Limits of Virtuality

Location-based, multi-sensory VR experience / 2019

Limits of Virtuality is a location-based, audio-visual multi-sensory VR experience. It explores the boundaries between virtual and real objects, between avatars and the human beings they represent. It raises questions about the differences between how we behave in the virtual space and in real life.

Created by Barna Szász with Unity 3D, interactive music with Chunity

The visitor enters the space with a headset and with gloves with trackers assembled on them. It’s a dark space inspired by Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms, there are glowing particles floating in the air, and as the visitor touches them they produce a pleasant, variable pitch sound. As the the visitor touches more and more objects, the music evolves.

On the farther side of the seemingly endless space, behind a cloud of particles, an avatar appears, standing still, standing passive. The visitor, after realizing that they can pop the floating particles with interaction, goes ahead eventually touches the avatar. In the virtual world, they touch an avatar, but in real life, they touch a real person, standing still exactly in the position of the avatar. Depending on which body parts they touch, Chunity generates different sounds. The avatar is now an instrument. But it is also a human being. Are you going to allow yourself to interact with this avatar? With this human being? In what way?