VR Terroir

VR TERROIR challenges the standardization of digital culture by creating hyperlocal avatars that absorb and are shaped by their environments, carrying their “lived experiences” like terroir. The objective is to visualise how context (including data, textures, and local inputs) can alter a digital identity. Often, virtual representations of users in digital contexts are treated as static assets and limited to predictable and controllable formal and behavioural parameters that fit within the rigid walled gardens of the four big tech. VR Terroir achieves this by proposing systems that are rooted in their specific location, history, and context. The work is a video of a character going through an environment that is made by synthetic materials build with HLRS data and Stuttgart's physical environment. With this vision and approach, together with the Super Computing Center we developed a working prototype within the pipelines and constrains of HLRS, that opens a research direction for the creation of context-aware avatars.