SEA OF STORIES
ROLE : TECHNICAL DESIGNER (August 2016 - December 2016)
Sea of Stories is a non interactive immersive VR art experience that attempts to bring to life imagery depicting the power and beauty of stories. As creative lead for a team of six including technical artists, programmers, modelers and animators, my role included defining the creative vision for the project, managing production schedules, and blueprint scripting for gameplay using Unreal Engine.
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CREATIVE VISIONIf you look at the existing cinematic content in the VR space, most of them struggle with an interesting phenomenon called the Swayze Effect. In a nutshell, the Swayze Effect is a lack of a relationship between the viewer and the virtual world that causes the experience to feel disconnected. Furthermore, we realized that our experience might struggle with an amplified version of this phenomenon because of the specificity of the viewer’s placement. The first step to resolving the Swayze effect is answering the question ‘Who is the viewer?’ But what if we could use this question as a storytelling element in the
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experience itself? What if we could ask that question early in the experience and resolve it at a later point. This is the reason the viewer is represented in an abstract wispy manner and the arc of the experience emanates from here. In the experience, the viewer is an unborn story, and the experience is the journey of the viewer's birth into the Sea of Stories.
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PRODUCTION CHALLENGESIn producing cinematic VR experiences, particularly non interactive experiences, there is an interesting conflict between two production styles. On one hand there’s a game based iterative production style where development flows from one prototype to another to refine gameplay. On the other hand there’s the film production style which is much more focused and sequential to produce the beautiful imagery. Our experience needs a combination of both styles so here’s what we did. First we went about creating a prototype to playtest our design. Parallely we were working on concept art for key
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elements of the experience such as spring and currents. And finally, we were also exploring technology needed to achieve these visual elements. Once this phase was complete we used the prototype to playtest and refine the prototype based on our findings. Each individual element in the world is being worked on sequentially to achieve the established look. Act 2 of the experience is based entirely on computer generated art assets, so this part can’t be prototyped either and is being assembled piece by piece.
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ADAPTING TO VRTranslation from concept art to implementation in VR also poses interesting challenges. What appeared a big beautiful world felt barren and incomplete in the headset. We adapted to VR by couching the entire sea in a massive waterfall creating a basin like feel. This made the world feel a lot more complete and fit nicely into the premise of a fantasy world. Additionally, the original current implementation was entirely based on vector field based particle systems. This didn't scale very well performance wise and so we switched to a mesh based system with a material to simulate the feeling of the currents flowing.
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SCRIPTING CHALLENGESThere were plenty of other challenges dealing with the medium that translated into gameplay scripting :
1) PACING : Since this was a moving experience, pacing became much trickier than originally anticipated. There was no deterministic way of resolving the issue and so we implemented a mechanism to adapt to the viewer. As the experience proceeds, the bird would pause as the viewer looks around and resume movement when he/she looks in the direction where story events were to occur. |
2) ENVIRONMENT RELATING TO PACING : Since the experience was now no longer railroaded, the environment also needed to react to the viewer accordingly. For example, the current glow implementation needed to change to glow until it caught the viewer's attention. Similarly, sound could no longer be linear and had to be trigger based as well with a looping background score.
3) MOTION SICKNESS : At one stage, the bird moves in a circular path around a fountain. To execute this, the original idea was to fix the player's forward orientation with that of the bird. However, we observed that no matter how smooth the rotation, this still caused an element of motion sickness. prompting us to rethink the bird's path.
3) MOTION SICKNESS : At one stage, the bird moves in a circular path around a fountain. To execute this, the original idea was to fix the player's forward orientation with that of the bird. However, we observed that no matter how smooth the rotation, this still caused an element of motion sickness. prompting us to rethink the bird's path.
