Kristjan Buckingham

Tentacular: The Agency of Speculative Fiction in Experiential Reality

Tentacular is a nonlinear interactive exploration of the agential capacity of media and the potentialities of speculative works, conveyed through a fictional narrative using AR-passthrough with a VR headset. Each pathway functions not as a branch of the story but as a tentacle with the agency to reach out and take hold of the user.The fictional premise sets up the context for why the user is putting on the headset and engaging with these interactions. The device is said to be a calibration process used to determine whether the user is a viable candidate for permanent implementation of Experiential Reality.What is reality, if not experience? Experiential Reality advances beyond the audiovisual elements of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality to activate other sensory responses and minimize the dissonance between the virtual and the user's experience of reality, all without the need to peer through a screen or wear an external device.