IN
DEGREE PROJECT ARCHITECTURE, SECOND CYCLE, 30 CREDITS
,
STOCKHOLM SWEDEN 2020
Architecture, Virtual Space
And Impossible Space
Architecture
Virtual Space
&
Impossible Space
Feng Yang
2020 Spring
Play video 1
Case Study of the impossible space
Please click the link to watch the video (35 seconds):
https://youtu.be/1bQNxOqr6zs
The game is made by Ustwo Game, first released on iOS on April 3rd, 2014. It is an indie puzzle game, the player leads the princess Ida through mazes of optical illu-sions and impossible objects while manipulating the world around her to reach various platforms.
P.T. (initialism for “playable teaser”) is a first-person psycho-logical horror video game. It was directed and designed by Hideo Kojima, in collaboration with film director Guillermo del Toro. Released for the PlayStation 4 on 12 August 2014 as a free download on the PlayStation Network, P.T. served primarily as an interactive teaser for the game Silent Hills. P.T. uses a first-person perspective, which centers on an un-known protagonist, whom the player controls, who awak-ens in a haunted suburban house and experiences super-natural occurrences.
P.T. received critical acclaim for its direction, visuals, story complexity, and its supernatural horror tension build.
Antichamber is a puzzle game created by Alexan-der Bruce of Demruth. It is firstly released on January 31, 2013 on Steam. It could be one of the most famous puzzle games. The player controls an unnamed protagonist from a first-person perspective as they wander through levels and solving the puzzles.
Voi is a mind bending first person puzzle platformer set inside an huge impossible Escher-esque structure, filled with all manner of visual trickery. This game released as a student project on late 2015.
The puzzles in Voi are generally based around the idea of non-Euclidean spaces – impossible structures created by overlapping sections of the map. Your aim in the game is to reach the top of a staircase, with a new flight of stairs be-ing added each time you complete a section of the game. The Stanley Parable is an interactive drama and walking simulator video game designed by American developer Davey Wreden. The game was originally released on July 27, 2011.
The player guides Stanley, the game's protagonist, through a surreal environment while the narrator, voiced in the re-make by British actor Kevan Brighting, delivers exposition. The player can follow the guidence of narrator, and can not.
The game triggers huge disscussion about free will.
Ode to a Moon is a first person cosmic horror game by Colorfiction. Complete game has not been released yet, the demo is free to download and experience on its web-site.
It is a first-person spooking simulator in which you play a photojournalist who leaves the big city to cover a thanks-giving harvest festival in the country.
Manifold Garden is an indie first-person puzzle video game developed by American artist William Chyr. It was released on Windows, MacOS, and iOS on October 18, 2019, with a PlayStation 4 version to launch later.
The player must navigate an abstract series of structures that appear to repeat into infinity, while solving a progres-sion of puzzles.
Superliminal is a 2019 puzzle video game released by Pil-low Castle.
The game, played from a first-person perspective,
Journey is an indie adventure game developed by That-gamecompany and was released for the PlayStation 3 in March 2012.
Player will control a gender-or-age indistinguishable char-acter walk or fly through several scene alone or with one companion. During this journey, different scene and spaces will cast different impact on feeling of the player.
It is a walking simulator in which you can explore all kinds of mysterious places and dive into a world full of atmos-phere. It is released on 2018 August, developed by Moshe Linke.
zium / noun / informal: 1. a virtual gallery game, composed of eclectic and wonderful things. 2. (kind of like a zine, but the museum version)
The Zium Garden is a Museum Exploration Game filled with artwork and installations from artists around the world, working in various mediums and styles. Player can visit this museum like visiting a real one but with special game ex-perience.
The Zium Project was conceived, created and curated by Michael Berto. This version was released on 2017, the main scene is a indoor space of a virtual museum.
This is a 2018 version of The Zium Garden. The main space difference between this and version 2017 is that the main exhibition space is a simulating outdoor space, however the sky dome is artisticed with a panting style similar to of Van Gogh.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Hearts of Stone is the first ex-pansion pack for the 2015 video game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Developed by CD Projekt Red, Hearts of Stone was released on 13 October 2015.
Players control the witcher Geralt, finishing three seems impossilbe missions. In the process of completing these missions, Geralt get through kinds of interesting and unusual world.
Death Stranding is an action game developed by Kojima Productions and released in November 2019.
The game is set in the United States during the aftermath of the eponymous Death Stranding, which caused destructive creatures from a realm between life and death to begin roaming the Earth. Players control Sam Porter Bridges, a courier tasked with delivering supplies to the fractured and isolated colonies that remain and reconnecting them via a wireless communications network.
Three months after published, the coronavirus epdimic makes delivering a real life game of Death Stranding.
What Remains of Edith Finch is a 2017 adventure game developed by Giant Sparrow and published by Annapurna Interactive.
The game centers on the character of Edith, a member of the Finch family. Edith learns about her relatives and their deaths by visiting their bedrooms, sealed off and treated as shrines to their memory, with each death played out in a short gameplay sequence to the player.
Fez (stylized as FEZ) is an indie puzzle-platform video game developed by Polytron Corporation, first released on April 13, 2012.
The player-character Gomez receives a fez that reveals his two-dimensional (2D) world to be one of four sides of a
Impossible Spaces In Games
The tricky point of Penrose triangle is, the in-accuracy in 2 dimension space presenting 3 dimension objects.
If we use the (x,y,z) to present a point in 3 di-mension world, and use (x,y) to present a point in 2 dimension plane, we will find a problem if we use 2 dimension plane to present a 3 di-mension object: one point (x,y) on a 2d plane, could be (x,y) or (x,z) or (y,z) on the 3d object that 3d image presented. This inaccuracy offer a opportunity that height can be far, near can be down, impossible can be possible.
Another trick that applied in this game is ‘rela-tive gravity’ I called.
In our daily life experience, everything will fall on the ground, it feels like the gravity comes from the ground. Even Newton correct us by theory of law of universal gravitation, we can still easily understand in a way that gravity fol-lows the ‘ground’.
In example above, the ‘ground’ and the ‘wall’ connected and transited by a curve surface, which makes the ‘ground and the ‘wall’ the one, implies the smooth transition of gravity from vertical to horizon.
P.T.
AntiChamber
The Monument Valley
The Monument Valley
x x
y
y z
The game happen in a L-shape corridor room in a suburban house. There are many impossible things happening in horror games with supernatural pow-er, but this time the architectural elements play a central part in constructing horror atmosphere and making this game the outstanding one. In this L-shape corridor room, the door at the end will lead you back to the door at the be-ginning with a smooth connection, which build an infinitive loop. Other than just a simple repetition, the details as well as the atmosphere in the room change concomitantly in each loop.
The one key important point in this loop space is the starting point and the end point are the same point. Some times this point is a door, in P.T. this point is a small room, marked as blue in the diagram to the up. When player enter this small room, the door behind will be closed. This way of transition makes game more smooth.
Teleported or space overlapping?
A box seems have been overlapped by other three boxes, each of them are visible through only one side.
AntiChamber
Voi
Voi
Loop space:
Both choice bring you back. Red or blue? Up or down? Never mind, both choice brings you back to the beginning point, which looks so counter-intuitive.
Loop space could be build by several parts. The essence of making people feel the loop is the point where the start and the end connect.
I call this space overlapping. A blue door in red room looks empty and solitary from one side. But when you come to the other side, you will find this door lead you to another room where have the exit.
Space overlapping Impossible corridor hub
Like one type of impossible space in Antichamber.
A corridor hub that could lead you to the four different room.
Same mechanism applied in Antichamber as a exhibiting box. Here the designer use it as a cross ‘road’ lead player to four different room.
Believe the illusion
The reflection in the mirror or water guides you where are the invisible bridges bring you to the right place.
It feels like the game happening in a quite complex planed office when you play the game. Even like that, the impression of a office building which constructed from the daily life experience makes us believe the building which contain the rooms is still a simple and regular box.
But when you can see from a view point outside of the gaming space, you can see it is consisted of several different spaces, some are even incomplete.
And during playing, these parts, rooms and corridors, changing their combinations, which creates a dynamic game space.
Ode to the Moon is featured by the artistic atmosphere which is constructed by the amazing and intriguing light and colour effect.
The impossible space that I found in this game is the cracking space. There is no loop space nor counter-intuition, but this cracking space is really a new idea to me.
After experiencing a moon eclipse in the game, all the things are going to go wrong. It looks like the world is cracking not in material nor physical terms. The whole space cracks into debris not following a material logic, for example stones broke into small sands and walls broke into small pieces, but following a space texture as shown in the pictures to the left.
This kind of space cracking also applies to gravity field. Anti-gravity is not a
In Manifold Garden, the game envi-ronment repeats itself such that play-ers who fall from a platform fall into another instance of the same struc-ture
The Stanley Parable
Ode to the Moon
Manifold Garden
Superliminal
The Zium Garden 2017
The Zium Garden 2018
Fez
Certain objects when picked up can be moved towards or away from the player, but when placed back down, scale to the size as the player had viewed them, enabling the player to solve puzzles to complete the game.
Some boxes contain a room with door to other place, the size of room inside the box is apparently bigger than the box, some are even infinitive.
A virtual museum which presented by a game engine brings new experience of visiting. The image to the right shows colourful bubbles are flying like wind blowing flowers, the expe-rience of walking through such space is abso-lutely exclusive.
One side material of the surface makes it pos-sible to visit exhibition from a ever pospos-sible perspective.
How to drink a cup of coffee in the virtual world? Why is there always has a cafe in the museum?
Maybe it’s because existence is more essen-tial than function.
A magic makes the two dimension world became a three dimension one. Here it extended to another three side of the box. How does the creature living in 2 dimension space feel when they come to a 3 dimen-sion space.
Some exclusive interactive exhibition as the Zium Museum 2017. They changing their form based on your moving speed.
The moving inflatable tube men dancing like crazy there. The artiest made it so hard to make them look like been driven by the air like the real tube men. However we totally understand that they are driven by animation techniques in game engine.
X2
Monument Valley P.T. Antichamber
Antichamber Voi The Stanley Parable
Impossible Spaces I
Loop/Infinitive Space
X2
Antichamber Antichamber P.T.
Impossible Spaces III
Counter-intuition
Voi Monument Valley Impossible Spaces IIOptical Illusions
Ode to Moon Monument Valley Impossible Spaces IIOptical Illusions
Ode to Moon Monument ValleyImpossible Spaces III
Space Overlapping
Antichamber Antichamber Voi Impossible Spaces IIOptical Illusions
Ode to Moon Monument ValleyThe Jesuit church of Sant’ignazio
St Aengus Church
Space hiding in the walls
Only optical illusions(Using skills of perspective) are applied to build ‘impossible space’ in the real world. And I found it is less interesting. So I
Optical trick
Painting Space
Galleria spada
Untitled (Horizontal Sliding)
Using perspective trick to make a video that
shows a ‘infinitive long corridor’.
Virtual Space: Games, Movies Or Even Google Map Street View
Death Stranding
Sansar is a social virtual reality platform developed and owned by the San Francisco-based firm Linden Lab and launched in “creator beta” to the general public on July 31, 2017.[1] The platform enables user-created 3D spaces where people can create and share interactive social experiences, such as playing games, watching videos, and having conversations in VR. Each participant is represented by a detailed avatar that is the graphical representation of the user including speech-driven facial animations and motion-driven body animations.
Eve Online (stylised EVE Online) is a space-based, persistent world massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) developed and published by CCP Games. Players of Eve Online can participate in a number of in-game professions and activities, including mining, piracy, manufacturing, trading, exploration, and combat (both player versus environment and player versus player).
The key to sustaining EVE Online's community -- which has 300,000 monthly active-users, around the same number of residents as Petursson's native Iceland -- for so long has been about recognising and facilitating the ingenuity of its players.
The game is renowned for its scale and complexity with regards to player interactions – in its single, shared game world, players engage in unscripted economic competition, warfare, and political schemes with other players. The Bloodbath of B-R5RB, a battle involving thousands of players in a single star system, took 21 hours and was recognized as one of the largest and most expensive battles in gaming history. Eve Online was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art with a video including the historical events and accomplishments of the playerbase.
Second Life is an online virtual world, developed and owned by the San Francisco-based firm Linden Lab and launched on June 23, 2003. It saw rapid growth for some years and in 2013 it had approximately one million regular users;[1] growth stabilised and by the end of 2017 active user count had declined a little to "between 800,000 and 900,000".[2] In many ways, Second Life is similar to massively multiplayer online role-playing games; nevertheless, Linden Lab is emphatic that their creation is not a game: "There is no manufactured conflict, no set objective".[3]
Virtual Space: Exhibition
This is an exhibition hosted in ArkDes at 19 September - 18 November 2018. "Shaped by the practice and conceptual lens of Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg, creative directors of the London-based architecture studio Space Popular, this installation articulates a direction for architecture which interfaces with cognitive science, colour theory, and the spectacular possibilities laid before us at the dawn of an imminent, immersive virtual reality."
Currently, architectural spaces are typically envisioned for imagined users. And yet, if we believe that designed spaces can also design us in return, architects and designers should draw design criteria from within the experiencing mind of the inhabitants of virtual environments. This would have the effect of turning the conventional design process inside out. Design languages would be applicable and shared across both physical and virtual realities, and their designers could consider a new role that blends the creation and curation of architectural content, imaging spaces that retain their characteristics in physical and virtual worlds alike.
Virtual Architecture, Actual Meida
By N. Katherine Hayles and Todd Gannon
Technology, Virtuality, Materiality
By Antonie Picon
Inroduction: Technology, Science and Virtuality
By Arie Graafland and Heidi Sohn
Society of the Spectacle
By Guy Debord
Translated by Black & Red, 1977
Simulacra and Simulation
By Jean Baudrillard
Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social
relation among people, mediated by images.”
“Tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it.”
"If architectural theory is at a crossroads, where revisions and redirections are required for its sustained development, if forcefully needs to take the limited scope and application of contemporary discourse into account and be prepared to fully engage the complexities of our present reality.
"Architecture, deeply entwined with digital media and necessarily attentive to social and cultural constructions, constitutes and ideal site from which to explore and intervene in the recursive feedback loops co-constitutive of materiality, contemporary subjectivity, and digital media.
"The exploration of vew domains like the nanoscale represents an Simulacra are copies that depict things that either had no
original, or that no longer have an original. Simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time.
Our current society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs