In a team of 2, me and my partner built two VR experiences that involves 3D modeling original assets and programming a variety of VR mechanics. Each project comes with a full round of the design thinking process: ideating, story mapping, building core environment and mechanics, and ended with a polished final demo. During each stage of the world build, we conducted user testings to gain feedback from users to improve the VR narrative. While working on the projects and constantly communicating with users about their experience in VR, I got more fascinated about the UX of VR experiences and softwares. By the end of the course, I also wrote a research paper in which I investigated the potential of incorporating XR technology into digital product prototyping and testing. You can find this paper under the “Essay” section of my website.
My final project, “Cyborg Manifesto”, is a VR narrative that transforms the player from a human body to a robot body, that is, becoming cyborg. This experience is carefully thought to leverage the immersive VR technology: after completing one task in the experience, along with transforming one body part of the player from human to robot, a mirror that is a recurring object would pop up for the player to observe this change. With the mirror, the player is able to wave their hands in real life and see their movement reflected in VR through the mirror, which we observed creates a great sense cof immersion and joy during user testing. As one of our core mechanics, we created a “calligraphy tool” that uses ray-casting to simulate a calligraphy experience: when user presses a button to active the laser, the laser forms pattern on a blank surface that mimic the action of calligraphy.
“Cyborg Manifesto” also incorporates a rich variety of traditional Chinese elements: the traditional Chinese architecture, Chinese monetary system, street food, and calligraphy. It ends with lighting up an incense to worship the robot god while the player observe their body changing completely to a robot. Exploring the topic of cyborg using a VR experience set in a traditional Chinese style, we want to experiment how different elements that seems to be drastically different, can and clash and create fireworks.
Our first project, “Oasis”, is a VR cornerstone project that introduce us to storying telling in VR. Oasis is a story of a devastated traveller picking up different fruits in the desert while triggering the environment to transform from a barren dessert into an oasis. During the world build, we practiced programming some core mechanics in Unity VR: teleport, generic trigger, throwable, and animation. We also experimented utilizing sound and text to narrate in VR. For one of our core mechanics, the basket, we programmed the basket into an object that can “hold” all the fruits that the player throw into, so the fruit can move with the basket when the player is teleporting. We made this mechanics possible by programming the basket to be the parent of the fruit every time the basket detects a fruit is colliding with it.