Perception

The collective covid memories for people all over the world
‍
Project website:
https://kc3985.wixsite.com/perception

Project Summary
‍

Course: Senior Project Fall 2022
‍
Instructor: Professor Nick Katsivelos

Timeline: 2 months
‍
Softwares: Unity, Oculus Quest 2, Figma, Mixamo，C#
‍
My Role: producer, designer, artist, programmer
‍
‍Teammate: Kevin Chen

Project Details
‍

As a Chinese student studying aboard, I always care about my family and friends back in my country. Since the start of COVID-19, everything has changed in China.

Nowadays, the entire human race is experiencing the covid pandemic; inevitably, we are all the witnesses of this shared history. That is how the idea of creating "Perception" comes in. Even though my expression is ineffective, I want to create a Virtual Reality platform to record the collective memory in the mind of our audience who has experienced and is still experiencing the COVID control.

Perception is not only an immersive VR experience but also an open platform that enables our audience to experience the COVID memories from me and my teammate’s perspectives – some representative situations in China – while adding their own perspectives through our website.

In the future, we will keep collecting different COVID stories from different people and enrich the storytelling of Perspective.
‍

Design Process
‍

Brainstorming
The world setting
Storyline

Technologies
Website
‍

Brainstorming process

We found out that we could actually play with the literary meaning and the deeper aspects of “virtual reality”. VR is the stimulated exeprience. However, speaking of "stimulation", we realize that the world is becoming more and more “magic realistic” since the covid pandemic started; situations vary a lot from country to country, which means that we could not find a single reference to simulate.
‍
Therefore, our original idea was to create three worlds, a Good, a Medium and a Bad world; we wanted to experiment with different people's perceptions toward different world settings.

However, whether the world is good or not is from me and my teammate Kevin's perspectives; It's the audience's choice to decide which world is better and which world is worse.

However, during the second round of the brainstorming, we mapped out the elements that we want to include in our world, and we realized that it will be much clearer to sort them into one world.

And this is how the final version of our world setting came in. We want to make Perception as a collective platform for people to jog down their covid memories, and we can put them into our project in the future.

Previously, we only let our audience to perceive what we want to express; now, they are not only able to experience more aspects form different people, but also they partake in our project as storytellers.

The world setting

After three weeks of building the scene and testing the world, we got the feedback that having three worlds is a bit complicated for some of them to understand. So, we decided to change the project setting into a single world.
‍
The world setting is showed the Project Overview.
‍
And here are the three main elements we have in the Perception world:

1. Dabai 大白

‍The medical worker who wears protective suit, has become a collective memory in the mind of each Chinese person who has experienced COVID control.

Some people respect them, love them, and some people hate them. They represent the power, the constraint of morality, and the value of society.

2. The Ambulances

The ambulances are already one of the symbols of our time. Therefore, in order to commemorate this pandemic, we want to add the ambulances and the medical walker in our world.

3. The Green & Red horses

Everyone in China has a code called “通讯行程卡”. If you are in a low-risk area, your code is green, which means you can travel freely in the city. However, if you are in a high-risk area, your code would be red, and you need to get covid tested and quarantine yourself.

The word "Code" in Chinese is pronounced as "Ma", which shares the same pronunciation as "Horse" in Chinese. So, we want to play with the pronunciation, and make the red horses and green horses walking in the city to symbolize the existence of COVID.

Experience storyline

The whole experience starts with the onboarding part, two UI pages about the world setting and the NPCs information.
‍
Next, the audience will enter the experience. In the experience, they can hear that each NPC is telling their own stories, and the name of each NPC is floating on top of their head. If they want to check the specific story, they could open the NPCs Profile UI Page by pressing "Y" on the controller.
‍
After the experience end, they could go to our website, and tell us their own COVID stories.
‍

Technologies

Here are some main techniques that we applied in developing the project using Unity

1. Unity-AI: NavMesh

In order to let all the NPCs moving in assigned paths, we used the Unity AI- NavMesh to assign destinations.

In the testing scene, the floor was the Navigation, the horse was the NavMesh Agent, and the cube was the destination. The horse will only be able to walk in the navigation area, and when it reaches the block, it will stop moving forward.

The next step was to let the horse move in the scene following a specific path.
I created the path by changing the cube's position. The code shows that whenever the object tagged as NPC touched the cube, the cube (destination) will change its position to the next one.

Another thing was to tag the horse as "NPC". The destinations only work for those object with the "NPC" tag. In this case, whenever the horse touched the cube, the cube (destination) would change its position to the next one.

2. Locomotion System

Since our scene is huge, we used Locomotion to let the audience "walk around" using joystick.

We set the left joystick to the Continuous Turn Provider, and the right one to the Continuous Move Provider. User can also turn the direction by just turning their head.
‍

3. Instruction Arrow

We needed the guidance on the floor to lead the users move in the assigned direction.

To achieve this, I wrote a script for the Arrow sign. The logic was to make a shader with the Arrow sign texture, and add the shader to the plane. By changing the offset position of the Texture, we can achieve the effect that the shader is "rolling". Therefore, the arrow on the floor can move smoothly.
‍

After finishing the script, we assigned the shader to the plan, and then unchecked the plane's mesh renderer. The script enables the arrows to show and turn at the assigned path positions.

4. UI Pages

In order to let the whole setting more understandable, we add two UI pages: world-setting information and the NPCs information. These two pages will automatically show on when the audience enter the VR experience.
‍

These two UI pages are bound to the left controller, so if the users want to revisit the information later on, they can press "X" on the left controller to open and close the World-Setting Information Page, and press "Y" on the left controller to open and close NPCs Information Page.

Then I wrote the script for the UI Canvas. I used the Unity InputSystem.The public InputActionReference "toggleReference" will be shown as "Toggle Reference", which is a public field in the inspector to let me drop the object into.

The script is assigned to UI Canvas, and the toggle reference is the custom one that I created in the XRI input action. I created two customized toggles in the XRI Input Action for both UI pages.

Website

This is the link to our website:
https://kc3985.wixsite.com/perception

During the senior project show, Dec.15th, 2023, we will invite people to try our VR experience, and write their feedbacks, questions and their own stories through this website.

‍

Final Showcase