Our last project seidesein investigated the notion of touch in virtual spaces. d-room is continuing this investigation. As in seidesein , we try to reformulate conceptions and metaphors of human communication into virtual space. For example talking about couture and suggesting each other to dress in such and such a way is a mean to care about the body of the other, it means to "touch" the other body in a metaphorical way.
Using paper dolls is to touch one´s own appearance, it means to play with an in vitro personality. However being with others in a dressing room often rather creates an unpleasant feeling. The body is exposed and actual bodies are rather close to each other. This is also a form of mutual "touch" in a metaphoric sense. How does this experience translate to virtual space? With d-room we want to experiment with all these notions. By construction this will be a collaborative effort.
d-room is intented to run as a Java Webstart application. We explicitly want the dolls to be rigid (besides the arms, see also vitruman ) and not moving as in video games. I.e. the paper doll association is intended to be blatant. However we would like to include features to enforce also the avatar association like e.g. by video streaming of user faces onto the faces of the dolls. We used videostreaming in seidesein and in egopong. It allows for a rather strong identification with the virtual avatars. The technical realization is no technical problem per se but more a problem of performance. Another additional feature would be the application of 2D processing applets to the graphical primitives/clothes, which would allow for fancy visual output. The inclusion of processing is also no technical problem but again unfortunately very performance intensive. So our proposal is without these additional "wants". However we will try to incorporate them.
(Note: References, time span and price are omitted in this public version of the original d-room proposal)