For this project, Junior, Claire, and I decided to play around the everyday theme of having to find your glasses. Coincidentally, all three of us have bad eyesight and so we either wear glasses or contact lenses. We shared our experience of how we struggle to find our glasses, especially in the mornings, as we tend to forget where we placed our glasses the night before.

We decided to choose the bathroom as our location and include a bathtub, a toilet, sink, bathroom shelf, a towel hanger and towels. We had originally planned to place different objects, but after placing some objects, figuring out each of the positions, and removing some objects according to the overall balance, we decided to settle down with the current bathroom setting. We also added the hanging light as our light source.

Claire and I were in charge of creating the bathroom setting, matching the virtual space to the actual available space in the classroom, placing the four glasses in different places, and making sure that the user felt that he/she was in a bathroom trying to find his/her glasses.

For our next steps, we need to add the different functions of the four glasses in order to make it interactive. Each of the four glasses will have different functions – whether they are zooming in, zooming out, different colored tints, and the corrected vision. Although we understand that the blurry vision will cause nausea for the user and may not be suitable for long use, we will play around the degree of blurriness to see how we can make it work.

Demo Video

Zenboo was based on the concept of a Zen environment with a simple yet endlessly executable action in place. Originally, the plan was to have flowers that could be endlessly grown but then the idea of bamboo came up. Since, in reality, bamboo grows incredibly quickly and is aesthetically attractive, we decided on this vegetation instead (fig.1). A positive addition was that bamboo inherently already had some connection to the idea of Zen. We wanted to place the user in a comforting environment that presented them clearly with a task which they could continuously do in order to relax for the daily stresses of everyday life. All the artistic choices behind the environment were directed towards this comforting attitude. The interaction were also kept simple and obvious. The interactions involved the picking up of the two objects and the using of the two objects. A watering can could be picked up and used to pour water on the bamboo, which would make it grow, and the sickle could be used to chop the grown bamboo, and make it disappear (fig.2).

Knowing that there was a lot to be done, we split the tasks evenly into two groups: scripting and designing. One individual was responsible for the designing of the environment, another in charge of the music and sound effects, and two responsible for making all the desired actions feasible. I was responsible for scripting actions and did most of my testing in a separate scene than where the environment was being designed. Since the actions had to be explainable without any description, we made sure to use everyday objects and code for recognizable physics behind them. This meant that the watering can could be lifted up and that water would only appear when poured at a certain degree, or that bamboo would grow upwards when water interacted with it. The testing area was modeled around what the final scene would encompass for the user. The tools were placed near to the spawn point of the user and could be used on the bamboo that was close by (fig.3-4).

The behaviors of the objects were expected because they were similar to reality and this made them seem like everyday actions. This meant that tools could be lifted, thrown, dropped, and act the correct way when coming into contact with other objects or when being poured. The only area where an unexpected result appears is when bamboo grows (fig.5). It was discovered, during testing, that bamboo balancing on itself was a lot more attractive and brought more comfort to the user, similar to stacking stones (fig.6), so it replaced the regular straight growth of bamboo shoots. Having the segments of bamboo fall to the ground after they reached a certain height was also a feature of this balancing. This brought new possibilities to a used behavior and also prevented clutter by having the segments disappear after a moment. After all the objects were designed and equipped with their respective behaviors, they were made into prefabs and placed in the final scene, in similar coordinates (see Cassie’s blog). The environment was designed to have warm sunset lighting, comforting wind, grass, and hills in order to bring ease to user. A small oddity observed was the floating rocks, though these objects are not following our reality’s physics they look incredibly mesmerizing and thus were maintained in the environment. Generally, having a few quirks that brought personality to the area, was expected to give the user more reason to desire realizing in this world.

Our expected world was a place a used could freely spend their time in with the goal of alleviating stress. This was achieved because the user had a simple task that could be endlessly continued and a surrounding that promoted comfort. With more experience and time, the world could eventually be expanded. There could be more tasks for the user to indulge in and more scenery that was intriguing to look at and enjoy. Expanding is always a possibility to entertain the user but keeping them in a roughly enclosed area was a solution too. Keeping them enclosed and with only a few tasks to focus on lets them possibly enter a form of meditation, which is by far the best stress relieving method. Better designing of the current scene could have involved the matching of asset styles and consideration for certain behaviors. Making the bamboo that falls intractable by hand and making it so that tools were always held in the correct method would have been logical. Making a better match of the tools’ material with the design style of the environment would have been more attractive. After showing the project in class I also noticed that some of the music could have been worked on to be less hostile and the water system needed some tweaking. Simply, there were a few factors that made the objects in the project seem unworldly and made it harder for the player to immerse themselves.

Though there were several factors that could be worked on there was also a sure sign that the project was a success. This is evident in three behaviors, players would want to place the controller on the stump after they were done, players tried to move out of the way of falling bamboo, and players continued to water the bamboo endlessly without tire. This shows that players were about to connect their reality with the world we created to such an extent that they the lines between the two existences became blurred.

This project is going to be like something out of the Harry Potter universe. It places the recipient in a large, Victorian style greenhouse, in front of a planting station.They are provided with seeds, a watering can and a planting pot. If the user follows what is pretty much expected and plants the seed and waters it they end up growing a giant man eating plant that gets them eaten. Just behind them will be placed a second plant of the same species with a danger sign, an easter egg warning that the user may or may not see.

I envisioned the greenhouse to look like the ones found at the Kew Gardens in London that I visited last summer.

We first set out to find some ready made assets, primarily a greenhouse and the man eating plant. I managed to find a greenhouse that cast some nice shadows and came with a bunch of planting pots and benches. I also managed to find an animated plant with teeth. Getting the animation to loop is something we have yet to figure out. We built the planting area by combining some of the benches that came with the greenhouse.

Then, we began work on the interactions. We brought the player in from one of the example scenes in the Unity VR package. We also brought in a sphere that we will be using as the seed. Adding colliders to the pot and the table allowed us to place the objects on the surface and drop the seed into the pot. Figuring out how to detect the tilt of the watering can to start playing the particle animation of the water took some time but Max was able to figure it out.

I built an expansive terrain around the greenhouse to create a expansive forest. I sprayed the area near the greenhouse with patches of grass and a single species of tree but nothing too extreme or different so That the focus would remain more on the inside. The greenhouse was populated with strange alien plants, trees that reach above the recipient’s head and some close by the use in planters, some of which came with their own animations. The bench forms a visual barrier around the user. These worked wonders for bringing the space to life. Some of them emit clouds of spores, which became quite distracting so I ended up removing them.

To add another ‘alternate’ element to the world we added a creature, a giant butterfly in the sky. The butterfly makes the outside seem an even more daunting space than the inside.

We added some gardening equipment into the space the the recipient can pick up and play around with as well. I think it may make a fun ending to the game if the user was to pick up one of these and fight off the monster plant.

The growing of the flytrap is triggered to happen when both the soil and the water have contact with the seed for a certain amount of time. This took several hours to figure out how to do. The plant, which is already in the pot but extremely small in size grows larger and animates, lunging at the viewer.

Finally, we decided to add some ambient and 3D sound.
We found a bunch of sounds on freesound.com. The sound of a tropical rain forest plays around the recipient as the plant in the cage behind them emanates, low, rumbling growls.