Working on this project, I learned how to design in VR, which was really, really fun and fascinating. It was my first time doing it. That feeling alone was pretty phenomenal, and the world felt limitless and infinite, and as a designer, I wanted to explore using this space as an unrestricted environment to ideate and collaborate in areas like urban design, where the virtuality emulates reality, to expand our thoughts inward before using material and manpower and effort to generate more waste than required in terms of ideation and testing and prototyping.
This raises a personal paradox for me since I hold high value for making processes that use your hands and the use of VR environment itself may create this paradox for me constantly. I want to work with haptic and sensory simulations to try and achieve the balance between taking advantage of the infiniteness given by the tech and preserving the art and joy and process of doing things with your hands and learning through them. And maybe we do need to sit in the grass and build from your hands and let them guide the creation process. And wearing the metaquest?
Ultimately, some of the points of control being infinite are the materials and the absence of too much physical logic to maintain organic and explorative designs without having to engineer them first. Perhaps I will find an answer to this paradox in the overlapping spaces of the designer, artist, engineer, and person that I want to be.
Virtuality gives not just the infinite, but creates a space where people can collaborate in one space, seeing all the same things.
Virtual collaboration, especially for designing and re-designing urban spaces, opens up the opportunity to work with different cultural methodologies and structural properties and ideas that are focused on safe and easy navigation of cities, not just for humans, but every agent of the city, including animals, birds, and different groups. This opens avenues of education, awareness, and collaborative creation of physical spaces.
I learned a lot from this project by observing designers from different backgrounds and levels of knowledge use different tools like iPads, 3D scan spaces, and virtual spaces to design on by having 3D visuals and referential points that are closer to the actual size. This takes us a step further in having references to reduce margins of error during prototyping as well.
All this is to use virtual spaces for the creation of things in real life as a tool of ideation and collaboration. I'm also interested in designing for virtual spaces without having to be physical after it or having any physical constraints or involvement at all except corporeally. I want to explore making environments that people spend time in, not just for collaborating and designing, but also learning and training if necessary.