Documentation – Project 1: Psychedelia

Project Description

Entitled “Psychedelia,” my first project is a 3D environment built with Unity. The viewer can look around the environment by moving around the mouse. Drawing a lot of inspiration from psychedelic art, I intended the environment to evoke a psychedelic, surreal, dark, dizzy, and even suffocating feel.

What the viewer will first see is the television right in front of them starting to play a music video upside-down. Then they should realize that they are located on a round, isolated platform that sits in the middle of an extremely dim room filled with dark pink liquid. As they start to look around the platform, they will notice the checkerboard-patterned dance floor, a palm tree lighted up with funny colors, and a green armchair. Farther surroundings include some cars, trees, an airplane, and a huge disco ball drowned in water. In the darkened background there are some mountains and walls covered by a glitchy image.

Process and Implementation

For this project, there are a few things I specifically worked on to realize the identity of psychedelia, which I will address in different parts of this section:

• Colors/patterns
• Lighting/shadows
• Themed elements

The first thing I did to bring my imagination of psychedelia to life is making a storyboard to present the basic idea of the environment I wanted to create, as shown below.

Then I started to implement things in Unity. Above is what the enviroment first looked like. I changed the disco dance floor into a checkerboard because the former didn’t look good as expected, while the latter is about equivalent to a black and white striped pattern. I also found a water asset online that automatically generates waves and turned it pink.

I soon realized that even after I deleted the directional light existing by default, the light given out by the sky box kept the whole scene lighted up, which hindered the darkness I was going for. Therefore, I built walls and ceiling to make it an enclosed space, but within the walls it was still quite bright. By playing with directional light, I found out that rather than deleting it, adjusting its angle helps change the brightness of the environment, and a 188° directional light gave me just the right amount of brightness to design my own lighting.

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Coming back to the focal point of the environment, lighting upon the island consists of six spot lights. Two of them are main ones that cast red and blue light respectively on either side of the island, creating a contrast that the viewer can notice instantly as they change angles. The other four spot lights surround the palm tree and cast the shadows of its leaves all over the island and the surface of water.

As a result, the palm tree is illuminated with a bunch of different colors.

After that I began working on the surroundings. I thought carefully about what to add to the scene to help with the psychedelic identity, and finally settled on two sets of objects (themed elements): one would appear more realistic, while the other would enhance the surrealistic aspect. Together they would distort the viewer’s perception of how realistic this reality is.

The realistic set of objects includes some trees, cars, and an airplane, which are elements with a sense of everyday life. These objects not only added layers to the scene, so that it looks deeper from the viewer’s point of view, but also complemented the lighting. Under lighting of different colors, the trees contribute to darkening the atmosphere.

The surrealistic set of objects, on the other hand, includes the striped pattern on the walls, the psychedelic-style mountains, two disco balls, as well as the island itself. Disco ball presents a sense of clubbing/intoxication/hallucination and is reflective like mirrors, which would add to the lighting structure of the environment. Meanwhile, the palm tree encourages the viewer to look up, to not only see the disco ball overhead but also explore outside of the horizontal view.

Moreover, in this part I kind of “cheated” by inserting videos to achieve the dizziness I wanted. Besides the music video played on the television, there are videos of a glitchy screen playing on the walls and the mountains. Even on the checkerboard dance floor, I added a video of disco lights revolving slowly to accompany the rhythm that the water movement produced.

The video played on the television is a music video of the song “‘Cause I’m a Man” by Tame Impala. The video has been a great inspiration for this project, and therefore I paid homage by integrating it into the project itself, which acted as great background music at the same time.

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Everything combined looks like this:

Reflection/Evaluation

In fact, psychedelia as the identity for an alternate reality is already interesting, because psychedelia itself refers to the experience of altered consciousness. Personally, I am satisfied with how the project turned out to reflect my initial idea of psychedelia, especially how the distinction between presence and immersion is also somewhat reflected here. The colors, patterns, lighting, and surroundings of the environment are all part of creating the immersion, while the television is a means of presenting presence to the viewer. Since looking around is the only interaction allowed here, there is not much that can be done to promote the sense of participation; nonetheless, stopping to watch the television becomes something that the viewer can do, besides looking around, in the alternate reality.

From another perspective, I am content with how the final product embodies psychedelia both visually and musically, sometimes blurring the line between the two. Psychedelia itself can refer to a genre of music – the music I used in this project falls within that category. More importantly, during presentation in class, Vince pointed out the “rhythm” within the environment created by the water movement. Together with the revolving disco lights and glitchy videos, they act as a visual presentation of the music. And don’t forget that while the viewer is looking around the environment, they themselves are also revolving with it. They become a part of their very own psychedelic experience.