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In her work, VR artist Char Davies explores the "paradoxes of embodiment, being and nature" in the immersive virtual spaces she constructs.[39] The 1995 VR project Osmose was created by a team led by Davies while she was at SoftImage, a 3-D graphics software company based in Montreal. To use Osmose, users wear head-mounted displays and "breath tracking" vests. When the "immersant," to use Davies's term, breathes, the virtual environment changes, taking users into various visible and audible abstractions with a focus on nature. Users navigate the worlds within Osmose through breath and balance. Rather than use more traditional high-level rendering techniques focusing on ultrarealism and science (like the kind most users of SoftImage's packages would be likely to create), the graphic aesthetic of Osmose is soft, unprecise, and fluid. Spatial relationships are purposely ambiguous so that the space might "evoke" rather than illustrate, as so many conventional 3-D works tend to do. Sounds respond to the immersant's location and consist of a sampled blend of male and female voices. The goal of the work is not necessarily to navigate but to experience a particular state of being.[40]

In her next major work, Ephémère (1998), Davies structures the virtual experience vertically into three levels: landscape, earth, and the interior body.[41] Throughout Ephémère, elements of nature, environments, and body organs are created and vanish. A central organizing "river" runs through the work and acts as a portal; participants can enter the river to switch between the vertical levels of the work (from nature to the interior body, for example). They appear and withdraw based on the vertical position, movement direction and speed, direction and duration of gaze, and breathing of the immersant. One example consists of seeds sprouting if the immersant looks upon the earth for a length of time, thus training the user to patiently observe the world around them (see figure 22.5).

Davies is committed to the idea of removing the restrictions so common to other virtual-space environments. "Immersive virtual space, when stripped of its conventions, can provide an intriguing spatio-temporal context in which to explore the self's subjective experience of 'being-in-the-world'-as embodied consciousness in an enveloping space where boundaries between inner/outer, and mind/body dissolve."[42] In Davies' projects, one experiences rather than navigates. This, combined with a connection to the physical body, is away in which subjects are constructed that serves to make one aware of the subject position, enticing or encouraging participant to reflect upon knowing.

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Notes

39. Davies, Char, Char Davies Biography. 1998. Online. Available at http://www.immersence.com/biography/index.html.


40. Davies notes that over 5,000 [approximately 25,000 as of November 2007]† people have been immersed in Osmose, and many participants report strong emotional responses, including weeping, from the work.


41. Davies work featured at the SoftImage Web Site. 2001. Online. Available at http://www.softimage.com/default.asp?url=/Stories/Projects/Ephemere/CharDavies.htm
[May 2007: link no longer active.]†


42. Soft Image Web Site. 2001. Online. Available at http://www.softimage.com/default.asp?url=/Stories/Projects/Ephemere/CharDavies.htm
[May 2007: link no longer active.]†