Project Description
Underwater Apocalypse is a virtual reality project designed and created by Luize, Nhi and myself. Within the world of this project, the user is able to see and experience how the plastics generated from humans’ everyday activities can severely impact the ocean and the life of marine creatures. We played with the concept of apocalypse and linked it to the consequence of our very own behaviors that are causing great damage to the natural environment.
The environment consists of two scenes: a living room scene, which embodies the typical modern lifestyle, and an underwater scene, which showcases the beauty of nature, as well as how human activities could destroy it. The storyness of the project lies in the emotional journey that the user will go through witnessing changes happen in the ocean and the connection between the two scenes.
Living room scene
Upon entering the environment, the user will find themselves in the room scene, which is simply furnished with a couch, a television, a coffee table and some wall decorations. Obviously inharmonic are some food items scattered around on the table and on the floor, including a few bags of chips and some cans and bottles, which the user is able to pick up and throw around. The television is also clickable, and when clicked on, it will play a video that introduces how awfully plastic products are threatening the ocean life. When the video ends, the coral decoration next to the television lights up and invites the user into the second scene.
In the underwater scene, the user can see various marine creatures including all kinds of fish, starfish, jellyfish, sharks, corals, and underwater plants. Right in front of the user is a path formed by a type of big-leaf plant, encouraging their active exploration. The further along the path they go, the more they will be able to see of the delicate beauty of the underwater world. However, as they are moving forward, plastic gargabe starts to appear from right behind them, while the scene darkens gradually. In no time the user will hardly find any fish within visible distance, but an increasing amount of plastic gargabe floating around. By the time they reach the end of the path, the entire scene has already become a mess.
Underwater scene
At the end of the path, the user will find a light-up coral, which is the same as the one next to the television in the living room. Once they click on the coral, they will be teleported back to the living room scene. The structure of the storyline appears as a cycle that the user cannot break out of, conveying a deeper message that until we actually start to do things differently in our daily life, the damage we are doing to nature is inevitable.
Process and Implementation
The function of the room scene is a vital factor that makes a great difference to the user experience, which has evolved a lot throughout the building of the project. The room scene serves as the starting point of the environment, as well as the story, presenting to the user a very important first impression. It matters whether it feels sci-fi-like, or everyday life-like. At the beginning, we wanted to go for a high-tech, The Matrix-ish feel in the design of the room scene, as shown below in the first two images. In that case, the room scene would be nothing but an introduction to the theme of the project.
Initial version of room scene, later ditched
But after we decided to turn it into a familiar living room setting that feels casual, cozy and homely, I realize that it was able to bring context to the user experience. It somehow indicates to the user some characteristics of the character that they are taking on in the story – one who lives a typical modern life, not so different from the user themselves. Maybe s/he is fond of puffed food like chips, drinks coffee every day, and has breakfast with milk, hence all the food. The character is made more easily relatable this way.
Regarding the room scene, we also had discussions about the video played on the television. Some feedback raised our concern that the user might not want to stay still and watch the entire video, yet the video is of great significance as an explicit introduction to the theme of our project and a smooth transition between the two scenes. So we decided to trim the video in length and have the lighting in the room go down while it plays, so that it was more likely to grasp the user’s attention and make them notice the visual cue of the coral when it ends.
The original design of the ocean scene included a past scene, a present scene and a future scene (1920, 2020, 2120) that would all have a different setting reflecting the corresponding time period, which was complex and required a lot of effort. To make our life easier, we significantly trimmed it down to one scene only. Somehow I seemed to find the one-scene design even better for the project, because rather than pushing the user to go from one scene to another, we got to then directly present the change to them in one scene. It had the potential to be more dramatic and more immersive, and moreover, we could then link the change to the character and produce the sense of agency, while the scene-to-scene walk might just feel like a visit to the museum.
The sense of agency, as I expected, should come from the garbage generating effect. An important detail that links up the two scenes, is that the garbage items that appear in the underwater scene are the same items seen in the living room scene, which should lead to the user’s realization that as the main character of the story, they are bringing waste to a beautiful natural environment. Besides, the gargabe doesn’t appear until about 20 seconds into the underwater scene, so that the user has their time to first appreciate its beauty, and then witness the gradual yet noticeable change of atmosphere.
The garbage generating, fish swimming away, and environmental light going down effects are all timed events that begin at a certain frame, and it took me quite a few tests to find the right timing for them to happen. How fast the plastics are generated, and how fast the light intensity changes were carefully calculated so that the two effects aligned in time. I also felt it was important to design the scene in a specific way that would encourage the user to behave as we intended, and consequently see the complete process of the environmental change; the way I handled this was by creating a path that they should intuitively follow along, and setting a proper walking speed for the character.
What’s worth pointing out is that, while I was laying out the corals and plants, I needed to make sure it looked good from the perspective of the character, so I had to use a temporary WASD movable character to walk the path and see how it looked. However, the mesh collider didn’t work as intended for the terrain. In order to fix that, I placed a bunch of cubes beneath the ocean floor to fit its shape and simulate the collider. Later when we switched the operation from keyboard to mouse, because Nhi’s character movement script used a different mechanism, we no longer needed those cubes and took them out. Still, they were crucial to the building process.
In terms of the aesthetics of the scene, I depended greatly on the assets we purchased and tried to make the most of what we had. I didn’t manage to find a convenient way to lay out such a large scene, and because the ocean floor wasn’t flat, I couldn’t just be lazy and copy and paste the assets, so I put every single object in place by hand, which was quite a struggle.
The sunken ship was borrowed from the original idea for the underwater scene, and it served well as the visually centric object in the scene. It not only helps to broaden the view in the vertical direction, but its gigantic size also puts weight onto one side of the scene, so that the user can look at it for reference of their own position in the scene and it doesn’t feel generic all over the place.
The lighting plays a vital part in the aesthetics, too. Corals are static objects, so I put point lights of different colors beside them to indicate their vibrancy. The dimming of these lights are also timed to hint at their decay due to the appearance of plastics. At the end of the path there is a spotlight lighting up the area near the ship, so that even after the scene darkens, the user is still able to find their way out of the mess.
Reflection/Evaluation
Given that the main goal for this project is to achieve storyness, I have expected our project to present that to the user manifestly. A dilemma that I found our group stuck in, was that it seemed to me there lies a conflict between storyness and agency. In a traditional sense, storyness comes from a plot, multiple characters with distinct personalities, and dramatic conflicts between characters; the feeling of agency, on the other hand, comes from the user being able to impact what happens. This leads back to the question we have been discussing for a while: at what position do we place the user, a ghost with impact, or a character with impact? How does the artist make the user feel like they have impact on a pre-designed story?
At least within the scope of this project, my answer is, we go for an adapted version of storyness, where the user should not only feel like they are able to impact what happens in the environment, they should also feel that their impact actually matters; we should put the user in a plot we designed but let them think they are actively pushing the story forward. We design consequences for user behavior. We are kind of caught up in the concept of “user being able to do whatever they want,” but we forget that there is still a lot of logic in what they would want, and that it could be designed as well.
Personally, I might be a little over ambitious, but I don’t want our project to feel like an interactive storytelling project, where the user does stuff as instructed and watches the story unfold; nor should it feel like an empty canvas where the user is free to draw whatever they want, because the complete freedom would mean absolutely nothing to the presentation of storyness. It should feel organically in the middle of the two models. I wanted the user to feel like they could do whatever they want in the environment, but by designing the scene in a specific way, I tell them what they want. Specifically for this project, the plastic spawning effect should be the major source of agency. It is where agency meets storyness. The interesting thing is, the fact that at first the user is not aware of the plastics they bring to the ocean is in accordance with our intention to highlight the lack of consciousness when we are producing plastic waste. Rather than an interaction that the user carries out, it is more an unavoidable property of the character – everyone who consumes plastic products inevitably produces non-degradable waste.
That said, I did regret a little bit about how the plastic spawning looked in the final version, because somehow the character moving mechanism interfered with the plastic spawning script. When I was working on the plastics myself, it felt more ovious that the plastics were generated by the character; in the final version, it somehow looked like they came out of nowhere. That to some extent affected how the user would understand the project. Nonetheless, I think it was clever that we depended our project on the common knowledge a lot of people share on environmental protection. That made it a lot easier to create the emotional connection with the user.
In a nutshell, I really enjoyed the process of us attempting to find the sense of storyness we wanted and fit it into an environment with only two scenes. It was very different from actually writing a story: it wasn’t about a fascinating plot or distinctive characters; instead, it was about how to manipulate the user’s feelings and emotions by leading them into doing what we intended and designing consequences for their behavior. We had no more than five minutes to intrigue the user and convey our message. In order to do that, we created intense dramatic effects, and those were the essence of the agency and storyness in our project. I also loved how we contextualized and interpreted the theme of apocalypse as a consequence of lack of consciousness about environmental protection.