These funds will help us develop affordable VR creation workflows, and then share those workflows with artists, humanists, and community workers-- anyone who is interested. We will share this work by using our website to document, troubleshoot, and archive the conceptual, technical, and financial requirements that are going into our creation of a VR experience.

We are asking you to fund our experimentation with commonly available devices so that we can give our audience advice and demonstrations using easily obtainable mobile devices like iPods, iPhones, and Android phones.

ViRVE brings VR development and inquiry out of expensive labs and makes it accessible to regular people who lack large-scale financial backing and who are curious about the possibilities of immersion in gaming, arts, and humanities. We want to lower the VR access bar and demonstrate to others that they can do it too.

In other words, fund our demo! If you back us, you can vote on which VR experience we make first.

Additional Information

In November 2015, The New York Times and Google collaborated to include Google cardboard units in the Sunday edition of the New York Times. Over 1.5 million devices were shipped. That December, Verizon soon followed suit, offering specially branded, limited-edition cardboard units as part of an exclusive Star Wars promotion. It was important to get millions of people interested in “Cardboard”— a new high-impact, lower-tech way to deliver Virtual Reality experiences through the mobile devices many people already own— because companies like The New York Times have already begun investing immense resources into developing immersive content: VR is the next frontier, but many people did not realize that it is already here!

While exciting, normalizing sensory immersion as a narrative experience brings a slew of questions. For while we agree with tech-writer Marcus Wohlsen’s assessment of Virtual reality’s potential, what does it mean to make a “powerful empathy engine,” and what does it mean that having the capacity to do so is perceived as isolated to a select few? As this new entertainment and educational standard spreads, very few scholars are in a position to to develop a robust arts and humanities framework for the critique of VR texts, much less design and build one.

With that in mind, ViRVE is a proof of concept experiment. It is known that people learn about arts and technology not just by consuming, but by also by making. The purpose of our project is to teach others to make their own VR experiences. Demo creation will help us develop affordable VR creation workflows, and we will share our information with anyone who is interested.

We have identified four pathways we are qualified to pursue as our proof of concept / demo project, and we would like our donors to tell us which they would like us to complete first!

# The Hear Me on Your Map Project (an advocate toolkit)

Using an innovative mix of spoken word poetry soundscape development, and immersive photography, this project takes up the question of how VR might be used to help youth create VR experiences that immerse users in their aural and spatial worlds, but also spark youths’ critical engagement with the materiality of their own lived environments.

# Octavia’s Notes – Following a Writer’s Journey (an archival experience toolkit)

This project would develop an innovative VR interface that would engage users in an interactive experience with selections from the copious Octavia Butler manuscript archive at the Huntington Library. Butler maintained thousands of notes pertaining to dozens of novels and short stories, each with multiple versions. This VR gaming experience would give users an experience of recovering stories from of scraps of paper and piles of notes.

# The Do You See What I See? Project (a diversity and inclusion toolkit)

Building on Fox Harrell’s (MIT) work on empathy and gesture, this project will tackle the complex problem of micro aggressions-- a kind of aggression that is very difficult to articulate when experienced, but often identifiable when experienced.

# The This Is Where She Lived Project (a cultural site toolkit)

This project utilizes the ViRVE team’s proximity to the Dickinson family homestead in the town of Amherst to produce immersive 3D models of Emily Dickinson’s dwelling place.

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Experiencing VR for the first time isn’t just cool; it’s revelatory... VR can act as a powerful empathy engine, a uniquely direct way to put us in someone else’s world. This makes me hopeful that VR will become much more than the next level of escapism for an already screen-addled generation.

— Marcus Wohlsen, Wired

An unfolded Google Cardboard unit. Photo by Runner1928 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34...