Workshop Intent
During the course of a five day workshop, we, students from the NID exhibition design program and two designers from Quicksand explored the joys of telling stories through the creation of unique virtual spaces.
Inspired by how photogrammetry has been used in the video game industry as of late to create mesmerizing spaces at the frontier of magical realism, the objective was two-fold. First, it was meant as an excuse to get a closer look at such new tools or processes like game engines and photogrammetry but the other hope was to try doing so in a more personal, intentional fashion.
To do so, we built on our existing skills as designers and makers. The workshop provided digital skill-building sessions as well as quick and dirty video prototyping methods to physically explore and build on the spacial concept and the narrative it would embody.
Quickly the two approaches started inspiring each other, nearly making demands of one another. While building out the virtual space made concepts like teleportation, absurd scales, moon-like gravity second nature, the physical model-making helped inform navigation through space, and the storytelling itself.
The result is a series of game-museum-theater-fable mashups, that hint at the promise of further marrying analog and digital tools as photogrammetry does so well. We exhibited the virtual narratives on NID campus to fellow classmates how had a chance to playtest them.