2019 - The Venn Room

The Venn Room by Space Popular depicts a series of possible scenarios of cohabitation in which issues of integration, interface, exposure, overlap, representation, storage and ownership in the augmented future for our domestic environments are put into perspective through everyday narratives.

Two Dimensioanl Verison of the immersive experience The Venn Room. A film by Space Popular exploring the future of virtual togetherness in the home. This film was first shown as a mixed reality experience at the Tallinn Architecture Biennale in September 2019.

The introduction of virtual portals in the home –such as the television, the computer or the smartphone– has had considerable consequences in our day to day but has left the architecture of the home pretty much untouched. 

The Venn Room by Space Popular depicts a series of possible scenarios of cohabitation in which issues of integration, interface, exposure, overlap, representation, storage and ownership in the augmented future for our domestic environments are put into perspective through everyday narratives.

Still from The Venn Room Immersive Experience 

One of the attributes by which new virtual media is described is DoF, which stands for ‘degrees of freedom’. 3DoF means you can roll, yaw and pitch (rotate along any axis) and 6DoF adds translation along the 3 axes (you can walk in any direction). This seemingly small difference has tremendous implications in the requirements for physical space: whilst one could be visually transported to a forest without leaving the sofa through a 360 video with 3DoF, this is far from the true sense of presence brought by the embodied experience of walking through it with 6DoF. In this way, new virtual media that offers 6 Dof poses the true challenge to our everyday environments as it offers the possibility to visually inhabit spaces that might have very little in common with our living-rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms or kitchens. The home will be to the experience of virtual space what the body is to the physical experience of architecture. Our bodies dictate which doors we can pass through, what size our beds –and therefore our bedrooms– need to be, or how high a tread can get. In the same way, the size and layout of our homes dictate where we can stand, sit, walk or reach in a virtual world (without teleportation or other means of virtual transportation). Therefore, as long as you choose to access virtual worlds from within the safety of your privately owned property, your physical home will inevitably become the skeleton upon which these are built.

As you bring your domestic blueprint into the virtual environments that you share with others, hybrids are formed, overlapping formal and functional categories in unprecedented ways and thus challenging our social codes and rituals. In doing so you expose patterns of movement that, if accumulated over time, will reveal your physical home and habits. Inevitably, the way you choose to hide or reveal them will say  as much about you as my clothes do today. Collectively with others you will create shared environments where you hang out, play, and watch movies. You will codecorate these environments and make them meaningful with colours, objects, and patterns that may be just built for the occasion or highly valued and kept over time. And as you build your virtual home that is at once a part of many others’ forming Venn Rooms you contribute to the forming of the placeless?, lawless?, unowned? Global Home. 

Still from The Venn Room Immersive Experience 

Still from The Venn Room Immersive Experience 

Still from The Venn Room Immersive Experience 

Still from The Venn Room Immersive Experience 

INTERFACE

In mixed reality environments, where the physical and virtual merge, every object has the potential to be smart. Every fitting, button, handle, knob, moulding, cornice, ledge has the potential to become a switch, gate, window, link to worlds beyond that in which they materially exist. The higher the density of detail and ornamentation the greater the opportunities for access to be granted. The home will be the toolbar keeper of your tabs into your immaterial places worth saving. 

CODECORATION

As we bring homes together into a shared virtual home, we construct the collective domestic spaces that frame our interactions. By virtue of the fully embodied experience that new technologies provide, the remote gathering place is not anymore a chat group with a funny profile picture but an actual dedicated room. Starting as the accumulation of bits of the homes of everyone involved, these ensembles will evolve into rooms in their own right that can be collectively arranged and decorated for the occasion and carry the symbols, imprints and memorabilia of its use over time. 

INTEGRATION

The introduction of virtual portals in the home –such as the television, the computer or the smartphone– has had considerable behavioural consequences but has left the size and layout of our domestic spaces pretty much untouched. New virtual media that offers 6 Dof poses the true challenge to our everyday environments as it offers the possibility to inhabit visually spaces that might have very little in common with our living-rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms or kitchens. The home will be to the experience of virtual space what the body is to the physical experience of architecture.Our bodies dictate which doors we can pass through, what size our beds –and therefore our bedrooms– need to be, or how high a tread can get. In the same way, the size and layout of our homes dictate where we can stand, sit, walk or reach in a virtual world. Therefore, as long as you choose to access virtual worlds from within the safety of your privately owned property, your physical home will inevitably become the skeleton upon which these are built.

EXPOSURE

Your patterns of movement in virtual environments, if accumulated, will reveal the footprint of your physical home and how you make use of it. Those who can walk far must live large, and those who reveal a view must be lucky to have nice one. Those who momentarily got an extension to their range must be home alone, and those who appear to be suddenly frozen, staring into nowhere must have been interrupted by another on the physical end. 

OVERLAP

Like Venn diagrams, homes will be overlapped with one another creating collages of all kinds of rooms that will lead to unprecedented hybrids of formal and functional categories that will challenge our social codes and rituals, and in-turn our behaviour and our way of making sense of how we live.  Our gatherings around domestic rituals –such as dining, brushing our teeth, folding laundry or doing the dishes– no longer need to be coordinated as we can bring their designated rooms momentarily together. 

REPRESENTATION

Inevitably, as it happened with clothing, this layer that –in some form– recurrently accompanies you in your virtual adventures becomes one with you and contributes to constructing your identity. If we are virtually hanging out together, you may want to get a sense of my physical home layout so my choices of where to stand, sit or move around can make some sense and, more importantly, can be –to a certain extent– predictable. Whether you reveal them in standard wire mesh or you cover them in flowers and glitter will say as much about you as my clothes do today. 

STORAGE

Virtual worlds have the ability to change by the second, however just as some physical things are highly valued and therefore kept and cherished while others are not, the virtual global home will contain highly valued objects which may stay for a long time while the norm will be to dispose of meshes and textures within seconds as we now do with memes. The virtual global home will become the keeper of important things in its purposely built ledges, shelves and niches for you and others to care for and preserve. 

Photograph: Evert Palmets

Photograph: Tõnu Tunnel

Photograph:  Fredrik Hellberg

Photograph:  Fredrik Hellberg

Photograph:  Fredrik Hellberg

Photograph: Evert Palmets

Photograph:  Fredrik Hellberg