2022 - The Global Home

2022

A new Immersive film by SPACE POPULAR’S Lara Lesmes and

Fredrik Hellberg exploring the future of virtual togetherness in the home. It was first shown in the immersive room at MEET | Digital Culture Center in Milano Italy 2022 as part of Fuorisalone 2022

The Global Home is an immersive film exploring the future of virtual togetherness in the home. Starting from the idea of the Venn Room (a term coined by Space Popular in 2019 to describe virtually overlapped domestic environments), and taking place in a matrix of rooms virtually linked together, the immersive experience takes visitors through a series of everyday events in this environment that a small community of avatars call home.

Immersive media offers the possibility to visually and acoustically inhabit virtual space and come together with others in a fully embodied way. In doing so it also poses a challenge to our everyday environments, as the virtual space we come into 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 they function.

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 your clothes do today. Collectively with others you will create shared environments where you hang out, play, and watch movies. You will co-decorate 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.

The Global Home premiered on the 4th of June 2022 during Salone del Mobile 2022 at MEET | Digital Culture Center in Milan, Italy as part of the exhibition Tomorrow Living organised by FRAME magazine, Huawei Milan Aesthetic Research Center and MEET | Digital Culture Center

Photo by Luca Marenda

SCENE 01

I MISS WAKING UP TO YOUR GLOWING LASHES FADING

Co-sleeping is a growing phenomena among vr communities enabled by the safety of the remoteness of the flesh. The first scenario depicts a co-sleeping room in which avatars fall asleep and wake-up together. One of them sports glowing eyelashes that fade off when they fall asleep.

SCENE 02

TURN OFF COLLISIONS AND JOIN US IN MEDITATION

Fitness activities are becoming more present in social virtual spaces requiring ever greater mocap fidelity. In this scenario the yoga class host recommends turning off collisions for the class to avoid mesh glitches and, in doing so, taking away the materiality of the body.

SCENE 02

YOUR FEATHERS ARE COVERING THE LENS, RESKIN PLS

Feature films are currently produced in social vr platforms, performed, directed, and produced by a cast and crew of avatars. One of the avatar community members hosts a workshop on how to use the new virtual camera they have built. The virtual camera is built into the avatar skin and therefore everyone must wear the same avatar, which happens to be an owl, in order to participate. Feathers end up everywhere.

SCENE 03

WHAT IF WE KISSED IN THE MATERIAL NODE EDITOR

Shared documents, spreadsheets, and boards are the most familiar social virtual places and the cursor is still the most established form of virtual presence. Co-workers seek privacy in the back alleys of the 3D software in which they’re working: the material node editor. There, as cursors, they can cuddle in an environment that nobody else in that admin meeting would know how to access.

Photo by Luca Marenda

Q&A with Lesmes & Hellberg

What is "The Global Home" about?

The Global Home is an immersive film exploring the future of virtual togetherness in the home. Starting from the idea of the Venn Room (a term coined by Space Popular in 2019 to describe virtually overlapped domestic environments - more on spacepopular.com), and taking place in a matrix of rooms virtually linked together, the immersive experience will take us through a series of everyday events in a shifting environment that a small community of avatars call home.

How do we live in the metaverse?

Firstly we would like to clarify that the term metaverse is perhaps a bit confusing. The metaverse is nothing else than the internet with a third dimension. Thus, we prefer to call it the immersive internet. With this in mind, perhaps it is not so hard to imagine how we will inhabit a three-dimensional version of the internet.

What do we do in a "global home"?

A Global Home is a space for remote togetherness that results from a community of people regularly gathering remotely via immersive media. Our everyday lives are already overlaid by a multitude of digital augmentations and interactions. Immersive technology gives a third dimension to an already existing virtual layer. This means that what used to be an issue of graphics/2D design, is now an issue of spatial design/architecture/urbanism.

The whole event Tomorrow Living at MEET | Digital Culture Center in Milan is about imagining the future meaning of "house" and of "living". Which is your personal vision and which needs will be met by the digital space?

Remote togetherness is at the core of what immersive media will enable. Virtual interactions will by no means replace physical ones, however they will enable exchanges and provide opportunities not possible before. This will likely have an impact on where we choose to live physically, and possibly challenge the metropolitan urban model.

A house should be a safe place. Is the metaverse a safe space where to design a digital model of a better world?

This, again, depends on what we mean by metaverse. A metaverse is a network of virtual worlds where people come together as avatars. Large internet companies are rushing to create The Metaverse, as if there would be only one. However, there will be many. Yes, a handful (or even possibly one) of them will be the main one that everyone uses, but we always have the choice to move elsewhere or create our own spaces. The Global Home is envisioned as such: a virtual gathering space run by a small community who also sustains the servers in which it is hosted. This is what would make it ultimately a safe place. Privately-owned commercially-driven for-profit platforms will never be safe places.

Photo by Luca Marenda

Report abuse