Virtual Unreality

It's the middle of winter, and you might be wondering if colour and life will ever return to the world after seeing weeks of snow, rain, slush, and grey. We've still got quite a while before spring, and sometimes I find myself forgetting what grass looks like. It's that short fluffy stuff that goes on the floor, right?

(NOTE: As soon as Kate submitted this article, the cold weather turned beautiful and sunny. Is this proof that Kate has clairvoyant powers over the very weather itself? Yes.)

Thank goodness it's not winter in Minecraft! And thank even more goodnesses that I get to cover Authenticity Relocated, a build with so many vibrant colours that it looks like the time I ate a whole pack of crayons and threw up everywhere. In a good way, of course.

"Its purpose is to make you stop thinking for a second, and just feel," says the builder, Immanuel, who describes the world as "psychedelic" and "alien." Immanuel was inspired after he had seen a build that his friend did for a Minecraft competition. “We both competed in the contest. I got second place, and he got third, but his idea was just so cool I had to try incorporating it into my own pipeline.”

The idea was to use something Immanuel calls "nothingness layers.” A "nothingness layer" is something created in an editor – basically an eraser that gets rid of every block in that layer while leaving the blocks above it floating, immune to gravity. This means that Immanuel could create strange, floating objects and weird geography.

But other than knowing that he wanted to use these "nothingness layers," Immanuel didn't go into the build with a plan. "I basically just figured out what I wanted to do along the way," he says. "It was sort of done with no real mockup.” Instead he relied on his imagination. Very successfully!

Immanuel is proud of what he's created, and how different it is from most other builds – it's a reflection of who he is. "I don't like realism, modernism or simplism," he says. "I put a certain degree of honour in not being like everyone else.”

It took just over a week for Immanuel to finish the Authenticity Relocated build. Although he went in without a plan, he knew he wanted to use as many colours as possible, and create strong contrasts between them. He even made sure that he highlighted the areas he wanted people to focus on by making them the areas of highest contrast. Look at the yellow forest, for example, which is surrounded by cyan blue, bringing out the bright colour of the trees and making them stand out.

Immanuel has his own details that he wants to highlight: "I'd have to mention the pyramids with galactic trees inside," he says. "Or the flying trees, or the jellyfish biome." He tells me those jellyfish are his personal favourite part. "I love the idea of flying sealife!"

It must be wonderful/terrifying to live inside Immanuel's psychedelic imagination. Why not take a vacation from the dull, grey real world, and visit his exciting, colourful virtual one?

Renders by Darastix, Ivain, Paul Sireau, Ryermeke