Transitions

Project Summary

Transitions is an interactive, coming-of-age VR experience, which addresses the anxieties of growing up into adulthood. The project was built in Unity using the XR Interaction Toolkit. The experience usually takes about 10-20 minutes to play through, and was built in just 3 months as part of University of Maryland's New Works Incubator, a program which aims to provide students with resources and guidance to enable them to build immersive media projects.

My Contribution

This project was created by two people: myself, primarily as a developer, and Sydney Grant, primarily as an artist. We worked closely throughout this project's creation, despite our differing skillsets.

Programming

As the sole developer for Transitions, I was completely responsible for all of the code and most technical aspects of this project. I worked heavily with Unity and the XR Interaction Toolkit, creating all of the grab interactions and the seamless "transitions", which are really just teleportation of the XR Rig GameObject.

Not Programming

With a team of only two people, I naturally adopted various extra jobs for the project. I contributed to the ideation, storyboarding, and narrative design processes, and additionally did a tiny bit of sound design and animation within Unity.

Accomplishments

Time Management

We actually got the thing to a finished state, by the deadline. I know from mentors and first-hand experience that this is one of the hardest challenges of any big project, and we did very well on this front. Not only did we stay on track with the deadlines given to us during development: proposal presentations, prototype showcases, and demo days, we were probably the only group in the room not panicking to get things set up last minute when it finally came time to present the project to visitors at NextNOW Fest.

Overall Experience

Our final product felt successful overall, with users enjoying the ability to interact with their environment, and finding the different environments engaging. On the technical side, there were no major bugs that significantly hurt the experience for the users. Artistically, the environments each felt unique and visually satisfying.

Shortcomings

Audio

Audio is essential to making any VR project immersive, but as a team without past audio experience, it was an afterthought for us. We relied on public domain music, which was fine, but we could have spent more time finding tracks that better fit the emotions we wanted to convey, or coughed up a few bucks to license better fitting tracks. In terms of sound effects, we had almost none. The only sound effects we included were ones that we felt were necessary to guide or inform the player, leaving the environments less convincing and immersive than we would have liked.

Narrative & Progression

While we had a clear idea and theme around our project, the specific narrative and message of the experience was somewhat weak and unclear. We may have evoked some of the emotions we wanted, but I think our message was fuzzy and I didn't feel that any of the test participants were particularly immersed in the story behind this project, but rather the fact that they were in VR and it's fun to explore and throw objects across the room.

Many times, we didn't communicate what the player needed to do to progress clearly enough, resulting in some "What do I do now?" moments, or even players who thought the experience was simply one room because they didn't realize there would be more. The hints we did include to lead the player often went unnoticed. I spent a while making an animation of a ball falling off a table when you try to grab it, leading the player to a key. Probably about 80% of players attempted to grab the ball and saw the animation, but not a single person got the hint.

What I Learned

Unity

After this project, I have a solid understanding of Unity-related concepts. I understand the purpose of and connections between, textures, UVs, GameObjects, Colliders, Rigidbodies, and more.

XR Skills

Working intimately with the XRI Toolkit and VR has taught me a lot both broadly and precisely. I now thoroughly understand the components of the XRI Toolkit (Interactors, Interactables, Locomotion). I understand the relation between the XR Rig, the Camera Offset, and the Main Camera, as it relates to both virtual and real world space. Additionally, I understand many big challenges that come with VR: realistic physics interactions, optimizing colliders for both performance and accuracy, and the limitations of the XRI Toolkit.

Project Development

As part of the New Works Incubator, I attended workshops on experience design, storyboarding, writing, prototyping, and more. All of this gave me enhanced knowledge of how to properly coordinate a project, and understand the importance of planning and ideation before jumping into development.

Future Goals

Audio and Narrative

As stated above, our audio and narrative both felt weak in this project. For my next VR project, audio and narrative will have a stronger focus from the start, with a much more specific story that has a clear thesis, and lots of environmental sound effects. Ideally, I will get a friend to compose music, but if not I will be willing to license some tracks.