently wait for processing power to increase to a point where fidelity considerations are less of a strategic grab for headroom.
To what end though?
Time travel.
That wonderful, science fiction concept will probably never be a thing in mine or anyone else’s lifetimes, but, using immersive technology will allow a kind of bending of the rules of reality. I intend to build my memory palace, piece at a time. Virtual locations which exist in memory only, each room signifying who I was and what interested me, these rooms will be time and location-specific, each will contain its own story. I will be able to visit them and perhaps one day, meet old friends and hang out for a bit, because I’m just in love with the idea of being able to say:
“Fancy meeting up with me in my room in 1986, 1992, 2001? take your pick”
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