Space!

Five March about space perceptions comparing real space with the simulated space of Second Life.
When we are young we are told that our 3D space can be represented by drawing a nice renaissance perspective. Before this knowledge children tend to draw like old paintings of the Middle Ages or before, thinking in a sort of not logically ordered space. That this ‘not rational’ space is often more effectively telling its story is often forgotten….
No just as a calculation, space representation should be “right”.
This so-called Renaissance perspective is founded in a beautiful section of Mathematics called projective geometry. This is how we experience space and we tend to think that this method of representing space is the only possibility or the only way. This construction of lines is indeed space!
Small mistake!
When you study experience of space you quickly notice that there is more.
Our brain uses much more kinds of sensorial data from which information about space is gathered, putting all these data together in something which is far from logical, but very effective.
First of all, painters not only followed perspective but also introduced colors changes to indicate space, for instance changing to bluish or grayish in the distance, and bright colors are always used for objects near to us. Objects at a distance are of course also blurred more than objects nearby. These tricks of the trade doe not belong to “renaissance perspective”!
And then there is shadow. Nobody has ever included this in his theory of space perceptions!
(Except for probably Goethe.) It is never fundamentally included in the 3D programs. But shadow is so important for the positioning of a shape in space, in relation to surrounding objects. A table is only feebly standing in space without a subtle shadow on the floor.
All because we don’t have absolute information about the scaling of objects.
Even more important and nearly never realized in software are the reflections and the reflected light of objects being close to each other in space. Faces of people nearly always show signs of reflected light from things surrounding them.
Next:
Even sound and echo is used by the brain to add to our sensorial experience of space. That’s why sound is so important in the movies, defining space and at the same time conveying information about the emotional character and significance of a shot.
In Second Life we have a clear-cut almost too sharp perspective space. Reflected light is absent, being of course too complicated to be calculated. Sound is used, although on a simple level. Nice is the sound while flying, related to the speed.
Sound of steps, while walking and even a Doppler effect is sometimes heard. The typing on the keyboard, varying in volume depending on the distance of the ‘talk’ comes in handy from time to time, to find out if somebody is talking to us.
At the same time these effects can be so like caricatures that the user cannot stop making funny remarks about them….
On Virgin Island some interested examples of the use of shadow can be seen: not only the shadow on the ground under a tree, a parasol or a ‘shade’, but also the shadow as a transparent solid shape can be found for instance under a roof of a shed on the middle mountain.
The shade here is not only a blurred picture on the floor, but even a solid black rectangular block, put on a certain degree of transparency.
This solid shape, clear-cut as it is, adapts itself beautifully to the character of Second Life and the special theme of the sim, being dedicated to the Wild West desert. Added to this is “solid” light shining through windows of a deserted saloon.
Another phenomenon of space found in this desert is the abandoned railway track, giving a vanishing point in the distance and adding much to the experience of space in the sim.
Somehow the space of the plane is only really perceived when the eye is guided by this mathematically ordered and disappearing abandoned rail track. The last phenomenon is the component of the vanishing perspective we almost never experience: height and depth, making a hole in the sim is impossible, what is possible is making a very sharp cliff, with textures almost tearing apart….
And where do you think all these pictures are taken? In the desert of Virgin Island, of course, and the expert of shadows is Amiryu Hosoi!