Documentation | Final Project

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

• Team member: Nhi, Luize, and Tiger
• Theme: Apocalypse.
• Space & Storyness: Our project is the combination of the experiences of our daily life in a small apartment and the underwater experience. This alternate reality is created with our hope to connect our daily life actions and their negative impact on the ocean, embracing the message of the inter-relation between human daily activities and nature. Through the perspective of being in a normal life that every user is used to, the user’s interactions with the food objects, such as plastic bottles and bags of chips, serve as the representation of our excessive plastic use daily. We may consciously or unconsciously use plastic in our life because of its durability, strength, and low cost that make plastic the material of choice for products. The message of ocean pollution is conveyed in the video of 20 seconds that the user will watch before diving in the next underwater scene. Without any special equipment, the user enters the underwater world, diving in its beauty before this world gets completely destroyed. Using the plastic objects that are frequently used in our daily life to contaminate the underwater world that the user explores, we hope to emphasize the negative impact our daily life activities can put on the ocean, and nature in general.
• Storyboard for the project: Our initial storyboard consists of 9 scenes with the first scene describing our daily life and the next 8 scenes describing the underwater experience throughout 3 centuries. However, we reduced the number of scenes to two main scenes described above.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• Playtest video:

PROCESS / IMPLEMENTATION

Project idea development: Our final choice of theme diverged from our initial idea for the project. At first, we decided to pursue the combination of two themes, namely “interpretation of a city” and “escape room”, as the descriptions of different invisible cities and our current social distancing situation amid Covid-19 pandemic served as inspiration for project ideas.

• 

• 

• 

However, as our team also put our main focus on creating a meaningful message for the users and a sense of storyness in our project, through lengthened discussion, we had come to a final choice of theme, “apocalypse”, which is different from what we started out with. In specific, we hope to portray to the users how our actions in daily life, whether conscious or unconscious, significantly contribute to ocean pollution.

The role of the users in the experience is the character with impact. In the first scene, the users are able to interact with the food objects, TV, and switch scene using the coral. In the second scene, the users, although mostly observing the underwater world, leave the trace of plastics wherever they go, and can switch back to the previous world through the coral at the end of the path of their exploration.

The final story of the project: With our unconscious consumption of plastic every day, we use different food objects, such as plastic bottles and bags of chips, serving as a first main interaction. We designed the first scene with various hints towards the next underwater scene, using corals of different types and colors. After the users interact with the food objects through grabbing and releasing them, they can also interact with the TV where a video of 20 seconds showing the current alarming ocean pollution. After watching the video, the coral on the shelf next to the TV would light up, inviting the users for interaction, which is for switching to the next scene. In the underwater space, it first starts out with a beautiful and lively scene. The users can walk around, but there is a designated path indicated by the two lines of plants. The scene would change gradually: the environment becomes darker; the fish disappears gradually. Every time the users walk around, they will leave a trace of plastic behind them. These traces of plastic consists of food objects from the previous scene.

The role of the users in the experience is the character with impact. In the first scene, the users are able to interact with the food objects, TV, and switch scene using the coral. In the second scene, the users, although mostly observing the underwater world, leave the trace of plastics wherever they go, and can switch back to the previous world through the coral at the end of the path of their exploration.

Scene 1:

• Plastic containers around the room. User can interact with them (grab/release)
• Television with video about ocean plastic pollution
• After watching, user can teleport to next scene

Scene 2:

• User enters into a pristine underwater environment – beautiful, vibrant, lively in the beginning, encouraging the user want to explore more
• Users follow a plant path
• After a while, a trail of plastic starts appearing behind them and around in the ocean, fish disappearing, and the lighting darkening.

• 

• 

Implementation of the project: Our project consists of two main tasks, designing on the two main scenes and building interactions. I worked mainly on designing the first scene and writing scripts for the interactions in both scenes.

• After the first playtest session in our class, we realized that our initial design for the first scene does not reflect a strong correlation with the second underwater world. The playtesters were confused when exploring the scene and did not expect that our project had a second scene. Hence, we decided to re-design the first scene, adding corals as the main decorations for the room.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

For building the interactions in the project, I wrote several scripts, and partially used the GoogleVR package for event triggers:

• PlayerWalk: this script is attached to the player object in the first scene. Due to the fact that the only action available in Google Cardboard is clicking the button, the user would be moving by clicking the button every time at the speed of 1 (the speed is public, thus can be changed). The user would not be able to walk when grabbing a food object in hand.
• PlayerWalkUnderwater: this script is attached to the player object in the second scene. In this scene, we set the y-direction constant and adjust the camera’s height so it creates a feeling as if the user is swimming underwater instead of walking on the seabed.
• Food interaction: this script is attached to the player objet and the food objects, enabled the user to grab/release the object whenever the user points the reticle towards the food objects.

• 

• Food collision: this script is attached to the food object to detect collision with other objects in the room. However, as the user grabs the food object, its kinematic is set to true, thus ignoring collision. The fix for this problem is Edit -> Project Setting -> Physics -> Contact Pairs Mode set to Enable Kinematic Static Pairs. This will make sure that the collision is still detected when the object is grabbed in hand, thus releasing the object whenever it collides with other game objects in the room. This is still not yet perfect. When we playtested to see whether the script worked properly, the objects sometimes still went through objects.
• CoralChangeScene: this script is attached to the coral, which serves as the switching point between two scenes. The coral object with this script is only enabled for event triggers after the user watches the video of ocean pollution.

• RayCasting: this script is attached to the player object. When the hit.distance from the user to the object in the room is smaller than 1.2f, the user would not be able to move through other objects, such as walls.
• TriggerTV: this script is attached to player object, with the event trigger added to the TV object. This also only allows the coral for switching scene after the user finishes watching the video.

• Cursorhide: this script is added to hide the cursor, leaving only the reticle pointer in the scene.
• For scripts in underwater, including ChangeLightIntensity, DeletePlastic, MovingFish, MovingShark, SpawnPlastics, I fixed the frameCount to adjust the speed and amount of plastic generated and the time when the fish disappears and the light becomes darker.

We also thought of whether we should change anything in the first room when the user goes back. After the discussion, we all agreed that we decided to keep it the same. Although it is easy to realize how much plastic can be generated by one human being, it is extremely difficult to significantly reduce the use of plastics in our daily life due to its convenience and massive use in products. This is the representation of an infinite loop that can only be broken by the change in the awareness and behavior.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

EVALUATION / REFLECTION

The project is an amazing team collaboration experience. As we work throughout each scene, we realized that there were a few problems that we underestimated when we first started. For example, the scope of our project in Google Cardboard limited our choice for interactions, hence when using the clicking button for both walking and grabbing/releasing the object, we need to reconsider when we should enable the walking for the user. Another problem we encountered during the project development was collision detection and interaction with food objects. With the great support from Professor Sarah Krom, we were able to fix the issues in the end.

In addition, the choice to reduce from 9 scenes to only 2 scenes turned out to be the right choice. Due to the time constraints, this simplification still represents the message we want to convey in our project.

Although we did not have time to add interactions with the fish and other plants in the underwater world, the final witness of plastic overwhelmingly occupying the ocean, in the end, is quite powerful for us when we playtested our project.