Ambrose Trataris Builds a VRChat World for Divination

Ambrose Trataris is building a VRChat world to host oracle readings. Virtual...Oracle, a work in progress, is the artist's first world for the platform, modeled in Blender, and is designed as a place where visitors can meet Trataris and other readers inside a cave, according to the project announcement.

New footage from the build moves from the outside in. It opens on a white cliff topped by a classical temple, with an arch cut through the rock above still water, then passes into the cave, where round portholes look out on a pink sky full of stars, bubbles and leaping dolphins. It ends on an ornate standing mirror. Trataris describes the project as bringing together "my love of magick with the multi dimensional medium of VR." No opening date has been announced.

Trataris works across mixed reality, dance and nightlife. Their 45-minute hybrid dance work Daisy-Chain<><><>Star-Connection premiered at Gray Area in San Francisco on Aug. 29, and Killscreen spoke with them about it. That piece dealt with a nightclub rebuilt inside a headset. Virtual...Oracle applies the same approach to divination: a practice that usually depends on sitting across from someone gets a purpose-built room on a social VR platform, where the reader and the visitor are both avatars.

VRChat worlds are user-made spaces that anyone on the platform can publish, and many of the most visited ones are social venues rather than games: clubs, galleries, meeting rooms. Virtual...Oracle adds a reading room to that list.

For more reading see Killscreen's interview with Trataris on Daisy-Chain<><><>Star-Connection, VRChat's documentation on how worlds are built and Trataris's ongoing documentation of the project.