John Waterworth: Creative Spaces, The Interactive Tent, and the Illusion of Being

At the Tools for Creativity Studio of the Interactive Institute, we are experimenting with Creative Spaces - virtual and mixed reality environments designed to support some part of a hypothesised process model of human creativity. In this presentation I will outline some of our views on the creative process and some of the environments we are working with and planning. I will focus particularly on the Interactive Tent. This is a test-bed for experimenting with the nature and possibilities of experience and communication in virtual and mixed reality environments.

In a tent we are secluded but are also in touch, with nature and with ourselves. A tent can provide a meditative, relaxing environment, but also an emotionally or intellectually stimulating one. The Interactive Tent has a simple and inexpensive material structure - rather like a normal tent. Video images are projected onto the outside and viewed from inside as an immersive visual display. There is a surround sound system giving a sense of three-dimensional spatial presence. The Tent can also detect behaviour by the user, such as restless shifting of position. Remotely-located Tents can be linked, to support what we call "Perceptually-Seductive Communication", which has a variety of interesting potential applications, both with and without the Tent.

Our first public production for the Tent, "The Illusion of Being," carries the Tent occupant through a cycle of four "elements": snow, fire, earth, and water. In "The Illusion" we realise four parallel streams of consciousness, four different ways of experiencing the same elemental story, according to a hypothesised model of virtual experience (Waterworth and Waterworth, in press). As the immersant shift position, he or she slips from one stream to another, making everyone's experience of the Illusion unique. The production is the result of work by all members of the Tools for Creativity studio.

Waterworth, E L and Waterworth J A (in press) Focus, Locus and Sensus: the 3 Dimensions of Virtual Experience, 'Cyberpsychology and Behavior' journal.