Dream States and Social VR
Here’s this weeks schedule of digital interactions!
One noted difference this week was the VR hang I had on Sunday! Two friends and I spent some time exploring Half + Half, a beautifully meditative Social VR platform with some games built in. The avatars are all styled in a way that can best be described as “the friendly version of No-Face” (from Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away). The “hands” part of the VR experience are this wiggly, noodly arms that are pleasant and silly all at once.
Calm, Peace, and LOTS of Vertigo
The ‘games’ range vary widely, from an extremely free-form ‘ocean’ swimming exploration, to a “rocket league but very slow in mid-air”, to an ethereal ‘just dance’ in space. There’s also a tremendously fun hide-and-seek mode which absolutely NAILS the fun to be had with perspectives + asynchronous multiplayer. All in all, they’re fun little jaunts that in various ways never depart too far away from some variation of meditative and dream-like. Being able to interact, but in a world that’s vague, hazy, and exiting all at once seems to capture the very essence of dreams.
To probe further into this, I’ve been attempting to keep a dream journal lately, with… mixed success. From attempts to ‘lucid dream’ in high school, I remembered that even the act of remembering dreams is a practiced skill. I’m not a very big dream-rememberer, but I’ve been able to gather some bits and pieces and think there’s an odd connection between them, that correlates neatly to the experiences had in Half + Half.
Apologies, it’s about to get progressively stranger.
1) I’m outside a restaurant in “Colorado”. (I have never actually been to a restaurant in CO). It’s themed like the Catskills, my mind “flashbacks” to two of my high school friends walking along a sidewalk at night, and back to the restaurant. I sit with these friends, my dad, and my cousin, as our waiter (The ever-hilarious “Celebrity Home Shopping” creator Samir ) brings us iced coffee, cracks jokes about poetry, and says it’s going to be a long wait for the food.
2) I’m outside of a mall in Los Angeles. The brick pathway leading up to the door extends out to nowhere, but the open ‘sky’ (i guess this mall is a floating island in LA?) is filled with an infinitely-complex highway interchange coming from and going nowhere. I trip into a car, where I’m accosted by the 7-or-so people who were in the sedan (?), demanding I pay for their very-rusted door as if I caused the damage. This is ridiculous, so of course I run away, and they fake at chasing me, but when I catch my breath - I’ve been fleeced. I interpret this as a clear-cut example of the dynamics of pickpocketing and how physical distraction works.
3) Another floating island, but this time it’s High-Fantasy style magic pillars, autumnal colors, blue crystals and gold filigree everywhere. Myself and some other robed figures are deftly problem solving the concept of dreams in and of itself.
So what does this have to do with Half + Half ? The immediate thing that jumps out to me is the simultaneity of things tethered to reality (known people, places, one of the pickpocketeers VIVIDLY yelling at me while eating from a big plastic tub of cheese puffs), and things that exist entirely in abstract or fantastical realms. The potential to intersperse so many disparate concepts, places, people, and more into the same interactive space is rife for exploration. Exploring Half + Half, my friends and I remarked how we were hit with an awareness of the weight-full-ness of our physical selves upon leaving the ‘Ocean’ experience back to standing on “solid ground”. There are so many ways in which our brain is ready to just let go and immerse itself into the reality, we have the potential create dreams - in all of their disjointed, poetic nonsense - and invite others into them.
See you there?