Author: Nhi Pham Le Yen

PROJECT MEMBER: Luize, Nhi, and Tiger

PROJECT THEME: Apocalypse/Escape Room

IDEA DEVELOPMENT:

In our first meeting (via Zoom), we decided a few elements that we want to explicitly convey in our projects before brainstorming: 4 final project theme ideas (Apocalypse, Escape room, Wonderland, Create an interpretation of a city from Invisible cities), a fictional space, interactions, events, and the sense of storyness.

In the beginning, we thought of recreating 3 cities from Invisible cities: FEDORA, OLIVIA, ESMERALDA. The theme would be escape room & Invisible cities interpretation: link to the current situation where everyone is trapped in their own space and try to escape the state of mind, connecting with other people through the Internet – a way of escaping the reality we are living in right now. Each city has different unique inhabitants, for example, OLIVIA has skeletons since it reflects the industrialization and the repetitiveness of the work people do every day, etc.

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However, since our main focus of the project is the sense of storyness, we found that our approach of recreating the invisible cities did not reflect what we wanted. We brainstormed a new different idea of the escape room theme. The context would be: Protagonist (the user) is a prisoner, wakes up from amnesia, finds themselves in a dark small cell. There is a giant clock on the wall of the cell showing red digits and counting down from 1 hour. This, hopefully, triggers the anxiety and makes the user look for tools and try jailbreak. When the user successfully finds the door to escape, there would be different scenes waiting for them (representation of the past, present, and future of a person). In the final scene, the user can find the door to bring them back to reality. The whole message we want to present through this idea is that every moment in life is precious.
This is a better idea compared to the first, but we encountered one problem. Since each user will have their own experiences, there would be no generic way to layout the scenes that can evoke the feelings/emotions for the user to reflect on. Therefore, we decided to revise the idea into a more neutral setting, which is the undersea environment.

Final idea:

• Beginning scene: neutral, white background – a television (off) -> user must interact (turn on/off) the TV to enter the undersea alternate reality world.
• The same idea before but different scenes, different message: travel through time in the ocean to see how the environmental change reflects during each time period.
• THEME: Apocalypse
• The user would be under the sea, there would be a line (road) that indicates where the user should move to (sunken ship (1920), submarine (2020)) where they would find a button to enter the same scene 100 years later.
• The scenes (3 scenes), in each time period, you still have a clock/sign somewhere to indicate the time (years, explicitly)

• 1st scene (past, 1920): no plastic
• 2nd scene (present, 2020): a lot of plastic but still can be saved
• 3rd scene (future, 2120): a lot of plastic and no animals -> can’t be saved anymore. In this 3rd scene, the user will need to dig into the plastic in order to find the button and travel back to the current time (reality).

• You go back to the present (the beginning scene) and take action to do something to save the environment.
• Message: save the world before it’s too late.

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Some clarifications/class feedback/adjustments:

1. The meaning of the TV in the first and last scene: The user needs to interact with the TV in order to move to the undersea scene. What we had in mind was that we could try showing different scenes of the ocean before the user actually experiences it. It’s similar to the fact that most people would just know about the undersea world through the screen but not by actually experiencing it.

2. Reduce the number of scenes to 4-5 scenes: Though it’s a lot of scenes, it would basically come down to these 3 ideas: first is the TV scene which is extremely simple, second is the outside undersea scene (appear three times with different levels of destruction) and third is the inside scene (sunken ship and submarine). In short, we only layout 3 main scenes and then replace a few things in each scene to demonstrate what we want.

3. The use of the button (click): not to have a literal button that triggers changes but something more subtle that blends in with the story – the nautilus

UPDATE April 17, 2020

Tiger and I finished the list of needed assets and created the first scene in our project. In this scene, we added a screen to the TV, which will be used to display the video later.

UPDATE April 20, 2020

After the lecture and class discussion on Procedural Authorship, our team felt like in our project, the players would be in the role of “Ghost without impact” since they will only observe what happened throughout 300 years and do not have any real impact on the environment. Hence, we decided to create some interactions between the user and the environment and limit our scenes to only 2 main scenes:

• The first scene: the users will enter an apartment (which is also their house in the game) where they see some snacks, water bottles, cups, and cans on the table and on the floor. They will get a chance to interact with the objects by grabbing and releasing them. They can also move by clicking the mouse (clicking the button in Google cardboard). The main point in the scene is when they turn on the TV and watch a video/a teaser of the experience they will experience next.
• The second scene: the users enter the underwater scene of 100 years ago. When they explore and interact with the undersea animal, they will leave a trace of plastic behind them (can be the cans, water bottles, or those cups that they saw in the first scene). We also hope to make the scene gradually polluted (sea animals/plants gradually die) that also represents the 3 initial 3 scenes we had in mind (1920, 2020, 2120).

UPDATE April 26, 2020

We finished laying out two basic scenes.

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In the first scene, I added objects for user interactions such as cans, chips, water bottles, coffee cups, and wrote scripts for PlayerGrab, PlayerWalk. I also wrote the SceneCtrl for switching scenes later. I also added event triggers for the objects so that when the users gaze at the objects, they can click the mouse/button in Google Cardboard to grab/release the objects.

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UPDATE April 29, 2020

After the team check-in, we all agreed on the current design of the environments (of the room and of the underwater scenes) and finalized the interactions we are going to add in the underwater scene. Currently, the user is able to look around using ctrl + moving the mouse in the direction they want to see. They also are able to walk by clicking the mouse (the button clicking in Google Cardboard) in the two scenes.

• The final interaction we are going to add in the white room is the user’s interaction with the TV. When the user looks at the TV, it is expected to change color from black to white. When the user clicks on the TV screen, it is going to show the below video, which is designed by our team member Luize.
• In the underwater scene, every time the user walks around, they will leave a trace of plastic behind them. They can also interact with the sea creatures and animals, and there would not be any immediate effects. However, the scene would change gradually: the environment becomes darker; the fish disappears gradually, etc. The user might not notice this but over a period of time, the change would be significant enough for them to realize their negative impact on the ocean.

UPDATE May 05, 2020

After the first playtesting, we realized that the first scene was not well designed and thus prevented the user from interacting with the objects in the room. Since we wanted to create a setting that truly reflects the daily life in an apartment, we decided to recreate the scene. I was in charge of redesigning the scene and adding interactions in this scene, while Tiger and Luize focused on redesigning the second scene.

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In this first scene, I added corals and sharks to hint the user towards something related to the underwater scene. When the user interacts with the objects (chips, coffee cup, milk bottle), they would be constrained on the vertical line, only moving up and down the objects. I limited the movement because I could not figure out the way to make it look natural when the user drops the object. Also, the user can click on the TV screen and the TV will show the video. After the video finishes, the coral on the TV shelf would be lit up, inviting the user to interact with the coral. When they click on the coral, it would lead them to the second scene.

In this underwater scene, after Tiger and Luize finished the design, I added the player walk movement in this scene to make it consistent with the movement in the previous scene.

UPDATE May 08, 2020

After the second playtesting, we realize that the constraint on the movement of the objects made the interaction meaningless. Professor Sarah Krom has been really supportive and helped us out with this problem (by adding a Rigidbody to the food object so we can take advantage of physics when dropping it). I am currently finishing the final touch on the interactions of these objects. I also added the script to hide cursor whenever the user enters the scene.

UPDATE May 11, 2020

The scripts for the food objects worked perfectly thanks to the help of Professor Sarah Krom. The user is able to grab the food objects and drops them anywhere they want. However, there was one problem I encountered when I was working on this part. As we grabbed 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.

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UPDATE May 12, 2020

While Tiger and I worked on the final touch, mostly for the second scene, for the project, Luize prepared the presentation. I replaced the FPS controller with the player object that can only move by clicking the mouse. Since the movement in the underwater is different from movement on the ground, we decided to keep the movement of the user near the seabed as if the user is swimming through the path.

We also adjusted the frameCount in the scripts to change the speed and the number of plastics, the change of light, and the disappearance of the fish in the ocean. We also adjust the switching scene script to enable to user to go back to the previous room, which is their daily life.

We also thought whether we should change anything in the first room when the user goes back. After discussion, we all agreed that we decided to keep it the same because without any change in behaviour, we cannot expect the change that easy in a person’s daily life. This is the representation of a infinite loop that can only be broken by the change in the awareness and behaviour. And though it is easy to realize how much plastic can be generated by one human being, it is challenging to replace the convenience of plastic in our daily life even though we realize the negative impact of it on the environment.

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Project theme: Peace & War

Project members: Neyva, Vince, and Nhi

Idea development: 

In our first project meeting, we built upon our class discussion about Lo-Tech VR Interaction Exercise, choosing boxing/punching as one of the two main interactions in the environment we want to create. I personally like this idea because it reflects a strong action and we can integrate any unexpected response out of a punch. The users may expect the punching bag to oscillate back and forth but would have no idea what effects/responses beyond the norm. Having said that, we also hope to develop our project to resonate with one of our class readings “Responsive Environments” by Myron Krueger, making the user experience and environment more interactive and responsive. For the second interaction, we first came up with the light switch, which is an everyday activity. We tried to connect the light switch with the punching action to make a cohesive story in an artificial reality. In the end, we slightly modified the idea and chose to go with a button on a pedestal. While discussing the two actions, punching a bag and pressing a button, which is almost part of our everyday life, we hope to alternate daily interactions into some dreamlike effects in our project. 

In specific, the setting would a theater stage where the punching bag and the button would be located on two opposite sides. We alternate the reality by:

• Punching the bag: every time the user punches the bag, besides the normal oscillation, there would be white/black doves flying out magically. The white doves represent peace, and the black doves represent the concept of war. 
• Pressing the button: this button would change the color of the doves. Every time the user presses the button, the color will change from white to black and vice versa.
• The stage: in the back of the stage, we are considering putting words/colors/pictures to reflect the theme of our project.

The main idea behind our project development is to demonstrate how fragile the peace and the world we are currently living in and taking for granted. When punching the bag, the users would tend to punch harder and harder to see if there is any change in the effects. Of course, there would be: more doves would fly out. However, if we take a closer look, such an increase in the intensity of each punch represents the rising conflicts among individuals/nations. Moreover, just by pressing one button, we are able to enter the state of war. This button is also the symbol of war threats such as nuclear power/weapons – by just pressing a button, peace no longer exists; a war has begun (white dove-peace changes to black dove-war). 

Project development:

We first sketched the initial 360 view of our project.

We have found a few free assets that could be beneficial for our project, including stage, punching bag, gloves.

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March 9, 2020

After our team discussion, we decided to minimize our interaction to only punching bag – birds flying out. The environment would be similar to the environment below

March 10, 2020

Vince and I worked on interactions of the punching bag.

The first problem we encountered was to control the boxing man when we moved the mouse. I wrote a separate script for the camera controller so that the camera position = box_man position + (proper) offset, and smoothened the interactions by using Vector3.Lerp(). However, after a few trials, we decided to use FPSController which already has the script and makes our life easier. We used the first person controller (FPSController) prefab (renamed it with “player”) and put the box_man prefab as a child of FPSController. By doing so, when we move the mouse, the boxing would move accordingly. We also positioned the camera and limited the looking angle so that we only see the hands of the boxing man.

The other part we worked on is collision detection. We decided to put the script of collision detection on the punching bag – every time there is a punch, the collision will be detected, and we will trigger the animation. In order to do that, besides detecting the collision, we also need to detect whether it is a proper punching action or not (since the collision detection can also happen when the boxing man just walks towards the punching bag and touch the bag ). We have two scripts for this: animationController and collisionDetector. In animationController, besides triggering the animation, we also put the Punch class that will return the anim.GetCurrentAnimatorStateInfo(0).normalizedTime in the get method. In collisionDetector, if we detect a collision and (call Punch and the time) < 1, we play the punch sound as if the person punches the bag.

March 11, 2020

After finishing the collision detection for the punching bag, we decided to use raycast to lighten the color of the punching bag whenever the player looks at it (to attract attention).

First, we reused the code we learned in class. However, the color did not change even though the debugging message indicated that the player was looking at the punching bag. We tried to switch the tag and the layer of different components related to the punching bag to see where the problem was. After around 1 hour, we found the problem.

First, hit.transform.gameObject did not work since the punching bag is the child component, and we need to use hit.collider.transform.gameObject instead.

Second, we can change the color of the prefab; however, the changes were not obvious to the player. Hence, we decided to change the emission color so the bag would brighten whenever the player looks at it.

March 12, 2020

We started working on generating birds every time the player punches the bag. We wrote the script birdGenerator.cs to handle this behavior.

In this script, we initialize an arraylist to store the birds. If we receive hit signal from collision detector from collisionDetector, we will instantiate a clone of the bird with different speed and position (using Random.Range) and add it to the arraylist. Later we just loop through this arraylist and set the moving direction and speed for the bird.

March 13, 2020

We worked on changing the angle of the bird animation and setting a flying path for the bird. Since we wanted the birds to fly out at a random angle, speed, and position around the punching bag, we decided to create a class bird and encapsulate all attributes into this class, and when we dynamically create the birds, we assign the random values to the attributes of the birds. This makes things consistent and easier for us if we want to add additional attributes in the future.

March 14, 2020

We worked on changing the color for the birds. The bird prefab originally had the color of red. Vince and I decided to experiment with the color when we received the environment from Neyva.

First, we tried giving each bird a random color (by giving random values for R,G,B). However, this variety of colors made the scene look extremely low poly and does not fit with what we had in mind for our final scene and our final concept of the project. Hence, we decided to go back to our original idea of doves and consistent white color for the bird.

We also decided to add background music to this project. Since we want to convey of dark & ominous environment

March 15, 2020

We worked on final touches for our project. After Neyva added the particle systems to create the fog effects, we decided not to use raycast anymore. The original idea of the raycast is to brighten up the punching bag a little bit to invite the player for a potential interaction. However, the fog makes the “brightening up” of the punching bag not obvious, so we in the end decided not to keep it. We also worked on other small fixes and on our presentation:

• Fix the position, density, and scale of the particle systems
• Fix the color of the clouds and the skybox
• Work on presentation and divide the part among team members

1. Idea Development:

My first idea of the project was inspired by one of my favorite movies since childhood “Alice in Wonderland.” I planned to recreate different scenes in the movie with a focus on landscape, lighting, interactions, and movements.

For example, by eating the mushrooms in one scene, the person can experience a change of scale.

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I sketched out different scenes I wanted to include in the project as indicated in the image attached below.

However, it would be extremely difficult for me to include all such details and interactions in my first project. After hearing suggestions and feedback from Professor Krom and other students, I reconsidered the feasibility of the project and decided to focus on one scene I want to create from the movie.

The concept I want to focus on is fear and mystery. Hence, I choose the scene where Alice meets the Cheshire Cat. I name the project “Wonderland Syndrome” as I want to evoke a feeling of confusion, fear,  and impossible to escape just like a syndrome for anyone who experiences it. The overall scene would be dark with the only source of light coming from the moon and a few fireflies. There is only a dead tree standing near the canyon, reaching the moon on the sky. This will create a sense of loneliness and desperation. On a branch of the tree, we will find the Cheshire Cat sitting there with its signature scary smile. There is only one straight (or curvy, I haven’t decided yet) road in the whole scene that leads to nowhere. Please find the new sketch below.

I also have another idea for my first project, which is completely not related to the first idea. For this new idea, I want to recreate our NYUAD campus scene but with giant campus cats (with different postures). The idea came when I was walking back from D2 and saw different cats laying down or chasing each other around in the space in front of D2. However, I am not sure if this is a good idea for this first project and if it is possible to find the assets for the project. So any suggestion on this would be appreciated!

2. Project Implementation:

I started laying out my virtual space in Unity. I put the mountains and the dead tree in the scene. I am still struggling with adding the light source for the moon, looking for additional assets, and envisioning the whole idea in the 3D space.

UPDATE 16/2/2020, 9:29 pm

I finished the basic layout for my virtual space. From Professor Krom’s suggestion, I put multiple cubes of different lengths with decreasing size towards two ends of the path to create a sense of infinity. I also fixed the camera rig to match up with the scale of the mountains and trees (instead of putting y = 2, I put y = 4).

To be added/fixed: Cheshire cat, the lighting of the moon, the color/lighting of the sky, music (if possible)

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UPDATE 17/2/2020, 7:41 pm

The idea of my current seemed to diverge from my original idea of the scene where Alice meets the Cheshire Cat. Instead, I tried to create the two different vibes along the path separated by two posts: one [1] side reflects a safer sense, the other [2] reflects the opposite with a deadly sense. In order to do that, I changed the lighting of the scene where the [1] side is much brighter than the [2] side. Also, the [1] has dense forests with a greenish platform, and the trees start to sparsely populated towards the [2] side and the green color of the platform and the trees also start darkening.

To be added/fixed: the spotlight in the [2] side, light emission from the 2 posts, and sound of strong wind (if possible)

UPDATE 18/2/2020, 8:19 pm

After meeting with Professor Sarah Krom, I decided to fix my scene a little bit. The first change is the lighting. I decided to decrease the intensity of the main light source since it did not quite fit with the night. I removed the two posts since they were not really relevant in the picture. Instead, I added two tombs from the asset package, gave them some blue light to evoke a sense of mystery and fear. I also added mountains far away to suggest the feeling of remoteness and emptiness. I added some rocks along the path to make it less flat than it was before.

On the other side of the road, I added some rocks with grass on them. I also lit up the fireflies so it evokes a sense of brightness and peace matching with the stars on the sky.

In general, I tried to make both sides of the path opposite in the sense and the feeling. To be added/fixed: sound of wind

UPDATE 18/2/2020, 10:22 pm

Sound of wind added. Project submitted.