There is something they warn you about in VR literature: beware of getting used to your own experience and then assuming others will have a similar experience, especially when it concerns dizziness.

I had been working in my environment for about two-three weeks without worrying about how motion-sickness inducing it could be. The color pencil shader I have on the camera reduces the frame rate considerably. It wasn’t until I had my fellow student try it that I realized, like a eureka moment right before she even mentioned it, that it made users light-headed.

This presents me with an opportunity but also with a problem. I could remove the shader, but I believe the design will suffer significantly. The other option is to see if there is any way of optimizing it, taking the opportunity to learn more about increasing frame rates and modifying shaders.

It is worth mentioning there might be another factor contributing to dizziness: touchpad locomotion. Since I have been having issues with using the Steam VR teleport prefab in my projects, I decided to teach myself how to script touchpad navigation. I’m glad I learned how to do this, but I think it is also a reason the user gets dizzy. The movement is smooth and slow, but unnatural.

In terms of critique, beyond the obvious danger of dizziness, I was glad some students thought the experience was beautiful. Going forward, I will see if/how I can optimize the shader and whether the navigation needs to be scrapped, as well. One month to go for this second unit of much exploration.

Below, I have included some snippets from my working script, created in Celtx.

My prototype is almost ready to be delivered. This coming week I will jump back into the storyboard and flesh it out. The scene in Unity is full of place-holders, but I ran into some obstacles this week.

(1) I made a model of my main character in TiltBrush in order to rig it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t export it as a 3D file outside of Poly without it losing its materials. This is a big problem. The auto-rigging in Mixamo otherwise worked pretty well.

Since it is not a requirement for the unit, and it is beyond my current skill sets, I don’t think I will be able to prepare an animatic. Nevertheless, in my December break I will have it as one of my “reach” goals, since I understand its importance in the workflow.

(2) The project will need to be optimized. The shader is extremely taxing on the system.

Another development: finally finished Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative. I’m taking one of their ideas on museum narratives now that I’m jumping back into my storyboard/exhibition space: that of spatializing intent. My focus will be on “the designer’s intents and how these are spatialized in the museum” (184).

I still believe in the potential power of this experience, as a purging of our current entertainment consumer trends. Hopefully I can develop it even further in my career.

Oscar Wilde famously wrote that truth is entirely a matter of style:

Art, breaking from the prison-house of realism, will run to greet him, and will kiss his false, beautiful lips, knowing that he alone is in possession of
the great secret of all her manifestations, the secret that Truth
is entirely and absolutely a matter of style; while Life–poor,
probable, uninteresting human life–tired of repeating herself for
the benefit of Mr. Herbert Spencer, scientific historians, and the
compilers of statistics in general, will follow meekly after him,
and try to reproduce, in her own simple and untutored way, some of
the marvels of which he talks.

This reflection, taken from his dialogue The Decay of Lying, dramatizes what I also consider to be art’s most potent effect: that of playing with the absoluteness of truth and perhaps molding what we consider to be reality and/or life in the process. This consideration, of how style can (mis)represent truth, is especially relevant today when we are bombarded with digital information from authors all across the world and across all ideological spectrums. Our ideas of what truths “sound” like must be challenged or we will resort to consuming content in our own personal echo chamber.

Beyond the inherent veracity or lack of veracity in the content we consume, there also lies the possible loss of its relative value. In the book Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative, mentioned in a previous unit update, the authors argue that “If we don’t find a way to filter out unwanted messages, we will walk in a reality augmented by the fleeting thoughts of every passerby.” This suggests that the digital age requires everyone to be a curator of content.

This new muscle we need to develop is what I want to stimulate with my Dream of a Theatre experience. I want the center of consumption to be self-aware, constantly changing, and unrealistic. I want it to mimic the feeling of walking into a complex relationship between objects, languages, bodies, that has no inherent absolute truth. I want it to be jarring and for it to involve a juxtaposition with big entertainment franchises. I think these blockbusters are a perfect analogy for truth being a matter of style, since below their slick conventions lie, undoubtedly, political and social idealogies. The same is true for any personal blog writer, be it about cosmetics or food, and especially true for journalists. Objectivity is never fully acheived, since the very act of choosing which facts to include involves choosing which not to include.

I don’t think we should aspire to perfect objectivity, perhaps just an awareness of how language can hide as much as it can reveal. More and more we try to appear more systematic, yet we’re trying to mold our data into ways we deem superior to our natural ways of perceiving, all the while being driven by the same initial perception we judged as incorrect or inefficient. Consider this project as a reaction to this sentiment and a celebration of that perceptive feebleness where everything inevitably changes right under our noses.

This past week I spent modeling in TiltBrush, focusing on the mountains that will serve as a backdrop to my theatre screen. I will upload some pictures of what they’re looking like once I have access to the application again.

More considerations: I want to further push the contrast between the enclosed theatre and the open world. There will be some gaps where the user will be able to see trees off in the far distance, giving depth clues. This will further confound the sense of space and give a feeling of unreality.

Challenges for this: not sure how I will mimic the watercolor quality of the water that moves on the screen. There is a petal-like particle system I am considering for the flooding of the theatre, but in order for it to give the sense of flowing water before said event, I would need to place many of them, almost like pixels, along the screen and over the model of the floating character. So many particle systems can be taxing on the system.

I am also playing around with shaders to see if I can place a flat surface with one on top of the screen which will mimic this watercolor horizontal movement. It shouldn’t be too difficult to achieve. Since my time is limited, it may have to wait until after I deliver this project to my course leader. My ambitious objective is to deliver a rough CG animatic. This is not required, so I will not burden myself too much if I can’t meet this goal. We are only required to hand in place-holders in the scenes, and a storyboard done in VR.

I’m happy to see these scenes evolve. Once again, thank you for reading!

Last week I began creating my models in TiltBrush, and this week I imported my first finished model: a movie theater chair.

At first, I had issues with importing the embedded materials and had to add some Unity materials. I don’t know if it was caused by this, but I was using the LWRP. In my new project, I used the 3D template and had no issues with the Poly toolkit.

I began to experiment with a colored pencil shader I found in Unity, in order to achieve a more consistent look. I am happy with the results, and think I will be using this camera filter in my final project.

Here’s what it looks like in motion:

Aaand here is what the scene is looking like at the moment:

I’m excited for the theatre to slowly come together.

In the book Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative , an impossible space is defined as a place the reader cannot understand; for example, a house that is smaller on the inside than it is on the outside. The impossibility of understanding is “not a matter of missing information but a matter of radical ontological difference (25).”

So what would it mean to place a user in an impossible space? If it’s a matter of ontological difference, then present them with a paradigm that is not only unusual, but with new existing relationships between their parts. I believe my theatre might do this: (1) it is an almost empty, dark place with no conventional entertainment and (2) the relationships set-up will have no reference in the physical world. Characters are doubled, including the protagonist, the screen is the object of observation and less of a passive consumption, and in a more cheeky twist movie posters around the concession stand will poke fun at existing modes of entertainment (MARVEL at U.S. Corporate Values or Token Moody Foreign Film). The idea is for the almost mirror image of this center of consumption to put the original in question and re-imagine relationships between ourselves and ourselves, ourselves and others, and ourselves and art/entertainment.

Another point of departure from a possible space is the painterly aesthetic. All models will be painted in TiltBrush with the bristle brush, that most similar to traditional media. This should give the space an impressionistic feeling that alerts you of the impossibility of what you’re experiencing being “real”. Since the impossibility we’re positing is inherently ontological, this should make the user question definitions of reality and perhaps consider the value of “in-between”, impossible places for a re-shifting of existing paradigms and consequent evolution (or devolution).

Now here’s a feeling worthy of pursuing in VR:
…no matter where we are, we are at a place connected to everywhere else in the world, a place where all roads come together (33).

This is reminiscent of Borges’ Garden of Forking Paths where the narrator discovers his ancestor has written a bifurcating novel:

Naturally, my attention was caught by the sentence, ‘I leave to various future times, but not to all, my garden of forking paths: I had no sooner read this, than I understood. The Garden of Forking Paths was the chaotic novel itself. The phrase ‘to various future times, but not to all’ suggested the image of bifurcating in time, not in space. Rereading the whole work confirmed this theory. In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts’ui Pen, he chooses – simultaneously – all of them. He thus creates various futures, various times which start others that will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times. This is the cause of the contradictions in the novel (emphasis my own).

Anything that is impossible ontologically must involve a contradiction. Contradictions are the first sign of evolution: the existence of a former state by that of a present or future state. Contradiction as feeling is not very comfortable, perhaps for the same reason that ontological shifts are not very comfortable. VR could reframe our experiences and possibly create the illusion that every new experience is related to all others–

Then I reflected that all things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Century follows century, and things happen only in the present. There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens to me . . .

This week I thought about two things relating to my first VR narrative. The first was working up a second draft of the storyboard by the end of the week, and the second was the whole concept of embodiment in VR experiences.

Embodiment is something that VR developers see as necessary whenever it can be achieved. It means the user feels like they are “inside” a body, which is in then in turn “inside” a virtual environment. Degrees of embodiment range depending, research suggests, on how much said embodiment can interact with the environment or how purposeful said embodiment seems to the user.

I think this is fascinating, seeing VR users seem to complain that a virtual body does not positively add to an experience unless it has a meaningful purpose. In a more interactive narrative, if I am given a hand I need to be able to do something with a hand. In a less interactive narrative, if I am given a body I need to know why I am seemingly embodied in that space where I can’t move, or talk, or neither. This is just proof of the old adage: equip someone with a hammer and all they will see are nails.

We have to be very careful with what we equip users with on these experiences. The ornamental will easily be read as such and could potentially jeopardize the utility of the experience. Every hammer given must have a nail around to hit, or a very good reason for being useless in the given space.

Another interesting effect this concept has is placing standards on virtual embodiments we don’t place on our own “real” bodies. Each day more and more people identify less with their embodiment, and we exist on a sort of spectrum between feeling we have a body versus we are a body. The very wording of feeling we are “inside” a body implies entrapment, whereas being a body entails movement and identification with that movement. I imagine this spectrum is going to eventually map out onto the virtual worlds, where we will be able to consciously reimagine and reenact these muddled relationships we have with our own bodies.

Ok, enough musings about embodiment. This relates to my narrative project since I want to recreate the opposite of a sense of embodiment, I want to create an out-of-body experience (think lucid dreaming when one floats away from one’s own body). This will very much, if successful, create the sense of being outside one’s body.

I plan to achieve this in two ways (1) literally being able to switch between a personal POV and a more omniscient POV where characters walk below your nose in a doll-house way and (2) mimicking the visual changes one can have in a consciousness alternating experience. These changes include magnification, where objects seem to protrude towards you, and some of their details appear to be magnified in a dynamic way. (If you’re interested in how this can be done: this particular effect I intend to create using a shader with a light source that constantly moves. Dramatic forms and their changing shadows could recreate this visual change of a magnifying form.)

The storyboard is still unfinished– but given my time constraints I will jump back in and out into it during the next six weeks. Right now it is complete with place-holders, but I will retouch it continuously with details until it looks fleshed-out.

https://vimeo.com/369118149

My next steps are creating all of the models in the next two weeks so that I can create the scene in Unity. I am not required to fully animate this for January, but of course, I will try my best. I intend to trace over models from Mixamo in TiltBrush that I can later auto-rig. Hopefully by the seventh week I can start animating and have the remaining three weeks to complete the interface.

This is all for this week, and I hope you’re enjoying this journey with me. Thank you to all who see these updates on social media and send me encouraging comments!

This week I managed to get a script onto paper. It isn’t written in the form of a traditional script, but gets nearer to a treatment. I thought this was more appropriate for my short experience (60-90 seconds) and it gave me much more liberty to deconstruct interactivity.

I won’t include the full breakdown in this post, but the experience takes place in a movie theatre and consists of three characters: a concession-stand employee, a movie-goer and an Ophelia-like screen actress. As of now, my main objective is to induce an altered state of consciousness, akin to that of dreaming. In its current state, it gives the user the constant possibility to switch between the movie-goers POV and a bird’s eye view. I have chosen to limit this freedom at two critical moments in the story: the beginning or set-up of the action and the climax/ending. I believe this will make for a more satisfying experience, since it provides a circular paradigm (given the specific context of the experience).

As for the storyboard, I went into TiltBrush a couple of hours and sketchily explored an idea I have for what a storyboard can be in VR. Since space will become more and more narrative in VR, I thought a storyboard could become a structure which reflects this story. I made a theatre which incorporates the ambiance and color palette of the intended world I want to create, and made it an exhibition place. Inside, there will be a color key for different characters, the interface, and different POV’s. The corridors diverge when viewpoints diverge.

https://vimeo.com/367557809

I opted for this method because I think of story as structure and structure and story. Wasn’t it Goethe who said to think of architecture as frozen music and music as liquid architecture? There’s an undeniable relationship between how we perceive spaces and how we perceive abstract expressions of emotion. For now, I am exploring this idea in the context of VR experiences. Storyboard could be an exhibited narrative space.

I was lucky enough to watch a 14 min VR film some days ago, which changed my whole approach to this story-telling unit. I had been convinced that this 60-90s story of mine needed an interactive element for it to be successful in VR, but this film proved me wrong. I watched it with a cardboard headset on my phone and my eyes had a hard time adjusting to the camera focus, yet it still moved me to tears. The camera angles and movements are compelling and intuitive. The use of close-ups is ultra-successful and right on the necessary emotional beats. It proved, for me, that cinematic VR could very well be defined by the simple choice of letting yourself go as a VR user and being led. Of course, leading well as a director is no easy matter.

This realization comes at a good time because my priority for this unit is narrating space. I am now convinced camera movement will be my protagonist, and the user will only need to sit and look around. This may seem boring to users who are used to more of a gamification of experiences, but trusting a narrative to move for you has great potential. It is imperative, however, that it is a camera that thinks. My instructor has recommended a book on spatializing narrative which I ordered for my personal library and am very keen to read, but still hasn’t arrived.

Here is a sketch I did exploring character design and palette.

I have been exploring some character design, but my goal for the incoming week, now that I have decided to fully limit interaction to head movement, is to write a starting script. This will raise many questions about scripting 360 stories, and is sure to be a feat. Wish me strength and flexibility as I start building this narrative world.