Reflection

As Marshall McLuhan has predicted years ago, technology has expanded the body so far so that they have shrunk the planet to the size of a village.[1] Today, technology has scaled down the world far beyond the village to our very extended bodies. With advancements in A.I., intelligent machines will go from "our pockets to our brains." At the same time, developments of virtual worlds have removed the importance of our physical identities. Though advancements of haptics and room scale VR allow us to use our bodies to express ourselves in virtual space, there's always a barrier between our own bodies and the "world." We normally construct our physical identities through feeling, touching, smelling, interacting with objects, communicating with people through gestures and facial expressions. In current VR, we have representations of our bodies.

In my project, I wanted to explore this tension between physicality and representation of self identity. I tell a brief story of my life while virtually walking over my own body. Though my physical body is removed, a 3D scan of my body shows a representation of my body. One could say that this biography and my physical representation will live beyond my actual physical body. If people were to explore this "world" after I die, they'll be able to see and remember Jasmine by the story she tells and as the youthful body inside the 24 year olds.

Regarding the technicality of the project, I had challenges making the animation transition smoothly from one to another. Initially, I wanted to show one person walking around and depending on which part of the body the person is in, she would do different actions. I realized to tell a cohesive story, I had to control where the mini person went instead of enabling the viewer to fall off the body and deviate order of the narrative. As a result, I created many distinct people that follow a certain path when trigger by a mouse click. As you move from one person to another, I also had to change the camera so the camera angle is suited for each person's placement in the body.

[1] Mark Wigley. Network Fever. N.p.: Grey Room Inc and MIT, 2001. Print.