WonderForest

“WonderForest” provides an immersive VR interactive environment asking the question of “what is real?”. If life is composed of a pile of sensory experiences, should VR be included in this game of life? It creates an immersive digitalized visual/audio environment as a new Nature. Just like walking in a forest, the audiences can sense the nature atmosphere but with totally different environmental elements. By creating meshes of waves as landscape, free-floating cubes and flying dots as living species, noise mixing with birds singing as ambient sounds, the project challenges the general stereotypical notion of Nature. It is also to convince the audiences’ that what they’ve experienced in the VR environment should be considered as “real”. For example, who can be certain about the space multiple lightyears away would be the same physical materialization as we have here and not like in the “WonderForest”? Besides, no matter if it is virtual or real, they will all imprint in our body/mind as real senses and memories once we experienced them, just like seeing movies or playing video games, or even dreaming. And that is what “WonderForest” attempts to deliver.

Jia-Rey Chang (US)
Jia-Rey (Gary) Chang is an artist, designer, and researcher focusing on ‘space as a living being’ and immersive spatial Interaction Design. He received his PhD from the Department of Architectural Engineering and Technology (Hyperbody Lab) at TU Delft, the Netherlands in 2018. Currently, he is teaching at the Art & Design department, the University of Delaware as an assistant professor. Throughout all his work, he continues active research in the trans-disciplinary topics of fashion design, creative coding, speculative/interactive/parametric design, Artificial Intelligence, generative art/sound, AR/VR/MR, and projection-based immersive environment.