Built by — Bakken & Bæck
A technology-driven design studio based in Oslo, Bonn, Amsterdam, and London. We define, design, and develop all things digital, in no particular order. With solid expertise in a wide range of design disciplines, we believe we can bring any idea to life — no matter the complexity. One of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies 2020.
Spatial Embodiment is a technical prototype for an interactive system which would invite you to communicate with the space around you, just as you would to a human being. In this virtual reality (VR) experience, you can use gestures in combination with your voice to interact and communicate with your home and the objects within it in a natural and intuitive manner – making the virtual environment feel more familiar.
Unlike the two-dimensional (2D) interfaces of our phones, tablets and personal computers, the interface of immersive realities allow us to be physically 'present' in virtual environments. Here, we can walk, turn and look around, and use our whole bodies while doing so. That said, human gestures are freedoms of expression, which make them pretty subjective. Traditionally, computers are machines that don’t take lack of subjectivity too well, which makes training a computer to track gestures, recognise the intention expressed by them, and perform related tasks, a pretty messy affair.
To explore how gestures and voice work together in immersive environments, Bakken & Bæck organised a workshop that included a product designer, linguist, frontend developer and cross reality (XR) expert. It quickly became clear to them that their movements felt restricted by the existing hardware and current implementations, trends, and directions of spatial interaction systems. That’s when it became their mission to create a better interaction system for spatial embodied interaction.