The very concept of space became the actual interface to the music and sound in Camera Musica. Virtual reality was used for what it can do best and not for mimicking reality. The old dream of looking and moving through walls—something usually avoided by all means in virtual environments—became a central idea of the piece. In an immersive display, where we can actually sense the presence of virtual objects, we can also experience penetrating objects and being penetrated by them. We move through walls, and planes cut through our body (even the most extreme case of a plane cutting right through the middle of our head, so that one eye sees one side of the plane and the other eye the other side, can be experienced).

Description of the Work
Camera Musica is an immersive virtual environment in which the audience explores a musical space. This space is visually defined by a simple virtual architecture. The effortless visual orientation in this architecture is the basis for the navigation through the music. Visitors are visually and auditorily immersed in this space, which they navigate with their body movements and by means of a hand-held steering wand. The Camera Musica virtual environment is displayed stereoscopically in a surround-screen display system (e.g. a CAVE). The music is created in reaction to the visitor’s movements. It is projected on an 8-channel spatial sound system. Tactile feedback is produced by an active vibration floor. Subsonic vibrations are perceived through feet and legs.

In Camera Musica the visitors freely float through spaces delimited by partially transparent cubes, some of them producing sounds when traversed by the head, others marking auditory regions in the soundscape composition. This is how the body becomes an index in the composition, allowing for a direct experience of formal openness. Whereas the head is the reference for the rendering of the visual and auditory scene, the role of the hand is to navigate and interact with the virtual objects. All objects are surrounded by invisible force fields which—as long as they are in equilibrium—keep them in a stable position. The user’s hand holding the navigation wand disturbs this equilibrium by its own force fields attached to the wand’s 6-degree-of-freedom sensor. This is how the hand attracts and repulses the other objects and interacts with them through the kinetic simulation which it becomes part of. This form of interaction highly increases the sense of presence, because the environment reacts plausibly to the behavior of the visitor. Camera Musica plays with the different forms of this type of interaction acknowledging the presence of the visitor.