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Char Davies: VR Through Osmosis

by Mark J. Jones

At SoftImage in Montreal, the reception area in the corporate headquarters boasts a long spiral staircase which majestically takes visitors from the ground floor to the upper reaches of the offices. There, on the upper floor of the building, where one can get a clear view of the Montreal skyline, sits the various 230 employees working on their next project: programmers, marketers, artists -- and one very content black Tibetan Mastiff puppy.

"That's Mystic," says Char Davies, director of visual research, as she scruffs him behind the ear. "He's our mascot. He reminds us not to take ourselves too seriously."

Indeed, SoftImage, one of the world's most renowned companies of computer graphic software development, is at a point where it has every right to take itself very seriously. Before being acquired by Microsoft in 1994, the company had already made its mark in the industry as one of the few developers which made graphics tools for artists. Give the artists the right tools, their mandate implied, and the art would begin to follow. When Microsoft stepped in, it was in recognition that SoftImage had set itself apart from other companies who were more concerned with technological development than artistic expression. "I feel it's really important that along with pure technological development, there's another development that goes alongside in terms of aesthetics and content," says Davies. "And my conviction is that [aesthetics] should always be evolving along with the actual code."

Enter Osmose, SoftImage's new virtual reality installation, presented at ISEA '95 and developed by a team headed by Davies that includes Georges Mauro, John Harrison, Rick Bidlack and Dorota Blaszcak. According to SoftImage documentation, Osmose is a fully-immersive and interactive virtual environment which uses stereoscopic computer graphics, a head-mounted display (HMD), real-time motion capture and live video projection. Its setting is a series of virtual worlds in which the user explores and becomes a part of: a fog, a forest, a clearing, a pond, a leaf; or can journey inside the ground, into an abyss, and finally into a world of digital figures and lines of code.

"Osmose is about our relationship with Nature in its most primary sense," writes Davies. "Osmosis: a biological process involving passage from one side of a membrane to another. Osmosis as a metaphor: transcendence of difference through mutual absorption, dissolution of boundaries between inner and outer, inter-mingling of self and world, longing for the Other. Osmose as an artwork seeks to heal the rational Cartesian mind/body subject/object split which has shaped so many of our cultural values, especially towards nature."

I don my HMD and the assistant wires my chest and back with interface devices. Osmose is activated and I am transported to a 3-D wireframe grid. "Practice," they say, "get used to the space and the interface." I look all around me and the grid extends to infinity in all directions. I inhale and gradually begin to rise; if I lean forward I move forward. Lean back and I move backwards. I'm flying, I am an enigma, I have no physical form, yet I am whole. I am an "immersant."

An "immersant," Davies repeats. "The whole thrust of this piece is to re-embody the participant, who I have named an 'immersant.' I think it's a good word, we went through a list of about sixty words on what we should call them: user, participant? I think immersant is suitable because you are immersed, and it was the immersive quality that I first started working [with VR]."

Another way of re-embodying the immersant is through the interface they have chosen. Gone are the cumbersome datagloves and joysticks. In the Osmose piece the immersant controls his/her movement with breath and balance. Davies explains: "I wanted to get away from the interface methods that are very directly manipulative, and in this piece -- as opposed to many other VR pieces -- I was looking for alternatives to the idea of getting into that space and controlling or dominating things, that I am just a disembodied eye."

Gradually, a thick fog begins to rise over the grid. Leaves appear through the fog, and the grid is gone. Everywhere I look there are more leaves. I move through them, in them, around them. I fly over them, yet more appear above me. Am I lost? No, I am surrounded by a thick forest of leaves of all shapes and colours. It is summer one minute, fall the next. I float as if I am swimming deep in the ocean, yet I know I am in the air.

Much of Davies' work has a fluid, enigmatic quality to it. She relates that much of her style in VR comes from her experience as a scuba diver. "There are many, many correlations between diving and VR. One of them, the most simple, is that when you're diving you have to put on all this heavy stuff. In VR, people complain [that] you have to put on this and you have to put on that, you have wear these goggles. Why can't you have unencumbered VR?" She notes that just as in diving, she doesn't mind being encumbered for a short period, since the equipment is necessary in order to enter another spatial world.

"The oceanic space is probably more related to virtual immersive space than it is to terrestrial space. Here we have gravity, we live on a horizontal plane, where in diving there is no gravity, you're in a space which can be vertical. It's very relaxing," she says. "We're trying to get away from a lot of the stereotypes that you see in VR, where there's a horizon and you've got all these solid objects -- buildings, or whatever they are in empty space. That aesthetic to me is based on that whole separation of self in the world. That's why we're taking away the [hand] probe and working with balance and breath, [which are] not only close to the body and intuitive, but by using breathing it makes the immersant constantly aware of their own body because they're aware of their own breathing. You breathe in and you go up, you breathe out and you go down, you lean forward and you go forward, you bend your legs and you go faster. So it's very, very intuitive. And not only does it draw the person's attention back to their own bodies, but it starts to relax them."

There, on the edge, a clearing in the distance. I exhale and begin to descend into the clearing. Bend my knees and I fly faster. Finally, I am out of the dense forest and into a cozy clearing. Some leaves lie on the ground, a pond, a stream, and a tree. A huge oak tree generously giving out its shade for all. I drink it in. I cruise around this area, I want to touch the tree but because I have no physical form, I cannot. I glide up through the leaves of the three and surround myself with their damp, exquisite beauty. There, look at that leaf. I'm going to go right through it!

For Char Davies, breaking the rules with art became a journey which began with learning the rules first. Having been trained as a visual artist at the University of British Columbia at Victoria, she moved to Vancouver Island in 1978 where she supported herself with commissioned paintings. But because representational art was not in style in her community, she taught herself to paint naturalistically, using classical perspective and chiaroscuro. When, in 1981, a documentary film project produced by the National Film Board of Canada became available in Montreal, Davies found herself shuttling back and forth between Vancouver and Montreal.

The yearning for representational sensibilities did not leave her, however, and in a series of personal visual exercises, Davies would remove her contact lenses and paint the images she saw with her uncorrected, blurry vision. In viewing her environment this way, she says, she saw not objects, but different regions of luminosity. This helped her work break free of the objective, physical appearance of things, and signalled new venture into the representational world. "It lost its interest, and I became a much more interior, poetic, symbolic reality painter. For me to reproduce the external appearances of things has no interest anymore."

Inside a leaf. Amazing. Look at this, I'm sliding along the inside of a leaf. There, its veins. Up there, trickles of water molecules making their way down the stem. I hover above them for a moment, trying to see where they exit. Too far to see. I lower myself slightly, directly into the stream of molecules. They are flowing all around me, hugging my form like a thousand tiny angels bidding me welcome. I follow them down the stream, back out the stem of the leaf, back out to the crown of the tree, back out to paradise. Quickly, a sunset occurs. Day turns into night. A warm glow covers the surface, and I glide over it. Then I penetrate into the ground.

In virtual reality academic circles, there is a duality of thought between the naturalists and the post-modernists. The naturalists believe it is better to start designing virtual environments using the physical world as its model. Concepts and new, more conceptual worlds, they say, will develop from there. Post-modernists believe, in true existential fashion, that "physical reality" itself has no definition, therefore to begin designs of virtual worlds based on a physical appearance is misguided, and leads only to restrictions in the imagination of what VR can become.

For Davies, the question of which school of thought has the upper hand is a matter of its application: "If you want to create models of the human body with body organ for surgeons, then I think they should be using photo-realism and it's great idea. If, for instance, you might be representing external appearances to teach a handicapped kid how to manoeuvre his wheelchair through the streets, it's very useful. And I think that to use VR for scientists to try to recreate what they imagine their conceptual models of cells and viruses and understand how they function is very useful. So I think it all depends on what it's for."

A different world. Vegetation and denseness, yet I travel through it as if I am part of the molecules contributing to its makeup. Over there, look, the root of the tree penetrating into the ground. I see the pond and its stream branching off into infinity.

The pond. Cool, clear water. I can't resist -- leaning in the direction of the pond, I cruise towards it, the surface of the clearing zooming above me. A moment later I am engulfed in water. It streams up to my face and moves around me, finally out to the stream. I can hear splashes as I swim submerged. Suspending my movement for a moment, I look beneath me. The pond appears to lead into some tunnel. Putting my arms at my side I exhale and begin a fast vertical descent.

In Osmose, the recontructed body is made possible by the absence of physical metaphors. With no metaphorical hands in front of your face, you become intensely aware of your entire being despite of the fact that you have no physical form. Recent trends have been to deny the body altogether, and consider that the body will become nothing more than a marrying of flesh and machine. "That trend, for me, is one that I find very alarming," says Davies, "and a lot of people have bought into it. For me, it's important that we reaffirm the body, reaffirm our materiality, and I feel that by using these interface methods I am resituating the body in that virtual space." She adds, "I don't like VR because of what we normally see. It's ugly, you've got hard-edged objects in an empty space, it's horizontal, they've got ugly textures on them. You go in there and there's not much to do except move around and point at things and manipulate things, and you're the boss. What we're attempting to do is get away from that completely, where you're not the boss, you're just in there in this enveloping space which is very sensuous and very ambiguous."

Green and blue, dark cold walls. I freefall into a dark abyss. Yet what would otherwise be fear is instead a fascinating curiosity. That sound, what is it? Music? No. Animals? No. It is neither, yet it is both. It swirls me like a gentle, lonely funnel cloud, begging me to stay a while. And while I am not afraid, it is not home. I want to go home, back to the clearing, back to the wise old oak tree. Yet still I continue my descent and swoop forward.

When Davies first started working with SoftImage 1987, she held back working with VR because she felt that the technology was not yet up to what she wanted to do with it. She continued incorporating the aesthetics that she developed as a painter and continued to develop as a computer artist at SoftImage. "There's a spatial ambiguity, and while there is a figure of the ground you can't quite make it out. [Some still] images take forty hours to render one frame. In VR, because it's real-time interactive, we need 30 frames per second or better. I that thought since I can't [achieve] that aesthetic [in VR] I should wait a few years, and then I had a talk with someone in Germany who developed a rendering software and he said it would be years before computers ever get that powerful." But since then SoftImage developed a technique for rendering environments in three-dimensional realtime by using particle patterns to create objects instead of the traditional solid blocks, a technique employed in Osmose.

What is this? Numbers? Letters, as if projected from a computer screen? Lines of programming surround me in big green phosphorous figures. DNA. Building blocks, the construction of this world, lines of code strung together in three dimensions. I move through them, fly over them, and all the while they play their techy, almost goofy tune.

Char Davies exudes a passion as she talks about Osmose, a passion that is reminiscent of a child who has found a new playground. But this child-like fascination is tempered by a very wise adult artist, an artist whose drive is to forge new paths for other artistic sensibilities to emerge. In Osmose, she says, " we were looking for an alternative to interface methods, an alternative to the aesthetic, and an alternative to the whole way of being linear," adding with a smile that "...what interests me about this piece is that it is so rich conceptually. We could continue this for another year and not get bored. We've only begun."

Then suddenly, the fog, it's back. The code begins to disappear. The thick forest. I'm back, back to where I started. Where is the clearing? Where is the edge of this immensity? Deeper I look, faster I go, but still get no relief. Finally, I continue on through, suddenly I am back in paradise. Back to that old tree. I'm home.

Davies is at home with VR, for now. "What interests me about the medium of immersive VR is that I see a conceptual arena, a place where it is possible to visualize concepts and mental models of the world. And once you have visualized these models in this space, you can kinesthetically interact with them with your full body. And I think that's what makes it such a powerful medium, and that's why it fascinates me."

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