VR project title: THE INNER WORLD OF DAYDREAMING
Synopsis
The name of my project is from the book “The inner world of daydreaming” 1975 by Jerome L Singer. The research of this book provided evidence “ suggesting that daydreaming, imagination, and fantasy are essential elements of a healthy, satisfying mental life.” I found this idea matches exactly my initial idea of creating a fantasy world for my VR immersive experience project. I always dream of staircases extended to infinity to the sky or the universe. The journey of wandering in the strange dreams always make me feel adventurous, yet remain solitude in mind. So in this VR experience I would like to apply the basic skills I learned from the Unity tutorial and visualised a dreamy environment featuring a small island with a weird landscape. It is surrounded with water and with staircases extended infinity to the sky. and the second part of the exploration would be more on the interactive element. How are we going through the journey of wandering in a surrealist landscape in search of unknown impossibilities? What we are looking for in terms of the vast universe?
Keywords: self-reflection, mind-wandering, day-dreaming, randomness, dreamy, curiosity, playful
Documentation Video
Research/Sketch
“The Inner World of Daydreaming”
Formatt Design Group on Instagram “Stairway to haven"
File:Japanese firm Shimizu Corporation has developed plans for this incredible and futuristic self-sustaining city that floats just under the ocean's surface.jpg
Japanese firm Shimizu Corporation has developed plans for this incredible and futuristic self-sustaining city that floats just under the ocean's surface
set the color scheme of the dreaming world. Shocking pink, yellow, black,
Modelling
I did not intend to spend much time on Modelling in Unity. I created a colourful terrain by applying a simple texture and change to the reflection rate of it. I tried to apply random trees in the terrain, but it was too heavy to load them. So I would like to keep the scene simple and try to add more dynamic elements by scripting later. In addition, in order to make the whole dreamy world more surreal, I tried to make the sky green in color and filled with pink fog. In addition, I download the Water4AdvancedReflection Asset to create the water flowing on top of the terrain.
Scripting
Scripting play a big role in my exploration of Unity. I do not have any experience of C# language, just know some basic javascript. But I managed to follow some tutorial from Youtube in order to visualise my dreamy world more dynamic and interactive.
Spiral staircases visual
Building a staircase is repetitive and yet time consuming. But this is the main idea of my dreaming world, so I followed the script tutorial from Youtube and created a spiral staircase leading to the sky. The idea is that you can place down one cube with this script attached, and it will generate a whole staircase of a chosen number of steps, where the steps will be sized according to the size of the original cube. I also tried to apply Shader Graph to the stairs to make the refractive effect. I spent a lot of time changing the setting and the Render Pipeline(URP), but sadly it still did not work.
Reference Speed Coding #2: Stairway to Heaven Unity script (steps generator) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-ZYhHYGSUg
Interaction Elements In order to make this scene more dynamic and interactive, I tried to make some randomness and feedback when the FPS character came across with some objects in the terrain. At first, I want to make a random shapes creation fountain from the sky, and it automatically random shapes to the terrain floor.
Reference: Unity Spawning Objects Tutorial! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_khN0EhbOM&t=2s
Reflection
I think I should spend more time of making change of different scenes with the timelines and make the dreaming world more appealing. And maybe make it more mysterious without the scoring system, but triggering different events when FPS control collided with different spawn objects.