Description
Crystal Cave is a 360° experience created for the Google Cardboard that immerses users into a small cave containing glowing crystals. To guide my design, I strove to create a cave that would have a serene and peaceful identity. To create the calm experience I was aiming for, I focused on making this environment one that did not look like a generic cave, and decided to include various mysterious, glowing crystals to do so. As such, the experience is designed in a way where the user finds themselves standing on a rock in the middle of a pond, looking at the mouth of the cave and the mountains outside or looking around inside the cave, eventually “discovering” a large assortment of glowing crystals at the end of the cave.
Process and Implementation
To achieve the peaceful identity I was striving for, I first looked for references and sources of inspiration that had this mood/atmosphere. I first came across The Long Dark and was instantly captivated by the vast, yet tranquil environment it portrayed. Using this videogame as a main source of inspiration, I created two moodboards. The first moodboard contained a lot of images of large, mountainous and snowy environments. After deciding that this would perhaps look a bit too generic and not quite alternate, I created the second moodboard, which contained an assortment of ice caverns with streams of water and crystals, and which lined up better with the serene atmosphere I wanted to create.
Now that I had an initial idea of the general visuals, I created the following storyboard/sketches. As seen in the composition below, I decided to place the user in between the mouth of the cave (which would show a glimpse of the world outside) and the end of the cave (which contained a series of elevated rocks with large, glowing crystals).
In this initial stage, I was only certain about the composition at both ends of the cave, and not in the other surrounding walls. Once I started working in Unity, I started with these two parts, and decided to design the remaining viewpoints as I developed the project.
Once I started working in Unity, I deliberately created a place that naturally guided the user’s attention through the careful placement of rocks, stalagmites, and crystals, and through the deliberate use of lighting (both from the crystals lighting other parts of the cave and from the moonlight coming from outside). For instance, as shown in the still below, the rocks in the pond along with the rocks at the end of the cave naturally guide the user’s attention upwards towards the largest crystal atop the rocks.
The biggest aspect that created the peaceful and alternate “feel” of the environment was definitely the crystals. Their cool teal color and their emissive glow was key in producing a serene atmosphere. Their lighting also afforded me with a lot of possibility regarding which aspects of the cave would be darker, and which ones would be less obscured. This then really guided me throughout the process of designing parts of the cave that would otherwise just have been empty. This can be shown in the following screenshot, where the crystal’s glow is used to suggest at the surrounding stalagmites. In this manner, the cave loses its potential of being scary, as certain areas are not entirely obscure. In a way, it could be said that the crystals themselves emit peace.
Reflection/Evaluation
Overall, I feel that the project implementation does reflect the serene identity I was striving for. As mentioned previously, the emissiveness and glow of the crystals inside the cave were key in creating a soft and peaceful atmosphere, and in making the cave feel more like a place rather than just an empty cave. Their placement as objects that directly countered the darkness of the cave contributed to producing an environment that would have otherwise been hostile. Looking back at my moodboard and initial sketches, I feel that this final outcome gives justice to the environment I envisioned, which I am really happy about. Regarding the medium, building for Google Cardboard versus building for the PC really gave different results. In the Cardboard, the whole environment looked much brighter in general, and the lighting lost its soft edges and quality. However, it still maintained itself as a serene environment, which is what I was striving for. Using low-poly visuals in Unity also contributed to the calmness of the environment, as the lack of hyper-realistic visuals created enough of a visual separation between the real world and this alternate crystal cavern.
Final Project Screenshots
