GMU:Immersive Essays/Hsiao Pei Kao

Anti Virus rusiV itnA'

This is an immersive space filled with feelings of fear, anxiety and insecurity. The idea of building this environment is inspired by what I saw, experienced and felt during this Corona-Crisis. 

Most of the time we are too afraid to try, to trust and to really see how amazing our universe is, because of fear our human become so blink, cover our eyes with scare, do stupid things only for self-protection and so on. So I build this immersive place filled of things that we might frightened of. The message I want to deliver to players is: Fear is something mutual. Things that we are terrified of, have the same scare of us as well. That is the reason why I want it to look like a Universe of Virus, Fear and Virus are pretty similar, they spread rapidly, Virus breaks our immune, Fear changes our humanity. So in this world, the movements of Virus are uncertain and unexpected. They might scare your sometimes because of their unexpected movements. But at the same time, you will see they are also a bit afraid of you when the your perspective turns to them. They shows their fear of new and unknown things, just like us. 

This is the main concept of this work. I try to deliver this ideas through the following parts in this scene:

Once you start the scene, first you will see you are in a rimless universe with things look like corpuscles around you. But instead of red color, I use a green skybox. Red has the meaning of anxiety, enthusiasm and fear. I don’t want to use colors as a hint for people who come into this environment. I hope they can feel that through encountering with the creatures in this world by themself.

Virus Nr. 1!

One huge, black and spotted Virus slowly floats to you, looking like it’s a bit curious of something showing up here all of a sudden, which is You. Then when it sees you, both of you seems to be afraid of each other. It shows it’s anxiety and fear by floating back a few of steps. After few seconds, it will try again to come a litte bit closer to you, you do the same thing as well. In the end of this part, you go through its body and see everything from inside to outside.

I hope this part can give you a first experience of trying, building a first connection of trust. This is what we do to show the trust in real life. We open the door of our heart or our mind to let people you trust come inside. Sometimes we want to do it desperately, because we are lonely and isolated just like what you see in this corona world. But once someone come into your heart, the connections of trusts go broken, the swords for protections grow. Hedgehog’s dilemma, a challenge of human intimacy, we meet this situation all the time when we come closer to someone. This is also the idea I want to show through the next movement of Virus Nr. 1!.

When you inside the Virus Nr. 1!, you can crystal-clearly see everything in- and outside of it, which make you feel safer for a while. Then you come out from inside to outside all of a sudden. This movements of coming out gives a hint that the first try doesn’t work out, just like what happened all the time in our reality. At this moment your perspective move to another creature beside. End of the first part. And in the next part of this scene, you will encounter more and experience differently.

Transition

A sphere with foggy texture floats in and surrounds you.

Virus Nr. 2!

The 2. Creature is floating outside of the foggy bubble, it moves its antennas constantly, seems like it is trying to reach you or to float inside the foggy bubble. This time it doesn’t even come closer to you in the beginning, after merges into the bubble a bit, it’s scared of it and you, you both stop going forward. It moves unexpectedly towards you and keep the distance from you again couple times, trying to test you and then make the decision to come closer to you in the end. Its first try works good, and it tries again coming really really close to you. This rapid movement breaks the connection between you and your perspective will be turned to the other side. Again, all you can see is a near-empty universe.

I hope a similar situation in our daily life can through this experience reflected: Building connections is all about trying, testing and tolerating. When people come closer to you in a short time, feeling of distrust appears and unneeded fear break the motivations for us to go forward.

Virus The Eye

The third creature you are going to meet is a rounded-shape virus with an eye on it, which makes it look less like a virus. It has more antennas, which let it move much faster and more active. It looks more friendly because of its appearance as well. However this time you won’t come closer to each other at all. It shows interest in you and turning around showing itself to you. It merges in and out of the foggy bubble again and again. Finally when you try to come closer to it, you will see a giant antenna of it ,which you did not see it in the beginning. You turn away from the eye creature after what you saw based on intuition. The intuition give you feelings of fear, distrust and make you keep others in distance without reasons, and we gradually get used to that, a perfect self-protection mode, that makes us blink, make decision without even try to knowing reasons behind.

Transition

In around 15 seconds you will see nothing in this universe full of fog. I hope in this moment players can take few seconds to breathe and to feel and think about what they just experienced.

Construction

You will see a huge nest-shaped construction showing up from the fog. It could be a creature, a construction or anything you want it to be. It’s not important what it is. It plays a relative passive role here for you to try coming closer and exploring actively by yourself. So the next things going to happen is, you will go into this red construction and go through it. Once you reach the end of it, you will rotate 180 degree to see the whole structure of this nest. Thing is going to be a bit faster from here on, you will feel like start understanding and seeing what is around you, but at the same time you are going to be drawn out of the foggy bubble and out of everything.

Now, all you can see is the empty universe again.

The Face

The last part of the scene is, you will see two sphere look like eye merge into the universe, looking at you directly. Eyes are always the most fascinating things for me because they deliver emotions, feelings and every informations you can get from a person. Interesting is, eyes are at the same time the most difficult thing to be read. This is the reason why I want to let players to be watched, observed and read in the end of the scene. I want them to feel confused, and confusion give us motivations to think and rethink. By doing this I think we can find answers or just some unanswered questions in our own versions. So after this very short time of making players feel confused, they will see a human model appears inside.

I use a human model here to bring players back to the topic of fear again after seeing couple of creatures in the previous parts. I want to bring players back to our daily life, the things we used to have fear of are things related to human. I hope when we take a view back to our human we can really think about: what we are afraid of? why we need to be afraid of? And why we make decision to turn away from them before we have not even given a try to understand it?

We label things, people and situations to fight against our fear. Giving things definitions just for making ourselves feel safer. For example the things we see in my immersive world. We will prefer to name it and pretend like we know it. Truth is, we definitely don’t.

And those actions and habits we have, bring those topics to our life, for example, fail of communications, lost of friendships, lost of opportunities to see more and experience more, or even discrimination.

3D Models All models are made and rigged inside 3D Blender(2.80), Textures are painting with Adobe Illustration, Photoshop, and edited inside 3D Blender.

Model_ Virus Nr.1. Virus Nr.2. are the same model with different textures on it.

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Model_ Virus The Eye Model_ Construction Model_ The Face

     Modeled inside 3D Blender without texture.