The Virtual Placemaking Initiative (VPI) explores awe inspiring spaces, and the deeply human experience we can find in the sublime experience of recognizing how small we are compared to natural, historical, and cultural patterns. Participatory design practices expand access to virtual placemaking and test how cultural competencies and historical trajectories might be reaffirmed or contested in virtual spaces. Planting cultural competencies and historical trajectories in emerging technologies encourages novel applications and locally specific customs to emerge in virtual spaces.
Many areas of human endeavors are undergoing a process of digitization that is creating new virtual spaces that resonate with our everyday lives. Digital technologies have affected and will increasingly affect how we conceptualize space and time, how we organize and share information, and how we sustain relationships. Initiatives to create better metaphorical and narrative relationships with virtual space will improve the experiences available to all in an imagined elsewhere. The metaphorical space of virtuality is more than a concept: it is a dreamscape, a landscape, a place to explore.
The MPS sees virtual space as a landscape that should be cared for as a natural preserve. Cyberspace can be seen as a sensitive wetland, a marsh that we are slowly wading into while the digital tide rises. The MPS asks “How can land conservancy and park systems be guides for understanding and stewarding the development of cyberspace?
As a park ranger for the Metaverse Park Service I focus on the development of new programming for virtual reality. I am an artist and cultural technology hacker with an interest in virtual places and the communities that build them. I am pursuing my masters in Human-Computer interaction and my work explores the relationship between technology, nature, people, and place.
I work with creative technologists, institutional partners, students, and the public to build and program interesting virtual worlds that leverage local culture and history for social impact and immersion. Architecting virtual worlds is an art form that continues to challenge and enrich me. This process is what fuels my love of teaching virtual placemaking as well.
How can we honor the past while building the future? The MPS explores the role of culture, history, and nature in shaping the future of virtual worlds. I currently lead events, provide technical training, and design curriculum as part of Metaverse Park Services Virtual Placemaking Initiative.
The Virtual Placemaking Initiative explores virtual environment design by reinforcing a place as natural, historical, and cultural construction. The workshop uses inexpensive virtual reality hardware paired with customizable sets of physical materials to prototype and explore impossible natural places.
The Metaverse Park Service includes:
1.) An encyclopedic interface that allows users to upload and describe their region’s environmental conditions.
2.) A virtual reality browser that allows users to access, manipulate, and annotate web-based geospatial content.
3.) A social networking platform that allows users to interact and discuss the environment of their communities.
The Metaverse Park Service (MPS) allows users to collectively identify and classify environmental issues in their region. The MPS interface can be used to generate environmental awareness, engage communities, and build civic capacity. Users can annotate and organize web-based geospatial content related to problems and opportunities they see in their virtual or physical communities. Users can work together to create virtual reality simulations that model different environmental scenarios. These simulations can then be shared with other users on popular social media platforms.
Virtual worlds can be considered places, cultures, and experiences, as well as ontological, epistemological, and phenomenological objects. Virtual worlds mediate our understanding of the physical realities we inhabit, while virtual places themselves have materialized as physical spaces.
Virtual worlds have come into public consciousness primarily through the development of immersive video games and movies, virtual reality technologies, and amusement park rides, but their potential is far-reaching. Virtual places have a life of their own, with rich possibilities for content creation, design, and interaction. However, virtual technologies are also becoming integrated into our physical environments, as new mixed-reality environments emerge. Mixed reality integrates virtual and real spaces, often through head-mounted displays, such as the Microsoft Hololens and the Magic Leap.
Mark Dery (2000) sees cyberspace as "a dream world, a land that is uncannily like but unlike the everyday world we know." The landscape of cyberspace is populated by cyborgs, avatars, and "beings of pure information.” Cyberspace is also "a laboratory where artists, computer hackers, computer scientists, anthropologists, and others meet and mingle.. [generating] a new form of cultural production.” The virtual reality of cyberspace thus functions as both a laboratory full of latent potential and an irresistible but unreachable dream: "As we come to see the virtual as the natural, the digital as the real, the Internet as the consciousness of our time, we begin to crave the dream as reality.”
A virtual space, for Deleuze (1997), is "the network in which possibilities, connections, and actualities coexist. . .” Deleuze's virtual necessitates creativity, desire, and becoming. If early cyberspace was dominated by an almost visceral desire to emerge as something greater than the sum of our parts ("We gather together and through the division of labor are able to accomplish far more than any one of us could by ourselves"), Dery (2000) argues that in the present day there is "an ethic of play" that prevails. Popular metaverse companies' “hacker ethic” is fighting against a rip current to create dopamine slot machine mechanics to sell ads.