Illusions: Is your reality always a construction?
Reinventing Reality
7,000 sq. ft. Virtual Science Center Traveling Exhibition
15 cities | 3M visitors
I assembled robust multi-sensory illusions (check out Long Arm too) enabling visitors to peek at how our brains construct our subjective “reality” via examples where experience doesn’t match the world as it truly is. VR works because we can engineer such perceptual trickery. In and out of VR, our brain continually constructs our experience of reality from a surprisingly small set of sensory cues. VR designers study and leverage these cues to create the illusion of a different outside reality inside one’s brain.
In the Educator’s Guide I emphasize that being “fooled” by these illusions demonstrates how smart our perceptual system is, not the other way around! We evolved to survive in the real world. For instance, if our brain and eyes didn’t incorporate context when perceiving shades of gray (second video) we’d be unable to detect the edges of objects, and constantly bump into trees and doorways.
Interaction Design & Curation: Bill Meyer
Trompe L'oeil Project: Heather Birchall
Exhibition Design: Quatrefoil
Fabricator: Group Delphi
