With the crisis brought by COVID-19, the human race now faces the task of addressing ethical concerns on a global and societal scale at the pace of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. However, humanistic thinking, which awakens the essence of humanity, ...
With the crisis brought by COVID-19, the human race now faces the task of addressing ethical concerns on a global and societal scale at the pace of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. However, humanistic thinking, which awakens the essence of humanity, is still perceived as difficult and bothersome by busy modern individuals. This study explores the implementation of the culmination of Korean Confucianism, 'The Ten Diagrams of Sage Learning,' into a Virtual Reality (VR) project. The Ten Diagrams of Sage Learning, also called ‘Sunghaksipdo,’ was composed by Toegye about 500 years ago. It compresses the concepts of Confucianism into a single folding screen with ten images, 1860 characters of Chinese characters. The ten images are also full of symbols such as circles and squares. Sunghaksipdo contains valuable thoughts on cosmology, ontology, and axiology, as well as highly logical reasoning unprecedented in global intellectual history, such as the discussion of the four-seven debates between Toegye and Gobong. In this heritage work, Toegye visualizes and edits the Confucian system and his philosophical ideas, which enable contextual analysis of Korean thought. However, even for modern Koreans, these values are unfamiliar. Therefore, our <Sunghaksipdo VR> project aims to reinterpret this integrated philosophy into VR to convey its significance and value. Thus far, there were several attempts have been made to examine the informational space of Sunghaksipdo from visual and informational design perspectives, but those efforts never fully approached the entire contents of Sunghaksipdo and its philosophical concept space, which penetrates the whole diagrams. Thus, our approach is the first attempt to visit and reinterpret its philosophical and conceptual realm into a virtual space where spatial-temporal and tangible experiences are possible.
To achieve this, in the first stage of the study, the research team constructed a knowledge map of the concepts in Sunghaksipdo and mapped it to a virtual space. We created ten separate, stand-alone VR works corresponding to each of the ten diagrams. Each VR work was completed with a high degree of completion that faithfully captures the philosophical concepts of each diagram while enabling an artistic experience like a multimedia work. The entire ten VR works’ running time is about 130 minutes. Additionally, we designed a macro-navigation interface to access each VR.
In the second stage of the study, we had three goals to develop our project. The first goal was to create a way to make the ten separate VR content interconnect, thus enabling the exploration of the concepts and knowledge. This is to contextualize the informational knowledge of Sunghaksipdo. We conducted studies to review and connect philosophically and theoretically and design concept maps and philosophical ideas. Based on this theoretical research, we designed the micro-navigation interfaces for each VR. Our second goal was to translate the audio narration of <Sunghaksipdo VR>, which was produced in the first stage in Korean, into English. This task requires a kind of professionality of Confucianism and our objectives of using VRs; thus, our research team did it by ourselves and proofread by English natives. This task is our hope to share our VR project with foreigners who want to know and understand Korean spirituality. Our third goal was to expand Sunghaksipdo into personality education and self-care programs. Therefore, the research team made efforts to make it applicable to various public lectures, exhibitions, and educational programs. However, the expansion of these educational programs was delayed slightly due to the unexpected COVID situation. During this period day, we encountered the planned exhibitions and lectures canceled and postponed. Also, we were not able to introduce and present our research results at international academic venues. After the pandemic, we have started introducing our projects at international conferences and getting invaluable feedback.
Over the course of this interdisciplinary research, besides the VR project, our research team published numerous domestic and international academic journal and conference papers and registered several technical patents only for this project and other related patents. These patents include the ones regarding the design and operation of VR sound systems. We also published a book called ‘Tangible Philosophy: <Sunghaksipdo VR>’ and two more books to come out soon under contract with book publishers.