So this is pretty much the most cyberpunk description of a video game ever:Bad Trip is an immersive interactive system that enables people to navigate my mind using a game controller.
Since November 2011, every moment of my life has been logged by a video camera that mounts on my eyeglasses, producing an expanding database of digitalized visual memories. Using custom virtual reality software, I design a virtual mindscape where people can navigate and experience my memories and dreams. The mindscape grows continually as fresh memories and dreams come in.That’s how Alan Kwan describes ‘Bad Trip’, his macabre video game-in-progress, on the trailer’s Vimeo page.Egomaniacal? Sure—welcome to my mindscape, people of earth. Undeniably fascinating? Also yes. Kwan just an interview with TechInAsia, and he shed some light on the project. On the project’s genesis:I purchased a cheap HD camera from eBay and modified it a bit so that it could be easily rigged to any glasses as a lifelogging video camera. Since then I have started lifelogging, recording what I've seen and heard everyday, on a 10-hour-a-day basis.
About a month later I started to think about ways of archiving this huge amount of video files … I then come out with an idea of storing these virtual memories spatially in a 3D virtual world. Therefore I started to build the software Memory Palace, which is something like SimCity plus iPhoto, in which users could build their own virtual world to store their personal memories, or in other words, they become the architect of their virtual mind. After I finished the software I used the same engine to develop Bad Trip, in which I act as the architect to design my virtual mind, and other people are invited to navigate inside …
In the virtual world of Bad Trip I do not only store my memories, but also some of my dreams. Sometimes if I remember anything from a dream, I would do quick 3D modeling and texturing to create the scenes in my dream, and put them inside Bad Trip. I am always trying to create a digital clone of my mind in this project.Now, I almost think it’d be more interesting if Kwan built the entire architecture out of the recorded images he collected; that seems more surreal to me than the nightmarish images he renders from his imagination.Then again, we haven’t “played” the thing yet, so we’ll see. Kwan says that he’s going to release Bad Trip as a free download early next year, so “people from all over the world would be able to literally navigate my mind through the internet.” We’re looking forward to it, Kwan. Let’s get weird.
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