Worldmaking: designing for audience participation, immersion and interaction in virtual and real spaces

Artists often try to open up new experiences for people, challenging them to extend horizons and perception. This becomes particularly relevant when thinking about experiencing built environments: Here, technologies like Cave Automatic Virtual Environments (CAVE) or Head-Mounted Displays (HMD) can be used as a tool to offer richer experiences to the audience in both art installations and exhibitions. We have been developing several exhibitions tackling the challenges that come with exhibiting in (semi -) public spaces: how do we engage visitors in our exhibitions, what role do bystanders play and how can this be considered in the development and design process? The exhibitions were built in a chronological order (2015–2018) and increasing degree of immersion and interaction. For exhibition one (“step-in/Ideal Spaces”), we built a CAVE-like “tryptic” projection showing linear pre-rendered videos of seven different built environments. In exhibition two (“fly-over/Super Nubibus”) we build a replica of a hot-air-balloon and let people experience architecture from birds eye view using a HMD. Exhibition three (“cruise/Biketopia”) is also an immersive VR using a HMD, but from a very different angle. Here we use a bike to let people actively explore a space by regulating speed and direction of the bike. By using the discreet method of observation, we ensured that the visitors were not disturbed in their experience, which in turn would falsify our findings. So we are able to compare and discuss these three approaches in regards to the above mentioned criteria within this paper.