Good Design İzmir 2024 | İzmir | November 1-17, 2024
As part of Good Design İzmir 2024, organized this year by İzmir Metropolitan Municipality and İzmir Mediterranean Academy with the theme of "Dialogue," we conducted a VR experience titled "Transcending the Boundaries of Dialogue: Virtual Reality Cinema and Digital Bodies" together with Prof. Dr. Alev Fatoş Parsa.
The starting point of the event was to consider the festival's theme through virtual reality: Is dialogue only established through words, or is being in another body, in another space, also a form of dialogue? Virtual reality cinema takes the viewer from their seat in front of a rectangular frame and places them in the space of the narrative, while also offering the possibility of existing from another's perspective through digital bodies. In the workshop, we explored this potential together with the participants: we had the opportunity to experience different perspectives in films set in virtual spaces and to discuss new forms of communication established through digital bodies.
The conversations that followed the participants' experiences with VR headsets allowed us to test the claim in the event's name: the discussions that began after the headsets were removed showed that the experience itself was a dialogue initiator. For us, it was also instructive that fundamental concepts of VR research, such as empathy, presence, and embodiment, were brought together with the city's residents within the context of a design-oriented festival.
I would like to thank the İyi Tasarım İzmir team for creating this space for this meeting, the İzmir Mediterranean Academy and the İzmir Metropolitan Municipality, Prof. Dr. Alev Fatoş Parsa, with whom I always enjoy collaborating, and everyone who participated in the experience.
