In Angela Riecher’s text “The Virtual Frontier”, she warns against the unease readers may experience when engaging with virtual reality text. When reading in a traditional way, our gaze typically remains fixed while our eyes move across the words. To that end, I propose a series of questions: What happens when this process is interrupted with unexpected variables? What happens when we have to look at text on an angle that we’re not accustomed to? Most importantly, what if text lived in its own world, and we were merely visitors?
Working in Maya and Unity, I investigated what happens to the experience of reading when typography introduces elements of dynamics and physics to study the effect of motion and movement on reading in virtual reality. In my environment, the user navigates a foreign world entirely comprised of typography. manifesting as living elements. Text lives in text amongst text, functioning in miniature ecological systems. It is no longer a passive element on a page, but instead a kinetic element that is living within the world.
