Looking Outwards 08: The Creative Practice of an Individual

Eyeo 2019 – Mike Tucker from Eyeo Festival on Vimeo.

The speaker that I chose for this week’s LO is Mike Tucker. I watched the talk he gave “NEW DOORS OF PERCEPTION: EXPLORATIONS INTO MIXED REALITY” at Eyeo 2019. Mike Tucker is an Interactive Director, Designer & Developer, currently based in New York. He studied Graphic Design at Virginia Commonwealth University. For the last 5 years, Mike has been working at Magic Leap, a company focused on developing the future of Spatial Computing. His work mainly involves interactive arts and music, and his hope is to “encourage the next wave of spatial designers to question our expectations of media, and the opportunity we all have in designing a mixed reality future.”

At Eyeo, he talked about how he started his journey from graphic design to web design and then to VR and interactive art. His most recent work is Tónandi (means “tone spirit” in Icelandic), which is an interactive audio-visual experience where participants are within a virtual environment with a unique soundscape. The soundscape adapts to the current environment and changes based on the participant’s eyes, hands, and movement.

I really love this project because I think it really breaks the expectations of how a medium should be experienced. The way that sound is represented visually and the ability for people to touch and interact with “sound” is so incredible. It’s also very admirable because Mike talks about how they started from prototypes and experimented with different elements before developing the final product. It’s quite amazing to see his early explorations worked towards his current works. Furthermore, he broke down the different aspects of how they created perception and illusion, which includes head tracking, controllers, spatial sound, touch, eye gaze, and environment.

Mike presented his work by documenting the stages of development. He used a combination of images and videos to show his past projects and also various explorations. He also showed other creators’ projects that served as inspiration. It’s very interesting to see how the technology improved over the years. I can definitely learn from him by doing a better job of documenting my work process.