Char Davies

Char Davies (born 1954) is a Canadian artist known for two early immersive virtual reality artworks, Osmose (1995) and Ephémère (1998), in which a participant wearing a stereoscopic head-mounted display moves through luminous forest landscapes by breathing and shifting balance. A painter by training, she joined the Montreal 3D software company Softimage in the mid-1980s, became a founding director, and led its visual research before founding her own company, Immersence Inc., in 1998.

Osmose was produced at Softimage in 1994 and 1995 and first shown at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal in August 1995. Its interface used sensors that measured the tilt of the participant's spine and the expansion of the chest, so that breathing in raised the participant, breathing out lowered them, and leaning changed direction, an approach inspired by Davies's experience of scuba diving. Davies prefers to call the participant an "immersant." Both works were later restored to run on a modern PC with an HTC Vive headset, and the restored versions were exhibited in Copenhagen in 2022.

Reviewed 4 October 2026. Biography, Softimage roles, awards, Osmose and Ephemere design, hardware, exhibitions and 2013-2016 restoration checked against Immersence pages, the Langlois Foundation bio, the 1996 ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics paper (DOI via Crossref), Davies's 1995/1998 papers, ISEA archive, UVic honorary list, Wired 1996, Glen Fraser's blog and Fotografisk Center. About review dates.

Early life and education

According to the Daniel Langlois Foundation, Davies was born in Toronto, Ontario, in 1954. She studied at Bennington College in Vermont from 1973 to 1975 and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Victoria in British Columbia in 1978. Her official biography says she began as a painter in the forests of British Columbia. In a 1998 paper she wrote that she started in the mid-1970s as a representational painter working in photo-realism, and that exploring her own extreme myopia led her toward images of "enveloping space filled with ambiguous volumes of luminosity." By the mid-1980s she had given up painting for 3D computer graphics, because the flat picture plane could not represent enveloping space.

Davies later carried out doctoral research at CAiiA (Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts). ISEA archive material from 1997 places CAiiA at the University of Wales College, Newport; her current biography states that she completed the doctorate in 2005 through CAiiA at the University of Plymouth. Her dissertation is titled Landscapes of Ephemeral Embrace: Immersive Virtual Space as a Medium for Transforming Perception. The University of Victoria awarded her an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts in June 2002.

Career

Softimage

The Daniel Langlois Foundation states that Davies joined Softimage in 1985, shortly after the company was founded. She sat on its board of directors and was vice-president of visual research from 1988 to 1994, then director of visual research from 1994 to 1997. In her own 1998 account she dates her start as a founding director to 1988, while her ISEA biography gives 1987. She used the company's 3D software for her own art. Between 1990 and 1993 she produced the Interior Body Series, 3D images that were output through photographic media as two-dimensional stills. The Langlois Foundation describes the series as seven Duratran colour transparencies shown in large light boxes. Davies described the images as "essentially frames of 3D virtual worlds," made interactively in SoftImage. She wrote that this output defeated her aim of representing space as something that surrounds the viewer, which led her to work with immersive virtual space. Her biography dates her first writing about virtual reality to 1991. Her publication list for that year contains "Natural Artifice," published by the Banff Centre for the Arts in Virtual Seminar on the Bioapparatus.

The Langlois Foundation lists three awards for her computer graphics work from this period: an honorary mention at the Prix Ars Electronica in 1990, the Prix Pixel Image at Imagina in Monte Carlo in 1991, and the Prix Distinction in Computer Graphics at the Prix Ars Electronica in Linz in 1993. Davies's text in the 1993 Prix Ars Electronica compendium identifies The Drowning (Falling from One into the Other) (1993) as the image that received the Distinction.

Osmose

Osmose was produced by Softimage in 1994 and 1995 under Davies's direction, while she was its director of visual research. In their 1996 paper in ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, Davies and software developer John Harrison wrote that one goal was "to demonstrate that an alternative aesthetic and interactive sensibility is possible for real-time, interactive, 3D computer graphics." The team included Harrison (custom VR software), Georges Mauro (computer graphics), Dorota Blaszczak (sonic architecture and programming) and Rick Bidlack (sound composition and programming).

The work has about a dozen "world-spaces." An introductory three-dimensional Cartesian grid gives way to a clearing with a single tree, and from there the immersant can reach a forest, the interior of a leaf, a subterranean earth, a pond, an abyss and a cloud. Below these is a world of the software code used to build the piece, and above them is a world of text quoting philosophical and poetic writing on nature, technology and the body. After fifteen minutes a final "LifeWorld" appears and slowly recedes to end the session. To render Davies's painterly look in real time, the team relied on models with transparent texture maps and many small particle systems. The authors also described a "deliberate misuse of the Z-buffer" that let more distant objects sometimes pass in front of closer ones. Some of Davies's earlier 3D stills had taken more than 40 hours to render, compared with the 1/30 of a second per frame the team targeted for VR.

Davies and Harrison rejected joysticks and glove pointing because, in their view, devices handled away from the body core encouraged control and a sense of disembodiment. Their alternative measured the tilt of the spine and the expansion and contraction of the chest. Immersants moved horizontally in the direction they leaned and rose or sank as they filled or emptied their lungs. Hands were deliberately left untracked. Transitions between worlds used long, slow fades, and the sound was built entirely from samples of one male and one female voice, with some sounds localized in 3D. For exhibitions, the immersant used the headset in a private chamber, while visitors in a darkened room watched a live stereoscopic projection of the immersant's view through polarized glasses and a shadow silhouette of the immersant's body on a translucent screen.

The 1996 paper lists the original hardware as follows:

Component	Equipment in the first two public installations
Graphics computer	Three-pipe Silicon Graphics Onyx RealityEngine2, loaned by Silicon Graphics; two pipes rendered the immersant's eye views at 20-30 fps and the third rendered both views of the stereo projection at 10-15 fps
Head-mounted display	Division dVisor, chosen for its wide field of view; the authors judged immersion more important than resolution for the work
Tracking	Polhemus Fastrak, tracking head position and spine tilt
Breath sensing	Custom breathing vest measuring chest expansion and contraction
Sound	Macintosh controlling MIDI devices via a serial link to the Onyx; Crystal River Acoustetron localizing up to eight sounds in 3D
Software	SoftImage SAAPHIRE and DKit libraries with SGI Performer and GL

Osmose opened as a solo exhibition at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (19 August to 1 October 1995) during ISEA95, the Sixth International Symposium on Electronic Art. It received "Best of '96 - Virtual Reality" from 3D Design and "Best Virtual Reality Art Event of the Year" from CyberEdge Journal in 1996. In an August 1996 Wired feature, Erik Davis quoted VR designer and researcher Brenda Laurel calling the work "breathtaking" and "a fundamentally powerful use of technology in the service of, dare I say, nature." He also reported that Mark Pesce had called Osmose the first work of virtual art. Immersence reports responses from about 25,000 people who had been immersed in Osmose since the summer of 1995. It also states that most immersants experience a shift of awareness, usually within about ten minutes, in which "the urge for action is replaced by contemplative free-fall."

Ephémère and Immersence

Davies founded Immersence Inc. in 1998 "for the purpose of pursuing artistic research in immersive virtual space." Ephémère (1998) built on Osmose with the same breath-and-balance interface and the same core team. Instead of a dozen realms around a central clearing, it is arranged vertically in three levels: landscape, earth and interior body. It is also structured in time. The landscape passes through dawn, day, evening and night and through the seasons from winter to autumn, while rocks turn into body organs deep in the earth. Elements appear and disappear depending on the immersant's position, speed and gaze, so that seeds sprout when looked at for long enough. A river that can change into an underground stream or a blood vessel gives a second way to move between levels. According to Immersence, the work was inspired by a real mountainside in rural Quebec. It premiered in a solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa in 1998, partly funded by the Daniel Langlois Foundation.

Davies continued to write about immersive virtual space. Her texts include "Changing Space: Virtual Reality as an Arena of Embodied Being" (1998, reprinted in 2002 in Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality). Another is the chapter "Virtual Space" in Space: In Science, Art and Society (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Restoration and later work

Glen Fraser, a VR consultant hired by Immersence to remaster both works in 2013, wrote that in 2002 Harrison had ported the graphics code from SGI hardware to a Linux machine, a setup last exhibited in Spain in 2007. The later restoration replaced what Fraser called "the refrigerator-sized rack of physical gear," including two Kurzweil K2000 samplers and the Acoustetron, with one computer that handled all audio in software. The graphics were ported from IRIX and Performer to OpenGL. The restored versions ran on a high-end PC with an HTC Vive at 90 fps, against about 20 fps for the originals. Fotografisk Center in Copenhagen showed both works from 3 June to 14 August 2022, restored by Fraser, Benedikt Wolff and Daniel Chudak and presented as solitary immersions with live audio and video for an audience.

In 1994 Davies acquired land on a small mountain in southern Quebec whose forests inspired both works. Her biography, last updated in July 2022, says that after early VR technology disappeared she continued making large immersive environments on that land using stone, earth, water and trees. It also describes a long-running project to develop software that portrays the forest "as a realm of subtle energies." She has protected almost 1,500 acres of the mountain as a nature reserve, and she lives there and in San Francisco.

Exhibitions

Selected exhibitions of the two VR works, from Immersence's exhibition list unless otherwise cited:

Year	Work	Venue
1995	Osmose (solo)	Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal
1996	Osmose	Serious Games, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom
1997	Osmose	Museum of Monterrey, Mexico
1998	Ephémère (solo)	National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
2001	Osmose and Ephémère	010101: Art in Technological Times, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
2002	Osmose and Ephémère	Biennale of Electronic Arts, John Curtin Gallery, Perth, Australia
2003-2004	Osmose and Ephémère	transfigure, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne
2007	Osmose	Feedback, Laboral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Gijón, Spain
2022	Osmose and Ephémère (restored)	Fotografisk Center, Copenhagen

Approach

In her 1998 paper Davies wrote that most designers of virtual environments relied on everyday terrestrial experience, so that their worlds were filled with "hard-edged solid objects, horizontal floors and walls" and navigation was "biased towards walking on treadmills and driving with joysticks." She contrasted this with the experience of a scuba diver floating over deep water. Her aim in Osmose was to make a solitary, contemplative space instead of one for "linking up with other people." She believed that body-centred interfaces, rather than "devices manipulated at arm's length," were the way to explore the medium. In the Wired interview she traced the idea to a dive in the Bahamas, describing it as "the first time in my life that I entered a space where there was nothing to see, no separations between inside and outside."

See also

• History of virtual reality
• Brenda Laurel
• Locomotion