RŪMI Master Thesis
RŪMI is Julian's master's thesis in the Information Design programme at the Technische Hochschule Würzburg-Schweinfurt, Faculty of Design, supervised by Prof. Erich Schöls and Prof. Claudia Frey. The name comes from the Old High German rūmi, meaning wide and spacious. The thesis asks how narration and atmosphere can be designed within virtual space, at a time when museums increasingly experiment with digital and immersive formats. Its practical part is a VR application for the Oculus Quest in which visitors alter the perceived atmosphere of a place through three parameters: time, the seen and the heard. The theoretical frame draws on theories of space, immersion and memory, against which the design can be tested.
Museums are going digital, and the role of their objects shifts with them. Since the New Museology the individual artefact has receded behind its context, and since the spatial turn space itself counts as a narrative medium that guides visitors through a staging. For Julian, virtual reality is the latest stage of that medium. From this follows the thesis’s guiding question, the appropriate handling of narration in virtual space. To answer it, the theoretical part first clarifies how people experience space. It connects spatial theory from Flusser, Lefebvre and Bollnow with Gernot Böhme’s notion of atmosphere and Aleida Assmann’s reflections on place as a medium of memory.
The practical work began broadly, between web-based augmented reality and first experiments in virtual reality. The decision to study the effect of virtual spaces alone led to a reduction to VR, since mixed formats made undisturbed observation harder. The experiments produced a matrix of design parameters that can be set differently in the virtual than in the real, among them gravity, the flow of time and scale. Of these parameters, atmosphere moved to the centre, controllable through the three sensually tangible quantities of time, the seen and the heard. The hardware was the cable-free Oculus Quest, the engine Unreal Engine version 4.26.
The design places two locations on the same coordinate, a natural forest and an urban dwelling, whose contrast struck Julian on walks around Würzburg during the pandemic. Both can be faded in and out, set within a foggy, seemingly endless space whose mist both veils and reveals. The experience is controlled through four spheres on a ring at the virtual hip. The time sphere moves the position of the sun and the distortion of time, the sound sphere mixes the volume and reverberation of the two soundscapes, the sight sphere regulates the visibility and radius of the places, and the connection sphere lays and uncovers the traces of earlier users. This creates an asynchronous form of participation without any network technology.
RŪMI does not answer its opening question conclusively but invites the user to explore the relationship between space, object, sound and time. Its design yield lies in showing that atmosphere is a designable phenomenon in the virtual as well, and that the familiar rules of body, gravity and time do not hold there by default. For the design of virtual worlds this means extending one’s own toolset by a dimension. RŪMI understands itself as an entry point that designers of virtual worlds can use as a starting place for their own projects.