VR Masters Projects
Student demoes are one of the most exciting times for me when teaching at Goldsmiths, University of London. They are the culmination of a term of hard work and learning, when students get to show the projects they have been working on.
This month I was lucky enough to attend the final demoes from Sylvia Pan’s VR class for masters students. Next year we are launching our Masters in Virtual and Augmented Reality, but we already run a course on Virtual Reality for our existings masters students in Video Games Art and Design; Indie Games and Playable Experiences and Computational Arts.
The demo session was a fantastic opportunity to see the great work, and the wide range of applications of VR that students were working on. In this post I’d like to feature of those projects.
To Bee or Not to Bee
Nothing like a good pun when you name a project. To Bee or Not to Bee embodies you in a Bee as you fly around a garden gathering nectar. The project aims to highlight the ecological dangers bees face in the modern world, but it is also a bit of fun with a cartoony style and a humourous voice over.
What is really interesting about the project is its use of interaction techniques to support embodiment and the sense of being a bee. You have to flap your “wings” to move around the world. That means a kind of comic flapping of your arms, sensed by the oculus touch controllers. The result is half way between play-acting a bee and having a sense of actually flying. It makes for a very effective interaction technique which grounds you in the life of a bee.
Dustman’s Horde
Given that the majority of student on the course were on games related masters degrees, it is actually quite surprising how few traditional games there were. One example is Dustman’s Horde: a first person Zombie apocalypse game where you play… a rubbish collector. The basic mechanic is to throw trash at the Zombies and it is has nice additional features like music and special bonuses like the item that, if you hit it, triggers the Zombies to start the “Thriller” dance.
Bot’s Burgers
There is a trend in VR games, exemplified by Job Simulator, for creating warped versions of real world tasks. This combines the fact that VR feels very real, while at the same time making it possible to break the rules. These games make a virtue of the fact that VR controls don’t yet match the accuracy and ease of interacting with the real world: making the clunkiness of picking up and manipulating objects part of the joke.
A good example is Bot’s burgers, where you act as a burger chef, cooking and assembling burgers to order (with plenty of burnt food and vegetables flying everywhere).
Mad Xmas
Mad Xmas, takes a similar approach, but this time to being a helper in Santa’s toy factory. Your job is to load presents into boxes as they come at you on a conveyor belt. Unfortunately, you don’t get to treat this precious cargo with the care it deserves. Lot’s of frantic present throwing ensues!
Söme Ässembly Reqüired
Söme Ässembly Reqüired is an escape room type game, in which you have to make your way out of a room whose walls are slowly closing in on you. You have to do this by assembling flat pack furniture, inspired by a “popular Scandinavian retailer”. Like the previous two examples the enjoyment comes from a recreation of a real world task. I was impressed by the attention the team put into the interaction to make the assembly feel real and work, even for quite small pieces. Not that it was easy, particularly when the process was being disrupted by a stray roomba.
Flow
Flow is a meditative experience, where a voice guides you through a mediation, while you are taken through an abstracted water world. You move between the surface (with moving particles and shapes) and the underwater world. It is very relaxing and demonstrates the potential of VR to influence your mood and potentially your mental health.
Smashroom VR
As in our undergraduate class, not all students approached handling difficult emotions through meditation. Smashroom VR, let you handle them by smashing things with a baseball bat. A variety of breakable objects fly at you and you get to swing at them with a bat. It’s a fun game and the use of sound reinforces the satisfying destruction.
Supershape VR
Supershape is a more rarified artistic concept, created by a group of computational arts students. They use a complex mathematical structure called a supershape, popular in generative art. The VR experience allows you to interact with it immersively. The graphics are relatively simple and abstract but the complexity of the supershapes make the visual experience very interesting. You use your body movements to manipulate the parameters of the mathematical system resulting in some breathtaking embodied experiences.
Haus Musik
Haus Musik initially feels like you are stepping into a highly realistic recreation of a home, with modernist furniture and decorations and an electronic soundtrack, but you quickly realise that the environment is reacting to the music in subtle, and sometimes not so subtle ways. Pictures jiggle on the walls, furniture dances and, if you press the “do not press” button gravity will turn off giving you a floating room of pulsing objects. The whole effect is slightly eery and uncanny but ultimately enjoyable.
Overall, it is great to see another crop of exciting and varied student projects. It definitely gets me psyched up for next year when our Masters in Virtual and Augmented Reality will begin and students will have the opportunity to take VR and AR even further.
This is part of a blog I have started to support learners on our Virtual Reality MOOC, if you want to learn more about VR, that is a good place to start. If you want to go into more depth, you might be interested in our Masters in Virtual and Augmented Reality at Goldsmiths’ University of London.
