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For me, VR is like scuba diving, a complete immersion in another world. Unlike snorkeling, where one views the world below, the VR world is all around you and with the right software, I can weightlessly play with and put brush strokes of colored light in space all around myself, unrestricted by the limitations and constraints of a 2-dimensional picture plane. I have been looking for this 3D capability since the early 1980’s and I have tried many technologies that have purported to provide this option. Still, creating the 3DVR ‘paintings’ is only one step in my current working process. My goal is a finished, stretched and framed picture to hang on a wall, not the 3D immersive environment itself. Though I use digital technology, I still think of myself as a painter, one who is painting with colored light in a 3D virtual world. I still want to get my images out of the computer into the real world. I do this by cropping potential pictures out of the 3DVR light painting, which floats in the VR space all around me like a colorful weightless light sculpture. 

I learned about cropping pictures in Larry Poons’ studio with Clement Greenberg in the early 1970’s. One advantage of cropping something created in 3DVR is that the lighting model which makes things visible in the virtual world, enables the cropped image to retain the visual 3D effect on the 2D canvas. Much the same way that traditional shaded figures on a canvas look three dimensional, the 3DVR shading creates the visual illusion of 3D brush strokes in space on the 2D picture plane. 

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--Darcy Gerbarg.