Page 17 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

Introduction
Literature, theater, and later cinema, have always had the ability to transport the reader or the spectator to a different place, recreating land- scapes, cities or ambiences, taking them briefly into a different reality. This innate capacity of artistic creation, supported in some cases by bril- liant set designs or location works, is enhanced and raised to unimaginable levels by technology.
For example, the power of cinema, long a win- dow to the world for many people [Martínez], was enhanced by special effects, the set of techniques and artifices used in filmmaking
to create the appearance of reality in certain scenes. Computer generated images have been used in special effects since 1973 [Stinson] and, along with advances in computer technology, opened the door to new ways to transport audiences and immerse them in a fictional world. Special effects are now designed using virtual reality, a fact recently recognized by Hollywood, which awarded a special Oscar to Alejandro G. Iñárritu for the installation Carne y arena.
The evolution of the creative potential of au- diovisuals, the emergence of three-dimensional, or 3D, systems, the explosion of virtual reality, and the widespread availability of the necessary consumer equipment, has opened up an experi- mental field for audiovisual artists with countless areas of application. The first, videogames, is very dynamic and certainly the backbone of digital creativity, but with the digital transforma- tion of many traditional environments, it is open to becoming a differentiating factor.
This new flourishing ecosystem of “immersive creativity,” to coin a phrase, is the subject of this article, which aims to provide a broad view of this environment, from the technology involved to its application in certain fields in which it is gradually increasing in importance.
What is meant by “immersive” environment?
In Spanish, the expressions entorno virtual inmersivo and realidad virtual
are literal, and to some extent creative, transla- tions of the Anglo-Saxon expressions “immersive virtual environment” and “virtual reality” (VR), and refer to the fictional and artificial world to which a person is subjected by means of external devices that recreate images, videos, sounds and tactile sensations, etc. These elements allow the user to interact in some way with this virtual world, as with three-dimensional movement in the environment, with the view of the recreated world being updated by the user’s own move- ments and interaction with the objects in this environment [Blascovich].
Fig 1. Basic equipment in VR applications [ElMundo]
Neither the adjective inmersivo nor the noun inmersividad appear in the official Real Academia Española [RAE] Spanish dictionary. However, inmersión does, and it is defined in one sense
as the “action and effect of entering or being entered into a real or imaginary environment.” This makes us think that perhaps we should use the expression entornos de inmersión (immersion environments) instead of entornos inmersivos (immersive environments) to refer to the systems and devices that allow us to submerge or intro- duce ourselves into an imaginary environment. Similarly, the phrase “high or high immersion devices” might be preferable to “immersive or
AC/E DIGITAL CULTURE ANNUAL REPORT 2018
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Digital Trends in Culture