Tag: Art

Paying a Return Visit to Occupy White Walls: What’s New

I’ve been away from Occupy White Walls for quite some time, so tonight I decided to pay a return visit to see what’s up.

Occupy White Walls (OWW for short) is a niche virtual world, which gives you the tools to build your own art gallery, and curate your own personal collection of artwork. I have written about it several times in the past on my blog, and I had started on an ambitious renovation project for my own gallery, which unfortunately got abandoned as I got pulled away to cover other social VR/virtual worlds. (Call it an occupational hazard!)

I had gotten as far as building one large wall for my prize work of art, The Last Judgement by Michelangelo:

But the rest of my gallery is still pretty much empty at this point. So I decided to spend a little time, wander around, get lost, and visit a few of the recommended galleries from their official Discord server, particularly in their Cool Galleries channel:

The whiterabbit gallery in Occupy White Walls

Some people have even gone so far as to build multiple galleries to house separate wings of their art collections!

Among other news, there is now a separate website called Kultura where you can browse the ever-growing collection of art available for you to decorate your gallery. You can buy the wonderful soundtrack. There’s also a new contest, where you are asked to build something cool using the newest assets from their version 6.0 “State of Mind” update. (You can see the winners of their last contest here.)

So, why not download the OWW software from Steam and do a little exploring, designing, and curating of your own? Best of all, it’s totally free! You can learn more about Occupy White Walls from their website, their Steam page, their user forums, their Discord server, or their social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, or Tumblr.

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SculptrVR: A Brief Introduction

SculptrVR is a multiscale, collaborative voxel sculpting tool, available for the Oculus Rift, Quest, and Go VR headsets, and PlayStation VR. The platform is also available on Steam.

Here’s a one-minute promotional video from YouTube:

There’s not a lot of info on their official website, so if you want to learn more about SculptrVR, you can follow them on Facebook or Twitter, or join their Discord server.

Yet another addition to my comprehensive list of social VR/virtual worlds!

MasterpieceVR: A Brief Introduction

MasterpieceVR is a professional 3D modeling tool for virtual reality, with the added bonus that you can work collaboratively in multiplayer mode:

The product appears to be a very powerful creative tool, as you can see from these samples of work created within MasterpieceVR:

You can see the complete gallery here. You can also see more MasterpieceVR creations on Sketchfab. Here’s a one-minute promotional video:

To find out more about MasterpieceVR, you can visit their website, where the company maintains a blog and a user forum. You can follow the company via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.

Another addition to my list of social VR/virtual worlds!

Bryn Oh Opens a New Artistic World in Sansar: “I See Our Movement As the Immersivists”

Canadian artist Bryn Oh (whose work in Second Life I have written about before) is opening a new art installation in Sansar on Friday, December 6th, 2019, on which she has been working over the past year, thanks to some financial assistance from the Ontario Arts Council.

Titled simply Hand, Bryn Oh describes the artwork as follows in a recent post to her blog:

Hand is the story of a girl named Flutter who carries something precious in a suitcase.  You follow her story in the same world that my others characters inhabit, and some of these you will recognize furthering their story and place within the world I have been working on for over a decade. 

Bryn created Hand to be best experienced in a VR headset, and she has some insightful observations on the use of virtual reality as an art form:

I believe that the virtual reality medium is a new art form which, in my case, focuses on immersion.  Throughout art history many artists have striven to immerse the viewer in their sculpture, painting or even cinema. They want you become lost in their artwork whether it be compositional methods such as the eyepath leading the viewer around a painting, to cinema where they turn off the lights, turn the sound up high with a screen large enough to reduce the peripheral vision distractions to a degree where the immersion is strongest. They overwhelm or control your senses, then tell you a story which, if well written, will take the viewer away from the world for a while.  We had the Cubists, Impressionists, Surrealists, Modernists and I see our movement as the Immersivists. 

Having been very impressed by Bryn’s art to date in both Second Life and Sansar, I look forward to experiencing her latest creation!

If you want to visit Hand, here is the Sansar Atlas entry for the world.