This project is going to be like something out of the Harry Potter universe. It places the recipient in a large, Victorian style greenhouse, in front of a planting station.They are provided with seeds, a watering can and a planting pot. If the user follows what is pretty much expected and plants the seed and waters it they end up growing a giant man eating plant that gets them eaten. Just behind them will be placed a second plant of the same species with a danger sign, an easter egg warning that the user may or may not see.
I envisioned the greenhouse to look like the ones found at the Kew Gardens in London that I visited last summer.
We first set out to find some ready made assets, primarily a greenhouse and the man eating plant. I managed to find a greenhouse that cast some nice shadows and came with a bunch of planting pots and benches. I also managed to find an animated plant with teeth. Getting the animation to loop is something we have yet to figure out. We built the planting area by combining some of the benches that came with the greenhouse.
Then, we began work on the interactions. We brought the player in from one of the example scenes in the Unity VR package. We also brought in a sphere that we will be using as the seed. Adding colliders to the pot and the table allowed us to place the objects on the surface and drop the seed into the pot. Figuring out how to detect the tilt of the watering can to start playing the particle animation of the water took some time but Max was able to figure it out.
I built an expansive terrain around the greenhouse to create a expansive forest. I sprayed the area near the greenhouse with patches of grass and a single species of tree but nothing too extreme or different so That the focus would remain more on the inside. The greenhouse was populated with strange alien plants, trees that reach above the recipient’s head and some close by the use in planters, some of which came with their own animations. The bench forms a visual barrier around the user. These worked wonders for bringing the space to life. Some of them emit clouds of spores, which became quite distracting so I ended up removing them.
To add another ‘alternate’ element to the world we added a creature, a giant butterfly in the sky. The butterfly makes the outside seem an even more daunting space than the inside.
We added some gardening equipment into the space the the recipient can pick up and play around with as well. I think it may make a fun ending to the game if the user was to pick up one of these and fight off the monster plant.
The growing of the flytrap is triggered to happen when both the soil and the water have contact with the seed for a certain amount of time. This took several hours to figure out how to do. The plant, which is already in the pot but extremely small in size grows larger and animates, lunging at the viewer.
Finally, we decided to add some ambient and 3D sound.
We found a bunch of sounds on freesound.com. The sound of a tropical rain forest plays around the recipient as the plant in the cage behind them emanates, low, rumbling growls.