What is reality?
When you wake up in the morning, is it the first thing you see in your eyes? Is that your first glimpse of reality or have you always been conscience? Many people associate sight with their existence, but that is just one node of perception. My project attempts to create the reality of a national park using an old video game combining imagery with movement, experience, control, sound, and scale.
What?
Tribes 2 is an old video game that involved large maps and an "epic scale." After watching a fellow classmate recreate his apartment using a Half-Life editor, I was inspired to do a much more natural environment. I had just taken a trip to Big Bend and set out to recreate it armed with a map and some photos.
How?
Tribes 2 (www.tribes2.com) has an in game editor. While ideally I would give you a link to the game (I thought it was free to download), no website is hosting it for download. A video of gameplay is planned, however there are multipel technical errors to work around. One of the reasons this game was unsucessful was due to the gliches involved. In creating my map I had to engineer several work arounds, however some tasks can be quite daunting.
Therefore, I can only retell what I did and include images and sounds of Big Bend that appeared in some form in my project. Below is a photo/sound mosiac, click on the image to hear sounds featured in my virtual soundscape.
What does it all mean?
In final form, I made an object from my trip that is more memorable than a picture or a sound. Inside the map, I am experiencing and hearing it real time. As I move so does my perception. Is a pixalated game giving me more reality than a photograph of the actual content?
Further research will include what creates the strongest memory and which combinations prove especially useful. For instance, is a real photograph more memorable than a colorful drawing with sound?