New Types of Spaces

New realities require novel spatial solutions

While looking for VR artists to bring art into the CULTVRAL VR art gallery, Estella Tse introduced me to Colin and Robin, the Co-Founders of the Museum of Other Realities.
I gave them a tour of CULTVRAL gallery and sent them the geometry of the Light Museum
to try in VR.
From then on, I joined the private VR art events at the Museum, which was named “TH-er” during the BETA period. These early events were some of the most enjoyable moments I’ve had in VR.
Surrounded by VR artists from around the world and a few VR industry folks, the conversations were always fascinating.
Over the next years, I showed a number of VR sculptures in the museum, including OASIS (then known as “Metaverse Room”).

2017 - Initial contacts

5e55c9a824830bb4260827c3_MORImmateria 1366x768.png — 2019 - A NEW PHASE

For their public launch, the Museum of Other Realities (MOR) was looking for a new building. Something that could have a language as radical as the art it is hosting, without stealing all the thunder.
The spaces were conceived through a series of conversations, sketches, Revit models and VR hand sculptures.
In order to obtain a modular system of expandable rooms, the design process followed an unconventional design order to allow for a flexible modularity:
Rooms
Corridors
Connections between rooms and corridors
This provided a good arsenal of design solutions for the museum to weave spaces together as it grew.

NEW WAYS OF DESIGNING

Frustrated with the formal limitations of Autodesk Revit, an architectural modelling software, I wanted to do something more dramatic and sculptural for the grand entrance of the Museum.

To marry the orthogonal elements of the space (floors, stairs, etc) with the wilder sculptural elements, I created a custom workflow between Autodesk Revit, an architectural modelling software and Adobe Medium, a VR sculpting application.

A few simple parametric rooms were modeled in Revit as well as the floor, stairs and illuminated patches of materials.

The grand hall would be separated in two twirling masses modeled in VR.

These techniques allowed me to merge the Cartesian spaces of Revit with the more expressive spaces of my VR sculpture in a more seamless manner.

Model from Revit with simplified Medium sculpture imported and aligned

VIRTUAL MUSEUM TOUR

In May 2020, Alex Bowles started organizing VR pandemic meetups in the Museum of Other Realities. As a final to these meetups, I gave a VR tour to of the MOR museum with a focus on my design process for designing the MOR architectural concepts.

While the video and audio is sometimes rough, I decided to release this in its current state rather than waiting much longer to release a perfectionist version.

Thanks to Sebastian Miller (Cryote) and Kent Bye for the additional footage and audio.

VR & PHilosophy

I had the chance to explore the Museum of Other Realities (MOR) and a temporary exhibition for the Cannes Festival with Joakim Vindenes from AltVR.

In the beginning and the end of the video we discuss the MOR design, in the middle of the video we visit and react to the Cannes Festival’s digital architecture inside the MOR.