Author: Tiger Tian

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.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

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.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

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.

• 

• 

• 

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.

Project Description

With the idea to make a “3D Calculator,” Ben, Keyin, Yeji and I worked together on this project. Its purpose is to imagine how the everyday activity of using a calculator could happen in a very different way with the help of VR.

Upon entering the scene, the user will find themselves in a bedroom (scene 1). In the center of the room, there are a bed and a desk, on which is a calculator, lit up by the lamp beside. Once the user clicks on the calculator, they will be taken into an alternative world (scene 2) where the calculation takes place.

Here, the user can form a formula by creating and dragging around cubes that represent operators and operands. The cubes that make up the formula remain red if not connected to the green equal sign cube; once connected, they turn blue and the result will pop out automatically.

It feels very alternate because instead of pushing buttons on a traditional calculator, the user places numbers and operators in whichever way they want to on a 3D canvas that can contain infinitely long formulas. They can actually place the cubes in specific ways to embody the logic behind the calculation, while digits on a small screen won’t be able to do so. Moreover, the technology of VR allows us to turn a electronic device into an entire environment.

Process and Implementation

Before making up our minds on 3D calculator, our team discussed a few ideas. From pet keeping, programming to barbecuing, we kind of traversed the spectrum of interaction: human-animal interaction, human-computer interaction, and human activities involving non-responsive objects.

We finally settled on 3D calculator, as all of us agreed that the idea of being able to create and snap together virtual cubes sounded cool and futuristic. Personally, I was interested in how it could embody both the everyday-ness and the alternate-ness. Calcutor is a common device that people are very familiar with, and the action of using it takes place in a lot of scenarios in our daily life; but by reimagining calculator within a VR context, we introduce to the user a brand new interface, where they get to experience a different set of operations. These new operations might open up the door to a lot of new possibilities of how everyday activities could be done in easier ways. Specifically, with this project, we want to demonstrate that activities requiring a strong sense of logic, such as mathematical calculation, and even programming / coding, could take on a more graphic and more intuitive approach. Once users get familiar with this kind of operations, tasks may be done more efficiently.

We divided the work in developing this project into two parts: building the everyday environment, and building the core interaction with cubes. Keyin and I took on the former, so I will first elaborate on the design of the bedroom scene (scene 1) with respect to the following aspects, and then introduce briefly the calculator scene (scene 2) Ben and Yeji built.

• Purpose
• Identities
• Design: furniture, room structure and lighting
• Interactions

Purpose The question to answer before doing anything is, what is the purpose of scene 1? I expected our scene to act as a friendly starting point for the user, where they would instantly feel familiar.

Identities This required us to create a homely and realistic atmosphere for the scene to be as immersive as possible. Therefore, we decided that building a bedroom would be an easy way to achieve the purpose, as a strong feel of warmth and coziness is often attached to bedrooms, and the identities above wouldn’t be too hard to realize with appropriate design.

• 

• 

Furniture We started with the bed at the center of the room, which has a very realistic texture that gives it a cozy feel. A nightstand was placed right next to the bed. Then we found a desk asset with incredible details, and put it in front of the bed as the platform where the calculator would locate. Alongside the calculator, we placed some other stationery as well as a lamp on the desk in an untidy manner to reflect the casual bedroom identity. The chair came into the scene for a similar purpose. Other decorations include the curtains, a plant at the corner, and three pictures on the wall.

Room structure A significant feature of the room is that it has a staircase on one side. The idea began with me suggesting that there certainly needed to be a door in the room, but Keyin added a staircase instead, which I later found to be a better idea. If we had a door there, it would most possibly not be functional; the staircase, despite not being functional (walkable) either, opens up the space and extends the user’s perception of the house. Since there is a second floor in the house, the user wouldn’t feel isolated in an enclosed space. The large French window provides a view of sunset and serves for that purpose as well.

• 

• 

• 

Lighting We chose the time of dusk as the background because it brings out a serene feel and leaves much room for us to create our own lighting. The bedroom contains two spot lights casting light from above, each having a gentle intensity and a warm yellow-ish hue. The light on the second floor is in fact brighter, so that it may leave the user imagining a brighter space in other parts of the house even though they cannot go upstairs. Not to forget that the desk lamp produces a spot light focusing on the calculator, highlighting the most important object in the room and encouraging the user to interact with it.

Interactions There aren’t many interactions in this scene, the only ones being that the user can click on the calculator or push around the chair. Later after we combined our scene with Ben and Yeji’s, Ben added the interaction of picking things up and throwing them around. We initially enabled the chair to be moved around in order to enrich the gaming aspect of the project; after other objects became movable as well, I found the entire scene a lot more interactive, realistic and engaging.

The calculator clicking interaction was made using RayCast, which basically means that as the user looks around, the center of their view remains a cursor that can be used to click on things. When the cursor is pointed at the calculator, the calculator turns blue, suggesting that it is clickable. Once it is clicked on, the user will be teleported to scene 2. From the desk lamp to the color changing, we tried to make it as intuitive as possible for the user to nevigate themselves and access all the interactions.

Scene 2 When the user clicks on the calculator, everything in the room disappears except the calculator, which remains at the same place, while a sci-fi-ish scene appears and replaces the bedroom. The calculator apparently acts as a portal from the real world to the alternate reality, and the reason that it is still present in the latter is that by clicking on it, the user can return to the bedroom scene, which is suggested by its unchanged position.

• 

• 

• 

• 

Since we compromised the project for PC platform instead of Vive, the experience of this core interaction feels a lot different from how we intended it, but the scene per se very much lives up to my expectation. (Thanks to Ben and Yeji’s hard work!) The glow-y cubes work well with the blue/black grid floor and the darkened background, creating a futuristic feel that contrasts greatly with scene 1 and presents the alternate-ness as expected.

The interaction is not as intuitive as it would be with a VR device. It involves several keys on the keyboard and all three mouse buttons, due to the amount of operations needed in this scene. Operations including choosing an operand / operator, creating / moving / deleting a cube, as well as walking around.

Reflection/Evaluation

One thing that’s been bugging me is the amount of intuitiveness that our project provides for the user. In other words, is this way of doing calculation simpler than the regular way? How is it more appealing? The core problem is, how many old conventions are we taking into consideration, and what new conventions are we trying to build with such an interface? In this sense, I think this project stayed far away from a lot of conventions of using a calculator. Our interface does not include a digit keyboard, which would be very familiar to most people. We don’t even have all the digits and operators laid out for the user to choose from; they have to scroll their mouse wheel to find what they want instead. Moreover, placing a cube at a desired position within a 3D space appears difficult through a 2D display, because the sense of depth is very much missing.

But in the meantime, I can’t help but wonder what the project would be like in VR. Obviously, the user would have more dexterity in VR with both hands available for more instinctive movements. Probably it will come in handy and be faster than the traditional calculator once the user gets used to the operations. Like I said, the ultimate goal is to explore the possibilities for 3D interfaces to become a common operating language, which could serve for more purposes, more than just doing mathematical calculation.

Agency Question

Like Murray said, the pleasure of agency could come from double clicking on a file icon and seeing it open, or obtaining a desired output from a piece of code. In our project, creating cubes to form an equation provides the same type of pleasure, which is equivalent to pushing down buttons on a calculator and getting the correct result. I think the summit of pleasure comes when the user places the equal sign cube at the end of their formula. Whether they have a desired result or not, it is meaningful to see that result coming out and fulfilling their expectation, because it is generated from something they build. The colors of the cubes (red when incorrect or not connected, blue otherwise) as well as the grid on the floor help inspire the user to create things in their way and anticipate the result.

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.

• 

• 

• 

• 

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.

• 

• 

• 

• 

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.