Project 2 | Document Journal – Alternate Realities

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[Updated] March 15, 2020

We began to integrate our interactions (the camera, the punching bag, the boxing man, the bird) into the environment that Neyva created. By all means, there were some difficulties trying to put together everything and we had to manually place every object that we created altogether. There were some compile errors and some glitches from Unity when it came to the particle for the fog, but we overcame them after all. I found a sound piece that fits nicely with the ambient environment of the experience here. We also played with the color palettes of the environment and its associated objects and ended up to color the bird white-gray-ish, the cloud red, the punching bags red, and the punching glove red.

[Updated] March 13, 2020

We wrote a script attached to an empty game object that clones new bird prefab every time the player punches the bag. We created a class Bird that hosts the initial conditions of the bird (position, speed, angle, animation…) and the GameObject Bird itself. Initially, we used Character Controller and its Move function to move the birds; however, because the Character Controller component comes with a Collider by default and no matter how hard I tried to disabled it, it still collided with the punching bag, causing unwanted bag swing that doesn’t look good.
Therefore, I did some research and came up with the idea of using RigidBody and AddForce to move the birds instead (without adding a collider to avoid collision with the punching bag), which works like a charm. For some reasons, the volumetric spot light above the fog did work in the Unity sketch but was nowhere to be seen in the exported app, which we could not fix and have to say goodbye to :'(

[Updated] March 11, 2020

We added a raycast script to the camera so that if the player is looking at the punching bag, it would become brighter, signalling to the player an invitation for possible interaction. Along the way, we encountered some challenges that wasn’t brought up in the original example of raycast.
Firstly, because the punching bag is a child of some other components, we had to use hit.collider.transform.gameObject instead of just hit.transform.gameObject (which returns the parent of the punching bag instead).
Secondly, because the material used for the punching is not a simple color, thus we had to use emission color to alter the brightness of the punching bag.

[Updated] March 10, 2020

Neyva is working on the environment while Nhi and I work on the player and the interaction with the punching bag.

Below is a video of the working punching bag (the environment is a placeholder, not the environment we are creating for this project):

After some experimenting with the character controller, we decided to settle on the first person controller from the Standard Asset and make the boxer a child of the controller so that he and the camera will follow the movement of the controller.
The Unity package comes with a boxer and his associated boxing animation. As this is a first person perspective experience, we intended to keep only his two hands in gloves in front of the camera as an affordance for the interaction with the punching bag. However, we couldn’t dissect those from his entire body rig, which is read-only; therefore, we put the camera just outside of the body and restrict the camera in such a way that the player can only see the hand movements (not the entire body).
Having some experience in Unity animation, I did some digging and found a way to trigger the boxing animation on click. I also slowed down the animation and configure it so that it can only be triggered again once it finishes (to avoid animation reload when the player clicks too fast). We also added a collision detector script on the punching bag and passed around some variables from different scripts to determine if the collision is from the punching action, not from accidental touches (in case the player gets too close to the punching bag and touches it with the hands). We also added sound effect upon collision.

[Updated] March 09, 2020

After having some more meetings with our team, taking into considerations feedback we received in class and the constraints we are now facing due to *cough* COVID-19, here are some revised aspects:

We will ditch the button; rather, we will focus on the main interaction between the player and the punching bag. The dove will fly out of the bag upon being punched as before.
We will ditch the theater. The environment will be simplified down to its barest elements. We took inspirations from the scene below:

The main cylindrical punching bag will be in the middle of the scene, while being surrounded by smaller punching bags held in place in the sky. Fog will be used to create a mysterious atmosphere. The environment will remain mostly dark, unlit; there will a volumetric light illustrating the main punching bag.

March 4, 2020

For the second project, we (Neyva, Nhi, and me) adopt the the struggle between war and peace as the central theme of our experience.

The experience is set up in a theater stage where the user is placed next to a punching bag and a red button on a pedestal, corresponding to two everyday activities of punching/boxing and pressing (buttons). What makes the environment alternate, or surreal, is the way those two objects and the environment responds to the user’s interaction:

To punch the bag, the user will need to press the trigger to form a fist with their hand and accelerate their fist towards. Upon being punched, white doves will magically appear from the punching bag and fly around the stage.
To press the button, the user will need to press the trigger while aiming at the button. Upon being pressed, the button will magically turns all the doves black.

The theater stage thus presents the user with an alternate space to perform his/her relationship with war and peace. The mere action of violence of punching is counterbalanced by white doves which have long been symbolizing peace and aspiration for peace. On a similar note, the symbolic action of pressing the red button, which is often quoted as the threat of global war, is materialized in the transformation of white doves (peace) to black doves (war).

Below are some Unity assets and some reference images we’ve found so far:

A cinema theater asset in Unity store. We will try to convert it into a theater theater.

Boxing gloves royalty-free 3d model - Preview no. 1 — A pair of boxing glove found on Free3D. We will try to replace the Vive’s default controller with these.

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