a webcams gaze: thoughts going in

In the past, I’ve made walking simulators with procedural or abstract geometry. Throughout the fall semester I’ll have access to an iPad, which will allow me, thanks to its depth sensors and positional tracking, to generate photogrammetry scans. I think it would be interesting, for several reasons, to create a demo based on photogrammetry scans of domestic spaces.

I find the voyeuristic relationship between the player and characters in narrative focused walking simulators like Gone Home (FullBright, 2013) or Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture (The Chinese Room, 2015) intriguing. Environmental storytelling, when used in domestic contexts, inherently represents an invasion of privacy and leads to a power dynamic between the player and game-characters. Players scrutinize personal objects and spaces to dissect the personal stories and personalities of people who no longer have any agency over their belongings. This dynamic, is however, diminished, because of the fictitious nature of these games. There isn’t the same sense of intrusion or uneasiness one might feel, for instance, when they open up the bathroom cabinet at a friend’s place to peer inside. I want to explore how this sort voyeuristic dynamic — an unrestricted, one-sided exploration of another’s personal stuff — might change (and likely intensify) when players know that they’re traversing digital translations of real-world places.

Exploration of domestic spaces has become particularly relevant now, when the home has taken on new meaning and importance through quarantine. People’s daily lives have been spatially condensed, physical delineations between work and leisure have faded. Domestic spaces are now so frequent subjects to the web-cameras-gaze that it has become standard to fuss over wall decorations and line of sights in order to put one’s best foot forward in conference calls and meetings. The webcam, it’s line of sight, and the resultant public space that has been inserted into our domestic environments, represents a fruitful subject for visual metaphor through my technical study.

Visually, I’m inspired by surrealistic-horror games like Paratropic (Arbitrary Media, 2018) which often employ a myriad of graphical effects, like the warping and shifting of textures, to render otherwise banal conversations and environments uncanny. This might prove especially effective in the safe domestic space of a bedroom, where small distortions in photogrammetry scans, or small warpings in textures or meshes will become especially disconcerting.

It’s these interests in: voyeurism through digital exploration, the surrendering of domestic spaces to public scrutiny, the condensation of physical space through quarantine, and the uncanniness that bizarre graphical effects can create when used in mundane spaces which I’m interested in exploring through this graphics programming journey.