Keyin Wu – Alternate Realities

Final Project Documentation

Escape Room: Watching

Documented by: Keyin

Group Member: Ben, Chris

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

— This project is basically an escape room designed for Google Cardboard environment. The game begins in a hospital and our protagonist will be restricted on a wheelchair while moving around and seeking clues. As the user explores our world, he/she is supposed to feel the anomalies and get into our story that it’s essentially an AI/machine-dominated world. Our character, as a human, is only a research object and is monitored all the time. We have a few designs based on this setting which I’ll explain more in the next session.

— But also, since we didn’t describe the background obviously by words, users are welcome to relate different things during in-person experience and we are also open to other possible interpretations if any. I believe after polishing up our indicative designs, different understandings can also add to the depth of our work.

— Based on the story we have in mind, we go with the psychological horror style to build the space. There’s no screams or ghost faces to scare people. But we do have multiple sound effects to create the skeptical and tense atmosphere. To meet the conditions of using a Google Cardboard, the main interaction in our project is only clicking as well as long clicking, the former for interaction and the latter for movement. The wheelchair setting was also made to fit how Google cardboard works, because we were intended to let the user sit on a chair and use Google Cardboard to play. At the same time, the wheelchair restriction can give the user different experience on moving around the space and pushing or interacting with objects.

PROCESS & IMPLEMENTATION

— When building the space, we made a basic hospital structure with a few sections. At first, our mood board chose some horror style, but later we went with psychological horror and tried to create a creepy clean style. That’s why we mostly used white, grey and red. As we were searching for assets, we didn’t find any that was very suitable. So we just chose a zombie hospital asset as it has a complete set of hospital stuff. And we set the light in a sense that it looks like psychological horror.

In order to construct our story, we’ve made effort on a few designs.

1. Player Setting

— The player is sitting on the wheelchair where he can only rotate his head to look around or move the wheelchair to move around. The movement is controller by character controller. When he moves, there will also be animation of his hands moving as he’s pushing the wheels. The angle the user can look up and down is also limited (delta y from -90 to 90) so that it composes a reasonable field of view for the person. The speed of the movement is also set as a relatively low value considering the situation, and it also turned out appropriate during the play testing.

Player Animation

2. Scenes/Objects Consistency

— To match the body model style, the clue photos of the character are also made in the similar low poly style. The elements of red circles and red rectangles are also applied in photo collection interface and the ending scene.

— The photos were made as if taken by CCTV. If you notice the dates on them, you may realize all of the four photos are about the same person, our protagonist, from young to old. Connected with the space the player is locked in, we are trying to convey that the player is undergoing monitor the whole time which may raise questions to the player. Who stands behind the monitor? What’s the relationship between the space and the player? What is he doing here or who locks him here for purposes? And the player could possibly have some answers by the end of the game.

3. Sound Effects Design

— We specially included some sound effects to make our scenes more expressive and immersive and also gives the player some motivation to get out instead of only idling in the space.

— Besides the basic wheelchair sound effect, there’re sounds only played once, sounds within a range of area, and sounds that will be triggered if the user enters certain space. The broadcasting sound at the beginning is cut off abruptly. The combination of unknown footsteps and baby cries near the mortuary is meant to create some tension and indicate something undesired may happen. There’s also one moment when the sound of moving beds is left-panned to make the user feel something is on the left. But when he steps out of the trigger area, the sound will stop suddenly as if what he heard is only his illusion. Generally the sound effects are designed to strengthen our “storyness” as well as improving the user experience.

Sound Effects Demo

4. Ending Scene

— After the player gather all of four photos and notice the dates on them, he could open the door by connecting all the dates as the password. The game is ended at that moment. However, we connect the door animation with another ending scene to make our story more complete.

— Instead of the first perspective, this ending scene is a third perspective from a CCTV screen. There also includes the audio of computer talking which can help with our illustration of the story idea. It echos with the previous four photos which are taken by CCTV and indicates that the player is still under monitor. What we want to convey is that it seems the player has escaped successfully. But does he really escape?

Keypad + Door Animation + Ending Scene

5. Other details

— We’ve turned the player to face the album on the bed at the very beginning of the game because it’s an important clue in the whole process. We also have a glowing effect on the album to highlight it. By the way, if the player doesn’t interact with the album at the beginning, he’s still able to go through the process and whenever he comes back, he can get the clue that there’re four photos in total. And although we refer to it as an album for convenience, in the story it’s more like some archives or records about our character.

— At the keypad interface, we’ve provided an indication that there’re five digits in total if the user clicks “?” at the right bottom. The player could thus more easily think of the highlighted dates which are right five digits in total on all the photos.

EVALUATION

— Generally I think we did a great job in composing all the stuff together to build the scenes and making effort on constructing a relative solid story background. Meanwhile it’s also very playable and can make sense to people who play it. In terms of Google Cardboard environment, it can also fit very well and the use of Google Cardboard would definitely be a plus to our project.

— The only thing is that due to time constraint, we did not add intuitive word/visual descriptions of our story. On the one hand, it can be a style that we leave some space for users to imagine the whole story by themselves depending on what they get. On the other hand, for users who are eager to know what the exact story is, what we’ve presented may not be enough for them. If we have more time, we could add some introductory animation at the beginning or conclusive words in the end to reveal what the whole story is like. Also we could add more ways of interaction the user can experience. One last little thing is that in the ending scene, we forgot to show time at the corner, because a CCTV monitor should always record time.

Development Journal – Final Project

12 April – Brainstorming + Story Board

For this project, Ben, Chris and I decided to go for the theme of escape room. We came up a few ideas when trying to narrow down what specific scenario we wanted to create. And finally we chose to make the protagonist sit on a wheelchair while moving around and seeking clues. We will let the user sit on a chair to simulate the experience on a wheelchair, which can also fit how Google cardboard work. The wheelchair not only gives the limitation in terms of movement in the game, it may also be a core part of our story. We are going to choose the story background in a theater/hospital/laboratory/retirement house because the wheelchair can be connected to these locations. And it will also relate to the protagonist’s experience or identity or gives him reason to take some action.

So far, we spent most of time deciding on the general direction and the mechanic of how the wheelchair will move. We also started to compose our story and design the process of escaping to make the whole thing cohesive and intriguing.

20 April – Paper Prototype

We discussed some story details and made this paper prototype for first testing. We only put the key objects on this simple hospital map to give the general idea. The character can move around on a wheelchair to explore this space. During the paper prototype testing, we’ve received some feedback about the navigation and the style. After the session we also reconsidered how we’re going to construct our story in a better way.

26 April – Scene Layout

We’ve figured out how to control the character. Basically the character will move forward by a long clicking and be able to interact with objects by a short click.

For the scene part, I started from building a basic hospital structure with a few sections. At first, our mood board chose some horror style, but later we found we all preferred more psychological horror and tried to go for a creepy clean style. As we were searching for assets, we didn’t find any that was very suitable. So we just chose a zombie hospital asset as it has a complete set of hospital stuff. But I don’t want to go for the exact same style as provided in its demo scene, so I tried to find a way to set the light in a sense that it look like psychological horror. And we all agreed on this change and these are what we have right now.

Layout

4 May – Play Testings

This week we did two play testings. In the first testing we had two separate builds: one on the movement and the other on the scene. But in the second testing we were able to combine the two parts and mostly tested on the space scope, speed choice as well as the general scene settings.

Here’re some points I gathered through the testing:

To provide the motivation to escape;
To limit the angle to look down;
To add more stuff / interactions;
To add some audio to wheelchair;
To add some glowing effect;
To implement object pickup animation;

There’re quite a few useful points and we were also inspired by some of them. By the end of the project, we only had the last point left due to time constraint.

6 May – Ending Scene

To make our story complete, we also decided to add an ending scene after the character managed to escape. Instead of the first perspective, this ending scene is a third perspective from a monitor screen.

When building this scene, the monitor screen is in fact a green filter on UI canvas and the red circle is made by two cylinders. One more detail is in the animation of the player that he will idle back and forth for a few frames before leaving. So it’s more natural to transit from the last scene. Later, this scene also included the audio of computer talking which can help with our illustration of the story idea.

9 May – Sound Effects + Story Reconstruction + Photos Editing

To create more immersive experience and give the character motivation to escape, we think adding audios can be a good way. Besides the basic wheelchair sound effect, there’re sounds only played once at the beginning, sounds within a range of area, and sounds that will be triggered if the user enters certain space. The combination of unknown footsteps and baby cries near the mortuary is meant to create some tension and indicate something undesired may happen. There’s also one moment when the sound of moving beds is left-panned to make the user feel something is on the left. But when he steps out of the trigger area, the sound will be cut off as if what he heard is only illusions.

The tricky settings in this part is that the spatial blend should be set as 1 and doppler factor as 0 to achieve the 3D sound effect. Also for the sound of wheelchair moving, it’s not natural to use Play/Stop to control. Instead I found adjusting the volume only can be a better solution.

Sound Effects Demo

For our background story, originally we set it as a world of selling happiness, and that’s why the clue photos are all laughs. However as we kept polishing up narrative details. We think replacing it as an AI/machine-dominated world can make more sense and be more consistent. So we started to guide our narration to that direction.

To match the style of body model, I also updated clue photos as follows:

12 May – Interaction + Scenes Transition + Keypad GUI

As we separately did some portion of the project, we finally combined all of them which includes the wheelman animation, the door animation, keypad system, scenes transition and photo collection interface.

WheelMan Animation

Originally we had some texts and a flickering cursor on canvas in the ending scene, but it was not elegant enough, so we used a dissolve effect to do the transition between the two scenes.

Original Try with Text Animation

For the keypad system here, we also fixed every problem we met, like fixing the trigger state and placing it right in the center. Also, there’s a “?” at right bottom of the keypad by clicking which you can get an indication of “five-digit password” on screen. At first the user needs to click again after the door opens to enter the next ending scene, but it’s not that intuitive to make him click again. So we just use an “Invoke” function to make a delay after the door animation so that the scene transits more naturally.

Door Animation with transition to Ending Scene

For photo collection, when the user clicks the glowing album at very beginning, there will be four red rectangles appearing at left bottom to indicate there’re four photos in total. By clicking different objects, the user can collect photos one by one and get the clues.

We also met a weird camera shaking issue which we are still not sure about the reason. But we later solved it by simply fixing any rotation axis.

Reading Response3: Invisible Cities

Is there a city that stood out, or that you found especially memorable? Why? Does any city remind you of a city you have lived in or visited, and if so, in what ways?

One of the cities I found especially memorable is Chloe, where “the people who move through the streets are all strangers”. In Chloe, people imagine stories with others in mind at encounter, but never stop and greet each other. It stood out to me because my thoughts changed more or less along with reading each paragraphs and overall it inspired me to think a lot. After reading the first paragraph, the city impressed me because the social life in this city diverges a lot from what we are doing and taught to do in daily life. The great difference brought me a feeling of isolation that I can hardly imagine in detail how people behave in Chloe. Then, by the description of diverse citizens in the second paragraph, the city Chloe gave me a stronger feeling of disorder — the inhabitants are of distinct characteristics while they all stick to one rule of socializing. Since when we talk about diversity of people, we will relate to freedom and self-realization. But in Chloe, diversity coexists with the oppression, the word in my understanding lying behind the strange rule of socialization. And its last paragraph echoes my thoughts because in Chloe men and women also have desires and dreams, which unfortunately will be destroyed in the end. However, the existence of the phantom makes the whole thing more creepy and scary, at the same time leaving me more questions: does the phantom refer to anything; why is there the phantom; what is the relationship between the habitants and the phantoms. Moreover, the subtitle is “trading cities” for Chloe but I cannot connect the ideas in a persuasive logic. Remaining these questions in mind and looking back on how I thought about this city along the reading process, I found there is intersection between Chloe and cities in our real world, but it is interesting that I remembered it because there’s part of it I cannot relate to.

Esmeralda, city of water, naturally reminded me of Venice, also known as a water city, which I visited last winter. When I read “a network of canals and a network of streets span and intersects each other”, things appearing in my mind is when I followed Google Map direction on my phone to walk through the narrow streets and cross countless canals in Venice. When reading “to go from one place to another you have always the choice between land and boat”, I recalled my experience to take ferries from Murano to Burano in Venice and due to limited ferry routes and times, I waited on the pier for quite a few minutes. Of course, the network in Venice is not as dynamic as that in Esmeralda since Venice only has one level, at least from my experience. But same with Esmeralda, the route from one point to the other tends to be a “zigzag” and has a couple of alternative plans. In summary, Esmeralda can remind me of Venice because they both have special characteristics like abundant with water, having a network of canals and a network of streets, which differentiate them from other cities. And when reading the words about Esmeralda, my memories in Venice with matched images would pop up and make up my imagination about the city Esmeralda.

Project 2 Documentation

3D Calculator

Documented by: Keyin

Group Member: Tiger, Ben, Yeji

Project Description

This project is meant to reimagine using a calculator in a three-dimension space. Instead of pressing buttons at fixed positions to get a result at a fixed screen, doing calculation within our project can have more freedom and the visualized process in 3D can break the regular mode but create a functional and portal experience with a calculator. We built the calculator world as an alternate world which is composed of blue grids and glowing cubes. The participant can move, turn around and even float in the sky while manipulating the cubes to do the calculation. Besides the calculator world, we also made a realistic bedroom scene where the alternate calculator world can be triggered by the normal calculator on the desk. Rules in the two worlds are quite different and we tried to utilize the realistic bedroom world to exaggerate the alternate part in the calculator world.

Process and Implementation

Initially after we did the brainstorming, we had quite a few ideas that were possible to extend. We finally chose the one with the idea of 3D cubes. The other ideas, for example, building an alternate backyard, can be fun as well, but we prefer to play around the flexibility of simple 3D shapes in a limited space and make things creative but also simpler and clearer. We thought about the application of 3D cubes including doing the calculation and doing the programming, because most of our group have CS background and these are indeed everyday activities for us. In this project, we implemented the 3D calculator.

The scene would start from an ordinary bedroom and the participant is able to move around in a room scale. When the participant picks up a calculator on the desk, he will be transported to another alternate world with only the calculator and glowing cubes in sight. Originally in VR environment, we thought about making the cubes throwable and the result would drop down from somewhere in the sky so that it could be very immersive and alternate. But later since the project was redirected to be built on PC, in order to adapt to the PC experience where we mostly interact with the mouse, keyboard and the screen, we simplified the effects and dragging objects became our main way of interaction in both scenes.

We were firstly divided into two to do the two scenes separately and then combined our work together to make it a complete project. When we worked on our own scene, we also thought about the consistency like how to change the scenes and the way of interaction. Tiger and I were working on the first scene and we initially used SceneManager to shift between two different scenes. Ben and Yeji played with visibility in the same scene instead. But it seems both ways can work and here we go with the latter one, because in this case, it’s more convenient to match the camera setting in the two scenes. We met some problems when we did combination, mostly in losing some material and texture. But we fixed them one by one and also improved the effect on the calculator when doing the transition.

The calculator scene is utilizing snapping to connect cubes and do calculation. By applying the different movement speed and rule, the participant can gain more freedom in this scene. The cubes that involves calculation will turn blue while others remain red, and the result will pop up on top of the “=” cube. If there’s anything wrong with the arrangement of the cubes, the result will show “Error”. As for mouse interaction, it includes left clicking, right clicking, middle clicking and scrolling. It may take time to get used to using this 3D calculator, but it indeed provides a total different experience for this everyday activity.

More detailed process can be found in Development Journal. And here are demos of our two scenes.

First Realistic Scene

Second Alternate Scene

Evaluation

The alternate part of our project lies in the calculator world which can be obviously sensible due to the different environment setting from the real world and the unlimited movement direction for the participant. To guide the participant to interact with the calculator, we made the glowing effect on the calculator whenever the center of the screen is directed to it. Accordingly in the alternate world, we have a big glowing cube functioning as a desk and the calculator is put in the center with the same glowing effect whenever directed. It gives the indication that the calculator is a switch to shift between two scenes. However, compared to the natural interaction of throwing and moving objects in the first realistic scene, the way of interaction in the second alternate scene may not be that intuitive because we are using different clicks on the mouse. But we think adding some instruction can be useful. In general, our project has successfully achieved what we want to create. Even though we deviated form the very original thoughts which was set in a VR world, we still watched the core interaction of our project and made the experience as enriched as possible on PC. The different choices made in the premise of different environment settings is also part of our learning experience.

Agency

The main interaction of our project is no doubt playing with the 3D calculator where the participant can clicking, dragging and moving with keyboard. The action is meaningful because it will finally show the result a person using a calculator is expecting. As I mentioned in the evaluation, we could make the way of interaction more obvious by adding some instruction. But thinking from another angle, the participant may have a chance to explore the alternate world in his/her own understanding by figuring out how to make it work, considering the WASD keyboard and mouse interaction are very intuitive on PC. With very simple setting at the beginning where there’s only a cube with “=“ and a cube functioning as a controller at hand side, It should be easy to find out how to create new cubes and connect them. Besides, we also have designed an action of shifting between two different things. We made the position of calculator fixed and added the highlight effect when it’s hovered in order to indicate it is a medium connecting the two scenes. It also makes sense in a way the participant will desire to see the working space of a 3D calculator when he chooses to click the glowing calculator on the desk. Moreover, we picked the starting point right in front of the staircase in the first scene because we want to encourage the participant to move around and explore by him/herself. And that’s how we think about the idea of agency along the process.

Development Journal – Project 2

3 Mar

For the interaction project, our group discussed several possibilities among which we finally chose the one with the idea of 3D cubes. The other ideas, for example, building an alternate backyard, can be fun as well, but we prefer to play around the flexibility of simple 3D shapes in a limited space and make things creative but also simpler and clearer.

The scene would start from an ordinary room and the participant is able to move around in a room scale. When the participant pick up a calculator or turn on the computer in the room, he will be transported to another alternate world in some way with only the calculator or the computer still in sight. The background will be different from the initial room view. Instead, there will be a lot of 3D cubes floating in the dark which represent the operands and operators or programming statements. The participant can use dragging and throwing to control these cubes and get the result of calculation or run some certain code. The result might be dropped from high in front of him. By reimagining the process of using a calculator and a computer in this 3D way, we would like to create a totally different experience which can be more involved and visualized. And here is our story board written by Ben.

10 Mar

We started form the first realistic bedroom scene. We built the room scene from scratch including picking the proper material and importing furniture models with consistent style. Here we also added the Rigidbody and Collider to the chair so that the chair could be movable and interact with the participant.

After gathering things together, we started to design the light settings to create the feeling of warm and cozy. We made the whole environment relatively dark as the sunset and the light in the room is slight but warm. To highlight the calculator on the desk, we chose a lamp to project light right on the calculator. And the lamp itself was not lit at first, but we put a bulb in it by adding a sphere with emission to make it look natural. We put the staircase in the room to extend the space and create more layers in this scene.

The window is basically an empty object with a collider because we didn’t find proper glass material. Later we also added the curtains to make it more like a window. As for the skybox, we chose a sunset scene to match our whole warm atmosphere. And we adjusted the shadow to make the whole thing more coherent.

14 Mar

For the interaction of changing scenes, Tiger and I were firstly using SceneManeger as follows to shift between two different scenes. It required to build two scenes at the same time and we added a white dot in front of the camera as the cursor. But later since Ben and Yeji used OnMouseDown to play with the visibility in the same scene, we go with their solution considering it’s more convenient to match camera setting in the realistic world and alternate world.

When combining our work together, we decided the light effect on the calculator and made the two scenes more consistent in terms of the objects position and the way of interaction. We also spent time fixing the problems like lost materials and textures as well as some awkward movement of our character. Also, we thought more carefully about some design details and did a little user testing within our group to make the project more complete.

Reading Response2

How would a response in VR seem intelligent (give an example, if possible)?

Responsive environment can perceive human behavior and response with auditory or visual feedback, which can be intelligently presented in virtual reality situation. Virtual reality is more immersive and focused on personal experience than other media like movies or books. So the participant can have more freedom to behave compared with sitting on a fixed position, surrounded by many other people and facing a fixed screen. With the ability of capturing the motion of human’s entire body, data VR can read will be much more complex and diverse so that after being processed by control systems it can generate more complicate responses and allow the intelligent learning process. VR may bot necessarily designed complicate in terms of the presence but the underlying formulas in making the response are on a much higher level than others, in a sense that they can specially fit a participant after him using it for a certain amount of time. For example, different form mobile phone games, a VR game of some activity simulation can possibly adjust its environment or game settings by reading the player’s input during the game time. The speed of movement, the scope of action, the reaction time or his height can matter and the game can be adapted to its player to build a most suitable playing environment for him. After the new environment is provided, new data of the interaction input can be sensed and by processing it again, the game model can be continuously modified.

Project 1 Documentation

Golden, Silver or Wood?

Project Description

Once upon a time, a man had a tree branch which looked common but was left by his mother. One day he accidentally lost the tree branch in water and found himself somehow trapped on a little island. Then he came across a water god who found three tree branches for him, among which one is golden, one is silver and another one is ordinary. And it was the time for him to make a choice.

I made this story as the background for my alternate world and it was adapted from a traditional myth. The identity I want to show is mysterious fantasy with uncertainty. It should raise the curiosity, look explorable but feel abnormal at some point. I would say it’s not a fancy and harmless fairy tale, but somewhere that can have potential dangers or unknown results.

Process and Implementation

I firstly created the terrain and built the water surface with online assets. But to increase the immersive feeling, I also tried to fill up the space above. So I made the 3D model of a group of clouds in Rhino and then imported them into Unity. I decided to apply water material to them as well. In this case, the floating clouds can also be viewed as bubbles, which can indicate the unrealistic and alternate part of the environment. And it also raised the question that whether it is on a piece of real land or in an underwater world.

Besides the model of clouds, I also made this human face model to represent the water god role in my alternate world. It is in low poly and I still applied the water material to match his identity. Since it would be boring if it’s simply static, I modified the material and changed parameters to separate parts of his face, which makes him more dynamic and vivid as a floatable and abstract god figure. I made this face super big compared with other elements, so that he can be emphasized in the whole scene and it also indicates the god power is beyond imagination. Moreover, the face doesn’t look benign and I did this on purpose to make the whole thing less harmless.

To create a spacious view with spatiality, I tried to make the plants relatively small than the landscape and also played around the field view of the camera a lot. However with a larger field view, there will be more easily distorted view at the corner when rotating the camera. So I changed back the camera view to normal. One more detail about the plants is the contradiction between the two islands, where one is full of withered plants while the other is more vividly growing. It’s one more setting I made aimed to make the world feel tricky and abnormal.

For the three tree branches, I picked the tree branch model and applied three different materials. I also added emission to make themselves glow a little bit. To further highlight them, I made three glowing water spheres to wrap them. To decide the position of these three spheres took me a while. Initially I placed them in front of the god in a row, but I found it would cover part of the god face and look disconnected in the scene. So I then placed them surrounding the camera in three directions. In this case, when the camera rotates, there can always be one of them as a main object in the field view. I believe can add to mystery and raise some curiosity.

As for the skybox, I meant to make the surroundings dark with the only strong light behind the god face. And the light look extremely strong when the user faces the god directly. And it functions similarly as the exaggerated size of god face. Also I manipulated the directional light mainly to make the environment dark but some building details still visible.

Lastly, since my water is very dynamically floating, so I think adding some audio can help strengthen the immersive feeling. So there’s also some peaceful water floating sound in the background.

Reflection

The final result is very close to my initial assumption, since when I look around, the mixed feelings include the desire to explore, the hesitation to break the current peace, the slight fear to face the water god directly and the joy to enjoy the appealing fantasy. I don’t have much curiosity because I know what’s going on here, but from user experience testing, people will always be curious for the first time. I think these feelings can match the identity I set because fantasy brings delight and joy while uncertainty brings fear and suspect. However, since I have a lot of real-time reflection in my project and it takes time to render, when I open the file on PC, it would be awkward to turn around because the views change slowly. But I assume the reader on Android phone with Google Cardboard can be much better and smoother.

Development Journal – Project 1

12 FEB

I was inspired by a traditional myth and would like to create a myth world with fantasy. The myth story is about the river god who provides a multiple choice for a boy to test his honesty. The boy is a carpenter and he lost his axe in the river. Then the river god showed up with a golden axe and asked him if that is his. But the boy answered no. The river god then took out another axe which is a silver one and asked him again. But the boy still said no. At last, the river god took out the original axe and returned it to the boy. In addition, to reward his honesty, he also gave the boy the other two golden and silver axes. Initially, I would like to design my own three choices and by choosing different options, the scene will change as the story goes in different ways. But considering the focus of this first project and the feedback from the professor, I decided to only keep my first scene at this moment. So I would like the character to picture himself/herself in a story and myth, which can raise his/her curiosity to explore in some sense and create a feeling of alternate reality.

Different from the original story, my main character here is lost in a magic place and he/she wants to find ways back home. The river god will show up and give the three options at a time. It’s not testing the honesty anymore but can possibly help or hinder the main character going back. To start with, I have some online pictures about the river as reference, since my story is going to happen near water. I don’t want it to be too bright and cute but maybe focus more on the feeling of mysterious.

Aside from that, I created a simple storyboard to illustrate the positions of my main objects in the scene, which includes the god, the three options (three flowers in this case) and water. I originally have four scene in total and this is just the first one, so it’s very simple but also direct. But I will definitely add more stuff like more lands or creatures in the water.

For the possible difficulty I may come cross, I think one of the biggest one is how to create a god, because I don’t want it to be too realistic and hopefully it should echo with the style of the whole environment.

13 FEB

I firstly created the terrain and built the water surface with online assets. The water material is dynamic, and I adjusted the parameters to make it match my desired style better. I pick a spot for the main camera which is a small piece of land separate from others, by which I would like to create a sense of isolation for the person who is going to look around from that spot.

Then I started to plant trees on the lands. I initially planed to have trees all over the islands. But it seemed that it would take too much laptop power and time. So I randomly create some different plants, mostly at the side the camera will directly face. To create a spacious view with spatiality, I tried to make the plants relatively small than the landscape and also played around the field view of the camera a lot. However with a larger field view, there will be more easily distorted view at the corner when rotating the camera. So I changed back the camera view to normal. One more detail about the plants is the contradiction between the two islands, where one is full of withered plants while the other is more vividly growing. It’s one more setting I made aimed to make the world feel tricky and abnormal.

To increase the sense of immersive, I tried to fill up the space in the field view. For the sky part, I wanted to add some clouds. I made the 3D model of the group of clouds in Rhino and then imported them into Unity. And I decided to apply water material to them as well. In this case, the floating clouds can also be viewed as bubbles, which can indicate the unrealistic and alternate part of the environment. And it also raised the question that whether it is on a lake/sea or in an underwater world. I duplicated a couple of clouds to make them surround the whole piece.

In terms of the creating river god (in this case water god may be more precise), I also imported a model I made in Rhino. It is a human face in low poly and I still apply the water material to match his identity. Since it is boring if it’s static, I modified the material a little bit to separate parts of his face and they are also dynamic, which again match his identity as a floatable and abstract god figure. Besides, I made this face super big compared with other elements, so that he can be emphasized in the whole scene and it also indicates the god power is beyond imagination.

18 FEB

As for the skybox, I meant to make the surrounding dark with the only strong light behind the god face. Instead of a harmless fairy tale, I want to present the mystery with uncertainty that there could be potential dangers or tricks when the user is exploring this world.

I also need to create three options that the god provides. Basically I picked the tree branch model and applied three different materials. I also added emission to make themselves glow a little bit. To further highlight them, I made three glowing water spheres to wrap them. To decide the position of these three spheres took me a while. At first I placed them in front of the god in a row, but later I found it would cover part of the god and look loose in the scene. So I then placed them surrounding the camera in three directions. In this case, when the camera rotates, there can always be a main object, the tree branch, in the field view. It indicated the current situation and I believe can raise some curiosity.

19 FEB

Since my water is very dynamically floating, so I think adding some audio can help strengthen the immersive feeling. So I added some peaceful water floating sound here.

At last, I manipulated the directional light mainly to make the environment dark but some building details still visible.

Reading Response1: Hamlet on the Holodeck, Chapter 3

Where do you think VR falls in terms of being an additive or an expressive form (or somewhere in between)?

Virtual Reality as a simulated experience seems like the sum of a body sensor and various existed mediums; however, instead of reckoning it as an additive form, we can hardly deny its expressive essence that differs it from other older traditions. VR is more than one plus one equals two, firstly because of the innovative form of 3D visuals. Even though 3D visuals can also be found in 3D films, only with the VR equipment can we have different perspectives when we move around our head or change position. The more you can explore by moving around, the more spacious the VR world feels. Since it also enables 360 degree presentation, it can more easily create an immersive sense, which adds to the possibility of the created world being more imaginative and unrealistic. Besides, rather than only using fingers to trigger some feedback in the case of computer, VR can receive a set of movements of human body which can be designed creatively. As VR tries to build a world around us, it can set rules directly to us instead of the character we control on the screen and thus the restriction and effect on the person’s behavior can also be a new sort of feedback we can get. Moreover, due to the illusion that VR can bring sometimes, the moment when we exit VR can cause a lot of human emotions as we wake up from a dream, which is also very special of VR but different form other mediums. In short, the expressive attribute of VR lies in the way the inside VR world can be explored, the way the interaction between human’s body and the environment happens, the way the person can act in a world that may have completely different rules and perspectives, the way to exit and the way human’s senses can be allured.