Epic Everyday from michael milano on Vimeo.
Epic Everyday
Epic Everyday immerses the user in a macroscopic sea of sound and visuals, allowing the user to inhabit the less than ordinary experience. The user will be able to engage with different channels throughout the experience. By inhabiting everyday objects, users can experience what is usually ignored thus challenging our preconceptions of what is important, and highlighting the oddity of inhabiting ignored spaces.
We are finding the sublime in the most ordinary of places.
// Context
Everyday, mundane objects are often overlooked. We don’t consider the experiential qualities of ubiquitous objects that are present in our daily lives. In Epic Everyday, virtual reality is utilized to transform how mundane objects are experienced. The installation presents video footage and the soundscape from a household environment. Once immersed in the virtual environment, the user experiences a heightened perspective of everyday objects through a dramatic shift in scale, and a magnified soundscape. Although this Epic Everyday is constructed as a computer simulation, we propose that this would be a real space in a person’s home, and that this content would be broadcasted like a webcam. These cameras would be placed with intent by voluntary users to capture ordinary experiences in a distinct way. By focusing on ordinary objects we can subvert what traditional film and tv have allowed viewers to do, escape from reality. Epic Everyday allows the viewer to escape their own reality by being further immersed in the everyday. The specific objects that we have chosen for the experiences are things that we interact with everyday. We disregard these objects and by highlighting their value in the Virtual Reality space we can create experiences that show how the mundane can be compelling.
// Questions
Can virtual reality be used to elevate a banal experience into something compelling?
Currently, VR is usually human-centric in regard to scale and point of view, but what happens
when we shift this perspective to that of an object’s scale?
What new soundscape do we become immersed in?
How does our understanding of a common household space change after this experience?
To see my process please visit ITP on GitHub