“DREAM MAKERS” IN THE METAVERSE: ARCHITECTURAL THINKING AND TRENDS IN VIRTUAL SPACE
“DREAM MAKERS” IN THE METAVERSE: ARCHITECTURAL THINKING AND TRENDS IN VIRTUAL SPACE
Yanxin Wang
Student, Belarusian National Academy of Sciences,
Belarus, Minsk
ABSTRACT
Based on the changes in the relationship between art and cities in the digital age, art is not only a mirror image that reflects or reproduces urban life, but also builds a digital city. It means that in the interaction with the city, artistic practice provides a perspective and way of urban perception through its connotative connection relationship, generation mechanism and formal framework. The three-dimensional nature of the building itself determines the connection between architecture and digital art, and it also makes architecture one of the easiest elements to migrate from the real world to the virtual world. Virtual offices, concerts, classrooms, museums and the real world can be connected to form the beginning of a virtual city. Communities and activities require space, which will create new requirements for architectural design. The most basic meaning of digitization is to carry out various related activities based on digital technology. However, digitization not only refers to the effects and possibilities of digital technology, but also a way of thinking. This has a more emotional and intuitive manifestation in the field of art. The city is the product of human social development. It is a complex of various information gathering, intertwining, paralleling, and joining. On the one hand, the city spawns and stimulates artistic practice, and on the other hand, it also absorbs the vitality and achievements of artistic creation, forming a spiritual carrier of urban culture. Today’s digitization process has made the city a new technological environment, and the artistic practice in it is also adopting various new technological factors, becoming the core of urban information dissemination.
Keywords: Digital art, Architecture, Virtual city, Design.
Art has played an important role in the process of the development of human civilization. In the environment of digital media art, especially today’s digital technology is deeply changing the structure and urban structure of our entire society. Compared with the industrial period, the requirements of urban structure have undergone tremendous changes. Social development is not only staged in the real world. Digital life has become an integral part of urban life. It can also be said that the combination of digital media technology and art actually extends people's thoughts more widely through technology, so that technology can better serve the development of cultural industries. The essence of the cultural industry is to tap the premium of “people”. The so-called premium refers to additional value, such as emotional value. Although the number of people in the city is dense, the ideological distance between people is getting farther and farther away. As a result, people's demand for cultural industries with humanistic care has become more extensive. At the same time, the rapid development of cities and the information explosion society are all urging the wider application of digital technology.
New media art
In 1992, Roy Ascott, a British artist dedicated to cross-border exploration, used the brain as a metaphor for the city, arguing that “deep-level urban semiotics may be shaped like a brain.” From this, he proposed the concept of “associationism”, arguing that associationism “includes neural networks and parallel distributed processing, which provides us with useful metaphors for interpersonal relationships and social interaction, and clarifies our own views and cognitive processes.” Artists are such associationists. They “are using the information network to create a new art form through cooperation. Connectedness is the most typical nature of Art Nouveau”. Ascot quickly introduced this to the structure of modern cities in an artist's passionate and exaggerated way: “Associationists and associationists will change cities, not only in terms of art and science, but also in all the reforms, transportation, housing and warehouses, communications, distribution, and production systems that make up modern cities” [1, p. 30].
The traditional cultural industry is based on cultural products as the leading “materialized” products, and in the era of digital media, digital art will greatly expand the boundaries of human perception. In other words, because of the intervention of digital media technology in art, the boundaries of this kind of experience have been greatly expanded, so if more people participate in this kind of emotion and experience, its value will become very high [2, p. 79]. Therefore, the meta-universe is the only way for future social development, and architecture is naturally indispensable as a carrier for people to interact in the city. With the development of digital media technology and art, in the virtual online world, people are no longer limited to communicating in chat rooms in the form of dialogs, but walk around in a digital image and interact with other users to chat and socialize, and architecture is the basic scene of these activities. At the same time, the virtual world is not limited by the physical world. With the interactive development of digital technology and meta-universe, there are more possibilities for the design of virtual spaces.
Virtual buildings were originally designed to serve the construction industry with the help of software mapping, so as to assist in the construction of real-world buildings without interacting with people. With the development of digital technology in art, and people's pursuit and love of digital art, digital art is widely used in film special effects, animation production, advertising and video games [3, p. 35]. The design of digital buildings not only visually reflects and reproduces the real urban scene, but also boldly designs the scenery of many future cities to satisfy people's unlimited imagination of future cities. The digital restoration and protection of ancient buildings also enables a better and wider continuation of human civilization in another way. It can be seen that digital art has permeated all aspects of urban life[4, p. 163].
Architecture in virtual world
In the digital industry, the characteristics of people's social interaction in the scene of video games have made video games the predecessor of the meta-universe. Immersion and sense of space have always been one of the criteria for judging whether video games are good or bad. In the real world, the most basic function of architecture is to serve human social activities, including living, leisure, social entertainment and other aspects. However, in the virtual world, the main function of architecture is to serve as a social scene, providing users with the most realistic experience possible and creating the atmosphere required for the scene. Whether it is common glass materials in real life or scarce marble, virtual buildings are all mapped or carved in software, but the real texture is very important to the virtual world. These designs will make virtual buildings closer to the experience people get in real life.
Lara Lesmes of Space Popular believes that architecture has created a new language in virtual spaces. Taking virtual characters to participate in online activities as an example, these participants may not need digital tables and chairs, but “code and atmosphere are necessary. This is architecture as a language. What virtual buildings and furniture do is not only to sit us down or protect us from the weather, they also convey a lot of environmental and atmospheric information. She believes that “the virtual environment is bringing architectural design to the forefront, truly thinking critically about the role of architecture in symbols”[5, p. 57].
At the same time, with the combination of other virtual technologies and other fields, new activities have also appeared in the virtual world. These activities can only be carried out in the virtual world scene, or better results can be achieved in the virtual scene. For example, at the NFT Encrypted Art Exhibition, encrypted art is difficult to display offline, but online, virtual characters can get an immersive NFT encrypted art exhibition experience in a virtual art gallery. The era of the epidemic has highlighted the role of the virtual world even more. People can complete various online meetings without leaving home. Students from the Animation department of Communication University of China copied the university campus and invited students and teachers to use virtual images to complete the online graduation ceremony in the virtual campus in an immersive manner. The virtual online concert jointly organized by the game Fortnite and singer Travis Scott successfully accommodated 12 million people to participate at the same time. Just like a real concert, the characters need to find a suitable location to watch the performance on the stage. The unique sense of immersion is an effect that is difficult to achieve on the real stage. Immersive virtual exhibitions, virtual museums, virtual classrooms, and virtual concerts have become possible. It can be expected that the architectural scenes of the virtual world will have more functions in the future. In the near future, people may hold virtual weddings to satisfy the regret that relatives and friends from all over the world cannot be present. Perhaps the new product launches of various products will not only be released by video or live broadcast, but will invite people to enter the virtual scene with virtual images to participate, so as to achieve better communication results.
And game designers have played the roles of urban planners and architectural designers in the meta-universe. Designers create virtual items in exchange for rewards in the real world. The existing online games can be regarded as small virtual worlds. For example, in the game Minecraft, players can create and destroy blocks in the game in three-dimensional space, creating buildings, works of art, and various creations. The virtual world is like a blank piece of paper, with inexhaustible space waiting for designers to develop and build. However, the composition of virtual world architects is no longer single. From the programmer who writes the system to every game player, they can become the architect of the virtual world and the creator of the virtual city.
In the virtual world, there are no rules and regulations of the construction industry in the real world, which makes architectural design more artistic. The development of Internet technology and digital technology has brought about a huge change in architectural thinking. Buildings no longer require a lot of architectural knowledge, long construction cycles, meticulous architectural guidelines and high construction costs [6, p. 89]. Architects in the virtual world can not consider structural mechanics and the laws of natural physics, let alone worry about building budgets and space constraints. There is no need to adapt to local conditions and design and create as you please, because the function of this kind of digital building is more biased towards social platforms than places where humans live and live.
In addition, unlike real buildings, virtual buildings in Metaverse are also easier to transform and rebuild. People only need to modify the data in the computer to overturn and rebuild a building, and they can copy and paste buildings in batches to quickly make oversized scenes or complex and gorgeous buildings. Therefore, the construction production cycle in Metaverse will be greatly shortened compared to the real world.
The NFT encryption technology can realize the encoding and tracking of virtual real estate, ensure the uniqueness of the building, and enable the virtual building to be traded. Then the virtual building expands the transaction object of virtual reality and changes people's asset composition. Although virtual buildings do not have the function of living and living, virtual buildings provide scenes for the socialization of virtual characters in the context of Metaverse. On the other hand, virtual architecture can also be regarded as a form of art, because a simple virtual building is just a model. Perhaps in the future development, virtual buildings will be bundled with social platforms for sale or trading, so virtual buildings will be given more functions. For example, the sale of Krista Kim's virtual home Mars House and the successful auction of Alexis Christodoulou's virtual building NFT show that the concept of virtual products is being accepted by more people. Digital product functions are becoming more and more complete and demonstrating their uniqueness, such as scarcity and traceability. In addition, digital real estate will not age and depreciate, and can be updated with one click with the development of technology, so it has a value that is different from real-world real estate. Real estate in the virtual world will become a new part of people's assets in the future [7, p. 15].
Digital art today is not only a type of avant-garde art that is amazing in terms of theme, form and technology, but is also expanding the extension of art day by day. From the improvement of form and aesthetics within art, to the socialization and politicization of the outside of art, the artistic function, artistic value, artist identity authentication, and art evaluation system of digital art must be redefined.
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