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The Waterfall World was the most technically challenging of the Three Worlds. Ultimately we were unable to implement the complex esthetic of designer Rachel Strickland, who was inspired by Chinese landscape painting and elements of Constructivism, and instead used a much simpler model, a wireframe that matched the actual topography of a real waterfall at Johnson Canyon near Banff (with a 2x vertical exaggeration).
In implementing the Waterfall World, we wanted to give a strong sensory impression of flow - both visually, and acoustically. We used a 30 frame movie loop projected on to the wireframe which graphically showed water flowing downhill, and we used four audio recording of real waterfalls, spatialized with Convolvotrons, to simulate the waterfalls' expanse of sound, giving a very strong "sense of place".
The Waterfall World was participants' favorite of the Three Worlds, in part because so many people enjoyed embodied as Crow enjoyed soaring about the Waterfall, even buzzing down the flow of the water and zooming out along the stream at the base of the Waterfall, where the other participant would be in the Magic Circle, embodied as a non-flying Critter... this sometimes lead to pleadings to the Goddess to force body-swapping!
You can see some of what participant's saw in the Waterfall World in these
VR Framegrabs, and you can listen to
the
story seeds for the Waterfall World, and you can watch a movie of audio field recording.
