Designing impossible architecture in VR is changing how Andreea Ion Cojocaru designs real buildings, and she’s reveling in the fact that she finally has a tool with VR to be able to explore some of the deeper philosophical questions about the nature of spatial design and architecture that have previously been impossible to feasibly explore. These research questions include the difference between quantities and qualities, including (i.e. Why is the abstraction and blueprint of a building different than an embodied experience of it?), how does changing where you are change who you are?, and how can architecture incorporate insights from math, music, bodies moving through space, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty phenomenological philosophy?
Cojocaru is a founding partner, technical, and creative lead of NUMENA Virtual Reality Architects, which designs both virtual and real spaces. They won VR Now’s VR Industry award for their B. Braun Aesculap Spine VR experience, which had an amazing piece of speculative architecture where you were floating through microscopic bone structures as a climax to the medical VR marketing and training experience.
Cojocaru has lots of insights about what VR designers and 3D modelers can learn from architects for how to design immersive spaces, and she’s a deep thinking about the potentials for how VR can help elucidate the quality of our experience relative to the world around us and as a result transform the concepts of our own identity and sense of “what’s possible” and what “reality” actually is.
LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE OF THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
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Music: Fatality
