Issues of the Virtual Realm

Virtual
• vir·tu·al [vur-choo-uhl]
• Adjective
1. being such in power, force, or effect, though not actually
or expressly such: a virtual dependence on charity.
2. The second definition is "essential nature of being, apart
from external form or embodiment."
3. The modern, vernacular use of the term virtuality - is of a
different order than the actual world, but it likewise
must be loyal enough to a concept of reality that it
retains recognizability (thus it functions as an illusion of
exterior reality).
Virtual
• Virtual things do not stand opposed to real things. They are
already completely real in themselves. According to Deleuze,
the process characteristic of virtual things is not realization
but rather actualization. (giving the appearance of reality)
• By extension to the original definition, the term virtual has
also come to mean "modeling through the use of a
computer," where the computer models a physical
equivalent.
• A virtual world models the real world with 3D structures.
• Virtual reality seeks to model reality, enhancing a virtual
world with mechanisms for eye and hand movements.
Virtual Reality
The modern, technology-driven conception of the virtual can be defined as
that which connects with its "real" counterpart by means of a visual similarity
manifested technologically, via various apparatus that construct interactive
sensory experiences.
It is highly sensitive to human actions. This is the key to whether the
particular virtual reality enables the user to "experience" something new and
different.
It expresses "space" and creates an "experience" for all human sensory
perceptions, not only sight, but also sound, smell, touch, movement, and so
on.
A model, developed in the early 1990s, is the CAVE system, a virtual theater
which uses an enclosed room, the walls of which are composed of display
screens onto which high resolution virtual imagery is projected, creating a
virtual space that is less obviously mediated by technology.
A cave automatic virtual environment (better known as CAVE) is an immersive
virtual reality environment where projectors are directed to three, four, five or
six of the walls of a room-sized cube.
Cyberspace:
Cyberspace is a completely spatialized visualization of all information in global
information processing systems, along pathways provided by present and future
communications networks; enabling full co-presence and interaction of multiple
users, allowing input and output from and to the full human sensorium,
permitting simulations of real and virtual realities, remote data collection and
control through telepresence, and total integration and intercommunication
with a full range of intelligent products and environments in real space.

Minimal Restriction and Maximal Binding:

Cyber space is a user driven self organizing system.

Maximal binding implies that in cyberspace anything can be combined with

Eg. Dungeons and dragons,

Active Worlds
Second Life is an online virtual world developed by Linden Lab.
Second Life enables' users, called Residents, to interact with each other
through avatars. Residents can explore the world (known as the grid), meet
other residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, and
create and trade virtual property and services with one another.
Virtual Architecture
Toyo Ito –
The question is how we can integrate the primitive space linked with
nature and the virtual space which is linked with the world through
electron network.
Development of electronic media may invalidate the common barriers
(in the field of architecture )one after another. Introduction of
computers is now radically changing our mode of communication.
For eg. The advent of automobile navigation system has changed the
concept of a map. Drivers are constantly informed of their location and
are guided to their destination by communication satellite. They do
not look up in the map but are immersed in the virtual space called a
map. Such a navigation system can also be employed to guide people
in urban or architectural spaces.
Virtual Architecture
FOA–
The capacity of this technology to model and simulate the behaviour and the
perception of environments have raised enormous expectations about the
possibilities of producing synthetic, virtual environments that will eventually
replace reality in the forms we know it.
Deleuze explains that the actualisation of the virtual is not the same as the
realisation of the possible.
The computer not only allows us to mimic a pre-existing reality, but also to
construct organisations and images that we had never seen before, and that
we could have never seen -and therefore we could have never imagined-
without its existence.
Virtual Architecture
FOA–
The visualisation and operation with numerical data on n-dimensional spaces
available through information technology allows us to introduce other
parameters in the architectural drawings, such as time, light, temperature,
weight.
It allows to test the behaviour of a system under conditions that are not
experimentally verified, to explore situations beyond the accumulated
knowledge or experience that we have from urban or architectural systems.
It is precisely this capacity to expand our perception to domains beyond our
experiential knowledge, and to control and determine with incredible
accuracy the processes of construction of the environment that make the
computer an ideal instrument for the production of the virtual.
Virtual House Project-
Asymptote

• With their designs for a virtual trading floor for the New York
Stock Exchange and a virtual Guggenheim Museum they
produced architecture intended solely for virtual space.
• They consciously suspended the conventions of “normal”
architecture, the laws of gravity and load-bearing
specifications, even materiality and budget questions. Instead
they made time and changeability aspects, not to mention
playing with human perception the parameters of a way of
building heavily influenced by the media.
Asymptote
Critique:
Professional futurists trading in techno-utopias.
Their sudden influx of commissions, and the accompanying
challenge of producing fluid-looking forms in real space, is
in many ways an outgrowth of the 1990s dream of
cyberspace: in the first heady days of the Internet, the
popular imagination held that the digital bytes flying across
networks comprised an actual environment, a digi-paradise
of self-transforming buildings and identity-shifting people.
A younger generation of architects talks more realistically
today about how technology and networks can augment
our actual messy lived reality.
Marcos Novak
A liquid architecture is an architecture whose
form is contingent on the interests of the
beholder; it is an architecture that opens to
welcome you and closes to defend you; it is an
architecture without doors and hallways, where
the next room is always where it needs to be
and what it needs to be.
It is an architecture that dances or pulsates,
becomes tranquil or agitated.
Liquid architecture makes liquid cities, cities
that change at the shift of a value, where
visitors with different backgrounds see different
landmarks, where neighborhoods vary with
ideas held in common, and evolve as the ideas
mature or dissolve.
“Cyberspace is a habitat for imagination.”
Marcos Novak

Transarchitecture:
• It is architecture which mediates the transition between the actual and
the virtual.
• This type of architecture is conceived algorithmically.
• It evolves out of the intermingling of architecture and media, the
combination of design and machine/computer.
• The visible aspect is identical to the architecture we inhabit.
• The invisible aspect creates multiples of physical volume. It establishes
spaces that sense and act intelligently, and also connect us to other
physical or virtual spaces.
Virtual Architecture:
The liquid architecture of cyber space is immaterial architecture.
It is architecture that is no longer satisfied with form, light and
the other aspects of the real world. It is an architecture
composed of changing relationships between a variety of
abstract elements.
It can be countered as - "fluid architecture" and "(non)
architecture" do away with the fixed character of a physical
building , hence it can no longer be regarded as a real building,
although it may be an art of a different form.
There is also the idea of designing a functional space within such
a cyberspace - and a certain interpretation which says that such
a thing is also a category of "architecture" appears to be
emerging in a part of the world of architecture.
Virtual Architecture:
The phenomenon of virtual architecture can have two purposes:
• a simulation of physical architecture or a functional virtual place. The
simulation of physical architecture is the most common purpose of virtual
architecture and is increasingly being used to visualise, understand, and
present architectural designs.
• The second purpose of virtual architecture involves the design and
creation of virtual places in terms of its functional organization and
electronic representation. An emerging concept for designed virtual places
is to provide an electronic location for people to socialise, work, and learn.
• The metaphor of buildings and rooms can be revisited and used in virtual
places, suggesting the potential for virtual places to be designed by
architects and then constructed by programmers.
• Users of virtual architecture do not have physical needs or extents, the
geometric description of the space does not hold the same significance as
it does in a physical building.
Virtual Architecture:
• Although architectural design is noted for the forms and places
created, the semantics of these places lies also in their function.
The functional aspects of physical architecture can influence the
design of virtual worlds.
• “Click, click through cyberspace; this is the new architectural
promenade” (Mitchell, 1995). William Mitchell suggests the
inherent architectural nature of cyberspace.
• The involvement of the architect is also subtly implied. However we
have yet to witness architects treating the design of virtual worlds
seriously.
• Currently we observe that programmers or computer scientists are
designing most of the virtual places. In most cases these places are
functional in a sense that they do fulfill the demands of certain
people at least in the short-term.
Virtual Architecture:
• Some of the more popular virtual places are often perceived as linear spaces
rather than spatial. For example a common chat place is often treated as a single
existing dialogue window, rather than a room with spatial quality.
• The expanding internet world and the ever-increasing intensity of online activities
is having a significant impact on our social and cultural environment, hence
affecting the built environment and potentially altering lifestyle.
• Since architecture is concerned with the condition of the built environment, the
current state and development of virtual architecture is certainly not to be
ignored.
• As the effect of online activities is gradually penetrating into our daily life,
architects will be presented with a design situation that poses more complicated
and interwoven problems.
• In three-dimensional virtual places we are increasingly confronted with a higher
degree of spatial organisation, including descriptions and the relationship between
content and space.
• This is when the concept of spatial design and organisation comes into play. Since
the architect is traditionally educated to manipulate spaces and places to provide
functionality, they may well be suited to design online places.