Project 2 Documentation | Boxing with Ares

[Updated March 28 2020] Added to Documentation Category

Project Description

Boxing with Ares is an immersive experience in Unity that invites players to a dark and eerie world where they will have to navigate through their internal conflict of peace and war, of hope and sorrow. An inviting big red punching bag placed in the center of a gloom, obscure, and desolate ground that is actively contrast by a sky filled with grids of smaller punching bags seemingly blending with bloody clouds streaks: what could go wrong, what other ominous thing that could happen here?

Unknowingly to the players, dozens of doves fly out from the punching bag whenever it is punched. That is simply not how punching a bag works in real life. The act of punching something is supposed to be a violent act: how could this make sense with such a symbol of peace, how could such two antipodes co-exist in the same world, let alone in the same interaction. Taken back by the unexpected interactions, the players then face their internal struggle of interpreting such encounters: whether to keep punching or to stop the violent act, whether to spread peace by setting the doves free or to let hope die out by chasing the doves away…

Process and Implementation

The very first step of brainstorming for this project was to come up with an everyday activity through which we would modify in accordance to the alternate world. Someone yelled let’s do boxing, I did not remember whom, but the idea was so captivating that we went full force with it. The word “magic” somehow popped up in the conversation and somehow I said “What if birds fly out of the punching bag like when they magically fly out of a magician’s hat?”. Instantaneously, something clicked: we realized that if the birds were to be doves which have long been symbolized peace, they would unexpectedly counterbalance the suggestively violent act of boxing. That they would open up so many questions revolving around peace, war, and the agency of the player, his/her internal struggle between the good and the bad. There would be a button that could be pushed to change the color of the doves flying out (this, however, quickly proved to be an idea made hastily and did not blend well with the rest of the experience).

Initially envisioned for the Vive system, we intended the interaction to be organic, analogous to that required to punch a bag in real life: the player would have to pull the trigger while holding tight to the controller (which resembles the act of clenching a fist) and accelerate their controller/hand forward towards the punching box.

The act of punching a bag. This is also the asset we found on Unity for the experience.

Also, we thought that we could envision a theater environment in which the player is given a platform to perform their internal struggle between peace and war.

This is our first sketch of the experience

However, after receiving feedback from Professor Sarah and our classmates as well as the breaking news of the coronavirus that would have a big impact on how we designed the experience, we revised and narrowed down our initial idea, specifically:

  • The interaction would only involve the action of punching the bag
  • The theater environment would be changed to a less context-based and more provocative space. We took inspiration from this scene from the Matrix, in which the environment does not guarantee any concrete clues as to where the player is currently situated, a place that is not defined by the conventionals.
  • We also took some more inspirations from this set-up. We would want some fogs in the environment, as well as smaller punching bags randomly hung from the sky, without really making any sense as to why they are there in the first place, opening up possibilities for self-interpretation and self-reflection from the player.

With the developed idea in mind, we started to work on the project. Neyva took charge of the environment, while Nhi and I worked together on the camera, the character, the interactables, and the interactions.

We decided to put the main camera on the character in such a way that the player can see his/her hands. As we could not use the Vive anymore and thus its associated in-screen controllers, being able to look down and see his/her hands provide a visual cue that interactions through the hands are possible. We however limited the angle which the players can rotate down, as we did not want the player to be able to look through the boxing man’s body. Lastly, we made the camera and the boxing man children of the First Person Controller so that they can move in tandem with the inputs from the player. This is about as far as we could implement the experience we intended to be without Vive.
We then added a script to detect the collision between the boxing man’s hands and the bag. We could not rely on the default Collider alone because we had to check if the collision is indeed caused by the punching action, not by accidental touches caused by proximity to the bag. After detecting the collision, we added a script containing a class Bird to generate birds flying out of the bag. The birds are generated with random positions, random angles, random velocities (using Rigidbody and AddForce function) and animation speed correspondingly (the faster the velocity, the faster the animation – the flapping wings animation).
The bird prefab upclose. We played around with its color and ended up to choose a white-grey-ish tone that suited well with the monotonous tone of environment while not overpowering the experience. The addition of the moving birds somehow provide the scene with a lot of contrast, which is predominantly made up of stationary or slow-moving components.
The punching bags in the sky placed by Neyva.
The clouds in the sky placed by Neyva. Originally, they were white; however, after toying with the skybox a bit, we decided to set them to red and made the environment even more mysterious, hell-ish, dark, and cruel.
The ground fog effect (particle system) created by Neyva

Project Reflection

Overally, I am satisfied with what we were able to achieve in such a changing and challenging situation.

First of all, I can feel a sense of an alternate world being presented in the experience. From the very prominent cue of a dark, ominous sky without any light coming from the sun dotted with bloody streaks of clouds, to the less-so-stand-out desolate layout of the immediate environment with only a lone punching bag on the ground (or even a lack thereof of a definitive ground, only a featureless plane that extends and seamlessly melts into the horizon), to the omni-present ambient sound that suggests a rather unsettling tone of the environment: everything works together to transform the player into an alternate world that one might imagine but is too scared to face it himself/herself.

Moreover, having the ability to see his/her hands (or rather hands with a pair of red gloves on them) right from the very beginning of the experience immediately reminds the player of the possibilities of utilizing them for potential interactions. Apart from the smaller punching bags that are placed way too high for any conceivable interactions, the one and only thing that are in the reach of the player is the inviting big red punching box that is a few feet away. It is obvious that something, unexpected or not, will happen upon interactions between the hands and the punching bag.


One small thing to note, however, was a lack of the volumetric spotlight that shines above the punching bag. While it was functional in the Unity project, when we exported it into an executable app, the volumetric is nowhere to be seen. While it originally served to further emphasize the importance of and as an invitation to the punching bag, the lack of it in the final app did not really have a big impact on the experience as a whole: the aforementioned features are enough to act as affordances for the experience.

The end product came quite close to what we envisioned for our project. In some way, it exceeds my expectation, it feels both more real and more alien than I could have imagined before. While the immersiveness of the medium lends itself nicely to the experience, giving the player the freedom to explore and interact, it also presented us with challenge to put things where they should be. For example, we decided to offset the punching bag quite a bit from the initial position of the player so that the player can have a grasp of the environment as a whole before delving into the interaction. This was met with positive comments from our classmates, citing it gave them a pause to think about their actions, to whether or not incite more violence by punching the bag on the already violent environment.

Agency Question

The very first thing that ensured the player with an agency in this experience is the ability to see his/her hands right from the beginning. What’s more, the hands are barely in their naked forms: rather, they are inside a pair of red boxing gloves, which imbued the player with an elevated kind of agency, the kind that comes with capabilities specific with boxing gloves. The sight of a matching red punching bag afar immediate after that inevitably welcomes the player to come closer to materialize the thoughts of actions that were triggered earlier upon seeing the boxing gloves for the first time. The satisfying sensation is derived from the ability to punch the bag (either through a mouse click which is implemented here, or with an actual forward movement of the controller while clenching a fist initially imagined for the Vive ) and see the bag responds to the action through its change of position and speed in space and time as well as auditory cues (impact sound). Moreover, more than an expected displacement of the punching bag, the player is surprised with doves flying out of the bag every single time it is punched. It is at this moment that the player realize they can not only physically influence, but they can also extend their bestowed agency on innocent doves somehow “trapped” in the bag, to decide either to set them free with a view to spreading hope outwards or to keep them inside, trying to hold on to the last bit of hope in this dark environment.

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