Heterotopia is a 15-minute VR experience for one participant exploring imaginary places, their creation, sharing, and disappearance.
Children, writers, and many others wander through places they construct according to their imagination. We want to open the door to this world by offering an adaptation of a collection of letters from two architects imagining a place, Chamber for a Memory Palace.
To give form to this immaterial concept, the experience takes the form of a model of a fantastical city built with real buildings. It is made possible by an innovative system that combines VR, Kinect, and photogrammetry. This system offers a level of interaction that allows the participant to raise and lower buildings at will with their fingertips, interactively recreating the demiurgic feeling of creation.
Using a Kinect to provide detailed information about the exhibition space, the participant is immersed in an environment similar to their own. The VR headset adds an object to their reality: an architect's table. Thanks to the dust on the table, they can build an entire city on a 3D scale. But the experience extends beyond the table itself: the participant invites their creation to spill over its frame and invade the real world around them.
Made with Dorian Rigal, Samuel Lecoeur and Rémi Large
Audio composition by Antoine Wert and Alexandre Bobe.
Voice by Claire Saumande
