It's tempting to think of virtual reality as an extension of cinema. After all, it seems to bubble from the same fount. In the live-action evocation of both disciplines, you use cameras to capture subjects—either in native or artificial environments. In the computer-generated expressions of both forms, where a digital landscape is rendered in three dimensions from which any perspective may be selected by the animator at any moment, the similarities seem even more apparent.

On a high desert plain north of Joshua Tree National Park, Hidden River Road becomes a graded dirt track, flanked on either side by single-family homes, unadorned, prefab steel buildings, and trailers. As you continue east, at the base of a low hill covered in reddish granite boulders, two strange structures appear. One is black; the other is gold. Designed and built by the Los Angeles-based architect Robert Stone, Rosa Muerta and Acido Dorado are nominally habitable residences. Both have refrigerators and bathrooms, for instance. But in philosophy and execution, the homes are as austere as the desert surrounding them. In fact, in a sense, the homes are the desert surrounding them. The roof of Rosa Muerta, except directly above the bed, is open to the sky. When it rains, it rains indoors as well. The walls of Acido Dorado's common space—great, reflective golden windows hung on tracks—slide back to let in the breeze, or whatever else is coursing through the desert. One morning Stone woke to find a rattlesnake coiled in the middle of his living room.

This article was originally published on brightideasmag.com