Here is a part of my recorded video (the original video is too long)

My inspiration comes from a game machine we may see in an arcade game store. Instead of a well-designed chain reaction in the video, it is a random chain reaction with many objects from many directions with random velocity, along with some elements moving regularly. It is a quite a success to use chain reaction for entertainment, which impresses me a lot.

I try to reconstruct it with the same idea in my unity project. I made a shell with collider, also a transparent one in the front, and there are many sticks causing the randomness. I made animation for two objects to make them move as the real machine. Lastly, I wrote a script to generate coins at random positions whenever the user press “Space”, so the user can interact with it. 

The overall result is good, but there are some problems I did not find the way to solve. First, it seems that the collider does not fit to the mesh perfectly on an animated object. Second, the gravity seems too small for the coin, so they usually keep bouncing and cannot land on the platform easily, or it may caused by that the platform keep pushing the coins. Last, coins easily flip or get stuck during the falling process.

Q1: This article was written before the popularity of Metaverse. Do you still agree with that VR experiences create solipsistic quality?

I do not think so, and I believe VR experiences does not only focus on solipsistic quality even before the popularity of Metaverse. Firstly, we need to know that VR is a media, and it has the nature of interaction which makes it similar to the games. And if we consider the potential of VR based on our experiences of the games. We can easily conclude that VR can not only provides with solipsistic experiences. For example, there are many games empathizing their social interaction, such as MMO and some cooperating games. Despite there are many restrictions for the expression through games, games can widen people’s social range to the whole world. Moreover, games, or other online interaction softwares makes many unusual ways of people’s interaction possible and common. From this point of view, we can see VR has the potential to have similar functions, and Metaverse is actually an enhanced MMO world created in VR world.

Q2: Please analyze and define what the immersive experience is from the perspective of a sense of derealization and empathy in this article. Does immersive experience necessarily involve a sense of derealization(depersonalization) and empathy?

For derealization, I think the situation depends on the purpose of the experience. The article suggests that VR is a “hot” media which requires a lot of attention from the people and thus get people immersed in the experience. This means that VR is a perfect choice to create an imaginary space. For this purpose, even if the artist wants to make each element in VR very real, it is still a kind of derealization if the artist’s intention is to create his/her own imaginary space. However, as Coupland suggests in the article, VR is as much data as human can handle, which means VR can be the best and most comprehensive way to replicate a real experience happened in the world. Because it contains more data thhan other media, and can contains all other medias in itself. For example, it can used as a tool for journalism and photography. In this aspect, VR is still a good choice when we want to emphasize reality.

As for empathy, I think most of VR artworks let the user has empathy, even the artist does not intend to do so. Since one of the basic purposes of an immersive experience is to make the user immersed in the unreal space. Usually, the artist may give the user an identity, which can help the user to immerse himself/herself and consider the experience in a designed way. However, there are situation where the artist does not think about his/her user and only focus on expressing himself/herself. And this situation also happens for other art medias, such as improvisation music and diary writing. From this perspective, even the artist may not intend to do so, he/she actually gives the audience a chance to know his/her real feeling in the heart, which also let the audience have empathy to his/her own experiences. 

The story we are going to tell in our game is about vicar, the agent and representative of God in the human world. The player is one of the vicars. He is chosen accidentally, and he will be assign missions by God. In different missions, players will have different abilities to finish the task. The current mission we are building on is that player needs to use the ability of “control” to save people’s lives. The demo video is below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9nUh1QGYhw&feature=youtu.be

The artistic expression in visual

Since we are talking about religions and the conflicts between humanity and the doctrines of God, we tend to use pure color to form a sense of solemn, player can tell that the scene is religious relevant and the player is supposed to feel that he has contact with God. The current scene we have is:

For further design, we will also use pure color as a theme to build a scene.

The artistic expression in audio

Audio in our project will play a role in atmosphere implementation. For the first scene, which is the first time that the player comes to the altar, the player will pass by many torches and light up the fire. The process of lighting up fire will also play a sound effect. For the general background music, we will use some mysterious, religious music to create a sacred and solemn vibe for the player.

For the final project, we want to make a graphic adventure game. We will build 7 different spaces, each space has its feature color and the objects in the space will try to construct a certain kind of mental situation and express a certain kind of feeling. Also, each space will give players some information, and all 7 spaces will together present a complete story to players. 

For the scenery in each space, we expect the objects are low poly and all in the same color. And the objects we use, the location of those objects, the light effect should be in harmony to match the theme of the chapter.

For the project management, we will work on building different scenes at the same time. And we will write different scripts and be responsible for different functions. Basically, we will try to complete 2 scenes each week, and we will complete the basic gameplay mode and functions during the first week.

We want to build our gameplay mode based on the traditional sneak gameplay. So before this week, we have already built the driving system. And we have also built the turret which will detect the car when it comes into its firing range, and the there are two parts of the turret which can rotate on vertical axis and horizontal axis particularly to make the guns aim at the car, and the bullet where comes out from an empty object in front of the guns to hit the car.

In this week, we have finished the three abilities of the car. For invisible, we change the shader of the car so the player, and we change its tag so that the turrets no longer detect it. For quantization, we also change the shader of the car, and we change the car’s collider to trigger so that it can comes across the buildings. And for the transition, when player click “z”, it will creates an “echo” (a prefab of the car with another shader) at that position, and when the player activates this function, the car will travel rapidly back to the position of the “echo” and removes the echo.

Also, we have made three simple UI images to show player the left amount of the three resource in the game, hp, energy and battery. The hp is easy to understand, the energy enables the player to use abilities and the battery provide power for the car.