{"id":174,"date":"2022-10-03T22:00:30","date_gmt":"2022-10-03T22:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.andyhartzell.com\/staging\/?page_id=174"},"modified":"2022-11-02T02:50:29","modified_gmt":"2022-11-02T02:50:29","slug":"virtual-acolyte","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.andyhartzell.com\/gallery\/virtual-acolyte\/","title":{"rendered":"Virtual Acolyte"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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When a medium is new, each piece of content is in a sense an argument. The creators are implicitly saying \u201cthis<\/em> is what the medium is for<\/em>.\u201d Games companies were the first to hop on the consumer VR bandwagon, so \u201cVR is a platform for games\u201d was the initial salvo in the argument. Facebook\u2019s acquisition of Oculus lead to the counter-argument: \u201cVR is platform for socializing.\u201d My privileged perches at Google and HTC allowed me to engage these arguments and develop my own. In a coupl<\/a>e of essays<\/a>, I proposed that VR is a platform for ritual.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ritual, I realize, is not a word that immediately screams \u201ccommercial potential.\u201d Indeed, it sounds archaic: the last couple of centuries have been all about discarding formalized interactions in the name of \u201cauthenticity\u201d. So it\u2019s a bit countercultural to suggest that the advent of the metaverse portends a ritual turn in our society, a shift from psychological inwardness to exteriorized representation. But the performative style of immersive social forums like VR Chat point in that direction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During my XR years, I had the fun of designing many R&D prototypes, and I had the privilege of consulting for a number of outside developers. Through these jobs I got a basic education in Unity development and 3D asset creation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Virtual Acolyte project gave me the opportunity to go through the entire workflow of creating a VR experience, from asset creation to scene setup to interaction design and implementation. It was also a chance for me to test out my thesis about VR as a platform for ritual. An acolyte at a Catholic Mass performs a rote sequence of actions; the role varies little from parish to parish. The actions serve the practical function of assisting the priest, but they also constitute an active form of worship. A virtual walkthrough of the process could be used to train up volunteers. Might it also have spiritual value as a contemplative ritual?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I designed the experience as a straightforward procedural sim, utilizing UX conventions that had already become somewhat standard: voice audio cues the action, glowing ghost-image guides the user to place the object in the correct location.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I modeled the elements of the scene in Blender\u2013all but the crucifix, which I sculpted immersively in Gravity Sketch. I assembled the project in Unity. The Innoactive plugin gave me a set of pre-scripted behaviors, along with a flowchart-style authoring environment for the state-machine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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When a medium is new, each piece of content is in a sense an argument. The creators are implicitly saying \u201cthis is what the medium is for.\u201d Games companies were the first to hop on the consumer VR bandwagon, so \u201cVR is a platform for games\u201d was the initial salvo in the argument. Facebook\u2019s acquisition […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-174","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andyhartzell.com\/gallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/174"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andyhartzell.com\/gallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andyhartzell.com\/gallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andyhartzell.com\/gallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andyhartzell.com\/gallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.andyhartzell.com\/gallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":377,"href":"https:\/\/www.andyhartzell.com\/gallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/174\/revisions\/377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andyhartzell.com\/gallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}