Life is Beautiful. Always: Using virtual reality to share the experience of disability

This paper discusses 'Life is Beautiful. Always.'; a virtual reality (VR) experience created as part of an ongoing research collaboration between practitioners in film and experiential design and multi-disciplinary expressionist artist, Marcel Schreur. Incorporating extracts from recorded interviews, 3D capture of Schreur's studio, painting and sculpture, original pieces of 3D sculpture work created within VR by Schreur, motion capture, 3D animation, randomisation and user responsiveness, the experience generates a cyclical, non-linear narrative that explores Schreur's unique life experience and approach to art practice as a thirty year oral cancer and seven year vascular dementia survivor. Developed through an iterative process of interviews, prototyping and personal responses from Schreur, the work generates a space that allows participants to consider aspects of their own mental process through a lens of difference and disability, to embody some of the physical characteristics of Schreur’s condition and to help facilitate communication about the experience of living with life-altering disability between sufferers, non-sufferers and medical professionals. The creative process has enabled Schreur and collaborators to develop a shared conceptual framework with which to understand and communicate core physical, mental and emotional aspects of Schreur’s condition and the impact this has on his life and art. This feeds into a broader research project that questions the use of VR as a platform to translate and communicate experience, and how this may be used to problematise and encourage dialogue on the relationships between self, environment, presence, memory and experience.