This article was first published in the July 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online
Universal Assembly Unit is transforming Britain's rural corners into an interactive digital landscape. The multi-disciplinary artists -- William Gowland, Samantha Lee, Oliviu Lugojan-Ghenciu and Zhan Wang – explore spatial design by creating multiplatform virtual artworks. "A lot of our projects look for ways to connect familiar physical experiences with new, virtual ones," says cofounder Samantha Lee, 26. "We're interested in technologies that redefine the ways we can experience space."
To create the piece Datum Explorer (pictured), the team took a 3D LiDaR laser scanner and binaural recording equipment to map woodlands in Great Park Farm, East Sussex. They then combined the data set with a game engine to create a virtual woodland -- with the addition of once-native animals, such as wild bears (inset). "It's a response to the increase in simulated environments and immersive virtual realities such as Oculus Rift and augmented reality," explains Lee. "We wanted to show this in a different context, take it away from the gaming industry and explore new ways of defining nature and our relationship with technology." The result is a ghostly-looking habitat where point clouds, created by the scanning process, become the defining aesthetic. The raw visual data becomes a digital material imbued with its own poetry. "When you walk through the virtual forest the points start to disappear," says Lee.
The piece, showing at the Sónar+D festival in Barcelona, June 18-20, can be explored as an immersive installation projected on to multiple walls, and as a PC and smartphone app. "As an experience it adds another level to what one would feel in the physical world," explains Lee. "It's not about mimicking nature, but creating new ones."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
