Beyond Mimesis: Extensive VR Design in the SHARED Case Study

A substantial portion of the recent academic output on extended reality (XR) in the arts remains firmly anchored in a mimetic paradigm in which virtual reality (VR) is treated primarily as a digital replica of pre-existing artefacts or contexts—especially in the cultural-heritage domain. SHARED is a transdisciplinary research-creation project—an interactive artwork that integrates musical gesture, adaptive sound, generative visuals, and transformable materials across three linked configurations—and positions itself as a critical antithesis to that stance: here VR is embraced as an emancipatory medium able to overcome the spatial, temporal, and performative constraints that traditionally circumscribe musical and installation based art forms. The work unfolds in three functionally equivalent configurations—instrumental performance, interactive installation, and multi-user VR environment—integrated into a cohesive interactive system that captures user gestures, parses their features, transcodes these, and returns the result as multimodal feedback. The paper presents the VR version as a proof-of-concept of collaborative embodied interaction and reports qualitative findings from a fourteen-participant pilot study (May 2025), and sketches the roadmap toward a public release. Preliminary qualitative feedback suggests that participants experienced a strong sense of presence and agency—albeit not yet measured with standardised questionnaires; the absence of significant issues is consistent with the prototype status of the project. The contribution is twofold: (i) a replicable workflow for translating an artwork grounded in its physical materials into VR without subsuming it to a reductive digital simulacrum; (ii) methodological reflections on agile co-design between artists and engineers in XR contexts.