Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges

Space in virtual reality engenders an embodied spatiality anchored on movement, temporality, and liminality. Worlding in virtual reality can be a trans-media method that expresses and articulates curious relationships between space and its mediation on social events. Through the creation of VRChat-based world Klein Room and the hosting of the Dream Sharing event, we discuss the special properties and potentials of architecture and space in virtual reality, and explore the extent to which social VR enacts social interaction and intimate group sharing. Klein Room is composed using the everyday architectural language of room, corridor, and door, but it is designed with sensitivity to their highly non-neutral embodied spatio-temporal significance, resulting in an interior space that maps a cogent lived spatiality of the visitor to a non-Euclidean space contingent on its virtuality. The paradoxicality of Klein Room pairs with subconscious aspects of dream, and a spirit of playfulness is instilled in the innovative exploration in this spatially staged social VR. Interior space as the most inhabited architectural space has primarily mediated social relations and interactions. Partition walls and interior thresholds not only form exclusive boundaries and access points in practical function but also set up role awareness of insiders and outsiders and expectations of the level of intimacy in the space-user’s social interaction, the latter of which is transferable across virtual reality, with the former acting as a cue. Research indicates that social VR participants under the anonymity of interacting as avatars could translate into increased openness for new involvement in social activities otherwise difficult. Through the creation of a paradoxical non-Euclidean space that evokes subconscious aspects of dreams while retaining playfulness, we aim to investigate the extent of the potential social enaction of intimacy and group involvement. We investigate through the method of a host-moderated Dream Sharing event in the VR space, Klein Room.