Anna Pompermaier
Meet Me Halfway, 2021
VR experience for HTC Vive (Pro)
Meet Me Halfway is a multi-user XR experience exploring the potential and implications of architecture across realities. By creating a micro-performative public space, the project speculates on the future of how we will live together, investigating alternative meeting places and communication strategies inside a phygital relational garden of encounters. A phygital space is a place explorable between the virtual and the physical, claiming that the digital is not only an expansion of the actual but believing in a synthesis of both. Several exploratory objects create the physical stage of the public participatory XR performance and guide the users through the experience, both as a digital and physical matter to touch and engage with. They become the tactile tools of the immersion, technologically embedding the virtual into our naked organic intelligence.
The project explores digital and actual materialities and investigates the impact of immersive technologies on contemporary architectural design. It asks: How can we use today's technology as a critical medium for spatial co-production? Which effects will it have for us, psychologically and physiologically speaking, to dwell simultaneously in dual worlds? How will virtual worlds alter the value of architecture? How will the phygital reshape us in return?
Credits: The project was developed at ./studio3, Institute for Experimental Architecture, University of Innsbruck.
Room scale VR, physical interactable objects, duration: open end
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ABOUT THE ARTIST
Anna Pompermaier (IT, 1991) is an architect, engineer, digital artist and researcher at the Institute for Experimental Architecture ./studio3 of Innsbruck University. In her works, she investigates the influence of immersive technologies on our everyday experiences and interpersonal interactions in the upcoming livable domains. She explores the potential and implications of architecture across realities, investigating digital and actual materialities through the use of XR technologies and public interactive installations. She explores how our global interconnectivity culture is evolving in new technological beliefs and communication strategies, uninterruptedly expanding and challenging our sense of reality. She applies the physical specificity of the body’s experience to the design of immersive phygital environments, present simultaneously in the virtual and in the actual, exploring multi-layered materialities and unstable states. Her works have been exhibited at different festivals like the Ars Electronica Festival, VRHAM!, roBOt Festival and ADAF and invited to conferences and publications.
If you are interested in exhibiting or viewing this artistic VR experience, please send an email to us.
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