ABSTRACT

This chapter explores how the experience of creating artwork for virtual reality systems relies on shifting sensory perceptions through “emotables,” or affective entities that establish aesthetics. Virtual reality (VR) art and design, framed in terms of a fine arts aesthetics encourages artists to build a visual rhetoric for VR that is distinct from that of video games or cinema. VR is typically understood or discussed in terms of video games, films, interactive videos and the like but it is actually redefining those genres in a distinctive way—it has the ability to extend these media. Approaching VR with an artistic strategy offers an opportunity for creating expression and affecting perception of a visitor within a multi-dimensional physicality of complex characterization of space and sound. In VR, the visitor discovers and defines the walk through the imagery by interacting with its elements or emotables.