Browsing by Author "Tucker, Thomas James"

Now showing 1 - 11 of 11
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    Bloom and Doom
    Li, Jiale (Virginia Tech, 2024-05-24)
    This thesis harnesses 3D modeling to present a contrasting world through Maya 3D models, Substance Painter textures, and Adobe's audio-visual editing tools. Influenced by my childhood experiences and cultural history, the project contrasts the natural environment with a polluted, urban landscape. The paper also discusses future expansions aiming to enhance interactivity and deepening the narrative on human environmental impact.
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    Fragmented Self
    Saxena, Shiven (Virginia Tech, 2023-07-09)
    As an artist, my work reflects my own life experiences, allowing me to reinterpret and process difficult events in a new light. Creating art is a therapeutic process for me, enabling me to explore and understand my past and my own Self. In line with James Baldwin's views, I believe that the duty of an artist is to provide their audience with an opportunity to rediscover themselves; to help them explore their inner selves. In my experience, to achieve that goal, the first and most important hurdle the artist needs to cross is exploring themselves. In the process of answering questions about their own selves, they can touch many other souls. In Fragmented Self, I employ composited 3D animations of my own body parts juxtaposed over still and moving images. Each body part and piece in Fragmented Self is a metaphorical representation of a specific experience I have lived through. The resulting pieces are meditative, surreal, and abstracted spaces that speak to the complexities of life experiences. I believe each body holds messages from the past, and in Fragmented Self, I disembody and fragment my own body to study and explore my own Self. Drawing inspiration from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass in which he proclaims, "I contain multitudes", I see my Self as a composite of various selves shaped by different life experiences coming together to form one Self. I believe that I am a constantly evolving individual, influencing my everyday encounters and choices. As in the Japanese tradition of Kintsugi, in Fragmented Self, I trace the gold lined cracks that unite my multitudinous selves into one in hopes of answering the question "What makes me who I am today?"
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    Investigating Interactivity and Storytelling in Immersive Virtual Reality for Science Education
    Zhang, Lei (Virginia Tech, 2022-01-19)
    Immersive and interactive storytelling in virtual reality (VR) is an emerging creative practice that has been thriving in recent years. Educational applications using immersive VR storytelling to explain complex science concepts have very promising pedagogical benefits because on the one hand, storytelling breaks down the complexity of science concepts by bridging them to people's everyday experiences and familiar cognitive models, and on the other hand, the learning process is further reinforced through rich interactivity afforded by the VR experiences. However, it is unclear how different amounts of storytelling and interactivity in an interactive VR storytelling experience may affect learning outcomes due to a paucity of literature on educational VR storytelling research. This dissertation aims to add to the literature through an exploration of interactivity and essential storytelling elements in educational VR storytelling experiences and their impact on learning. We designed a working prototype of interactive and immersive VR storytelling experience, Immunology VR, that focuses on the learning of specific immunology concepts: neutrophil transmigration and killing mechanisms. Based on the initial prototype, we further developed six variations that allowed us to conduct two major experiments below. Our first experiment explored designs of three different levels of interactivity, low, medium, and high, in the VR storytelling experiences and their effects on immunology learning. We found subjective evidence to support our research hypothesis that increased level of interactivity will lead to increased engagement in VR learning. Our finding suggests that interactivity is a key design element in VR learning design for effective learning and should be considered in all VR learning applications. Our second experiment focused on the designs of the level of storytelling richness and their effects on learning. Specifically, we designed three storytelling conditions, minimal storytelling, basic storytelling, and advanced storytelling, and investigated how each of them affected immunology learning. Subjective evidence from our user interview data suggested that participants from higher levels of storytelling conditions were more likely to perceive storytelling elements as the most useful features in the VR experience that helped with their learning. It is also suggested that higher levels of richness in essential storytelling elements may trigger certain emotions and empathy in more users and positively affect their learning.
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    Loci: Creative AR Visualization of Overlooked Narratives in Familiar Spaces
    Okoro, Joshua Oghenekevwe (Virginia Tech, 2024-06-25)
    This thesis explores the use of location-based augmented reality to transform our perception of the built environment. In the artwork, the historic Armory building in the Town of Blacksburg which serves as home to the School of Visual Arts (SOVA) at Virginia Tech is used as a locus of changing functions, social impact, and evolution. In this case, its history is used to creatively visualize the overlooked narrative in familiar spaces through augmented reality (AR) murals. AR is an artistic medium that unveils rich hidden histories, sparks conversation, and promotes deeper connection between people and places. I drew inspiration from contemporary artists such as Brian Peterson, the social narrative of the WPA mural initiative, and Kandinsky's vibrant abstract work. The project utilizes Google's ARCore framework in the Unity game engine as well as Google's Geospatial API with the aim to creatively reveal hidden narratives in places and promote positive social engagements.
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    Myco-scapes: Multispecies Entanglements in Artmaking
    Thornton, Eva Marie (Virginia Tech, 2024-06-25)
    Myco-scapes: Multispecies Entanglements in Artmaking is a body of ephemeral fiber sculptures. These weavings and digital fabrications are the result of collaborations with dynamic materials and other species, primarily fungi. The artworks (or artifacts) of the artist's material intra-actions explore the possibilities, challenges, and ethics of multispecies collaboration. Furthermore, in its ephemerality, Myco-scapes responds to the preventative conservation practices employed by art museums. Not only do these sculptures embody the fleeting nature of material entanglements, but they also challenge the capitalist structure of art collecting through their impermanence. The written thesis describes the artist's studio practice by exploring three primary influences: mycelium (the root-like structures of mushrooms), entanglements (the complex interwoven structures in which we exist), and preventative conservation (art-handling protocol designed to preserve artifacts).
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    No Person Detected
    Riley, Holly Jane (Virginia Tech, 2023-07-27)
    The collection of Victorian-themed wearables and accessories of  "No Person Detected" serves as an innovative solution to the issues surrounding biometric technology and the invasion of privacy. This wearable technology was designed to counteract the involuntary recording of an individual's unique biometric data through the use of body cameras and CCTV, which can be accessed by law enforcement and marketing companies. The technology represents a democratization of design ideas and collaboration that allows individuals to create adversarial fashion and provides a level of biometric protection. This thesis explores the potential of technological innovation and collaboration to result in a more privacy-conscious society, one where individuals can take control of their personal data and protect themselves against the dangers of biometric tracking. The convergence of fashion, technology, and design has the potential to revolutionize how we approach privacy in a digital age, and "No Person Detected" represents an exciting step towards that future.
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    Orientation Device
    Shokhov, Nikita (Virginia Tech, 2022-09-13)
    Orientation Device is a tool for understanding the other towards recognizing alternative possibilities, for care and compassion, for expanding our culturally and politically bounded mindset, a tool of vital nausea and questioning compulsory heterosexuality. The work is a series of augmented reality (AR) experiences for mobile device that allow the audience to participate in documentary queer performances in any private or public setting. These immersive experiences challenge our perception of space. The LGBTQIA+ community is often disoriented within heteronormative spaces, and this work reverses that dichotomy by disorienting the audience. As a cisgender creator, I invite queer performers, artists, poets, and thinkers who express their identity in their creative practices. As the AR medium is widely distributable, I want to give the participants the potential opportunity to present themselves to a wide international audience through the poetics of augmented reality and documentary video holograms.
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    Past, Present, Future
    Kimbangu, Rodney Bidi (Virginia Tech, 2023-07-27)
    Past, Present, Future is an immersive and interactive art installation that seeks to put displaced Congolese and African artwork - commonly displayed in world museums - into their original cultural context. The exhibit's immersive experience sheds light on the colonial exploitation of African peoples and their lifestyles: specifically the expropriation of lived African spiritual and artistic expressions. These artifacts - sometimes stolen outright, sometimes obtained through imbalanced terms of trade, and sometimes obtained by fair bargain - often appear in exhibits as disembodied objects devoid of explanation or reinterpreted through the conceptions of the exploiters. This phenomenon has historically supported the consciousness of colonialism and now of post- and neo-colonialism, maintaining its propagation through museums, schools, and other institutions worldwide. The exhibition is composed of a virtual environment in addition to projection mapping. The visual, aural, and interactive elements engage with and challenge the viewer's culturally conditioned ways of thought regarding artwork "consumption." This thesis, building on the exhibition, examines the possibilities of employing evolving technology and coding toward the long-term task of "softly" repatriating displaced artifacts while starting a conversation about physical repatriation and providing a model that Congolese scholars and artists can use to preserve and reclaim their cultural heritage.
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    Same Shit, Different Day
    Deisa, Eva (Virginia Tech, 2023-07-21)
    "Same Shit, Different Day" is a collection of three VR installations portraying short, looping animations. I am exploring routines and patterns I find myself and the people around me in to draw attention to the ways in which we mindlessly go through motions in our everyday life.
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    The Story Art and Tech
    Chung, Youn Hee (Virginia Tech, 2023-07-27)
    The Story Art and Tech merges storytelling and technology together to elucidate the animated filmmaking process for readers who are interested in animation. The author's path to animation director is traced from beginning to end starting with writing ideas and moving on to forming storyboards and animatics to completing animations for the screen. Two 3D short animated films and three storyboards with animatics are presented. A storyboard primarily shows the audience the thought process of storytelling; it previsualizes a script or an idea. It is then narrated into moving images called animatics; a preliminary version of a film. Animatics are important references for animators to animate shots and characters. Eventually the rest of the animation pipeline makes it into a final product: an animated film. As an artist who writes stories and animates them with 3D technology, presenting how a storyboard is made into an animated film is the most immediate way to inform the audience of this process with entertaining stories. In this paper, an extended discussion of the author's creative thought and development processes are presented with two distinct parts: storytelling and technology.
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    Transitions Of Light
    Corrigan, Nicholas Aaron (Virginia Tech, 2022-06-22)
    My work attempts to articulate how the format visual information is presented in changes our understanding of the visual information and our relationship to it. I explore analog and digital conversions, the audio and the visual sharing 3 dimensional space, and explore our relationship with screens, information and light. This paper discusses the ideas and underlying themes within my digital works that center around light as a form of information and communication. My work is also related to the transformation of technology that has occurred across many platforms throughout my lifetime. The most striking example is the telephone. The telephone has transitioned from an analog device on the wall that we speak into, to the phone we know today; a computer we carry around in our pocket with a screen we communicate through. This transformation of technology has changed our daily lives in ways past generations only dreamt of. We no longer log on or go online. We are always connected to a network of information, individuals and communities by an endless live stream of data. We live in an information super age, where we have access to nearly the entirety of knowledge humans have been able to acquire. Whether by reading by candle light, or a collection of pixels in the form of a screen, we use light to communicate all of these ideas and information. Social media, global positioning systems and on demand services have reached a point where our actions and nearly everything around us is tied to a computational system. My work attemps to bring this computational system into our physical space, where it can be acknowledged in the form of light and sound.