Virtual Reality Lab 2015 Projects
The Bamboo Forest | Beat Reader | China 200 BC | ESC (Escape) | Glorious Era VR | Imbalance | *inCahootsVR* | Light as a Feather | The Museum of Stolen Art | Night Owl | Ready Driver One | RecoVR: Mosul | The Syrian Journey | Vicious Cycle | VRabb.it | Yo Sobrevivi (I survived)
Bamboo Forest
The Bamboo Forest is a VR experience inspired by the Chinese Wuxia (martial arts, sorcery and chivalry) genre of film. Instead of watching a Kung Fu warrior race across tree tops as if in flight, the user can put on a Rift and soar across the canopy of a bamboo forest…leaping from tree to tree…but not without consequences.
A Stone Dragon pursues you from behind while animated Terra Cotta enemy-warriors lurk below and await for you to plummet to the ground.
Structured as a narrative game, the user must find an ancient temple, steal the Chinese censer (incense burner) and return to the wall… where he/she must slip through a crevice to avoid being destroyed by the Dragon.
Team: Chris LoBello, Bracey Smith
Experience: Oculus Rift, Gear VR
Beat Reader
Beat Reader – A Winner of the Hearst Immersive Hack
Beat reader is an app that works on your regular iOS or Android smartphone and allows you to browse articles in VR space – to the beat – hands free!
Cover images (with titles) appear to the beat of music and float past you. If you stare at an image for more than two seconds, it’s saved for reading later.
The demo will be augmented with a SubPac subwoofer backpack, so the user can really feel the beat.
Team: Lex Dreitser
Experience: Gear VR, Cardboard
Terra Cotta warriors
China 200 BC
Setting the stage for a story-game in VR, China 200 BC presents the Terra Cotta warriors in 3D. The five warriors – general, charioteer, archer, civil officer and soldier – are clad in the authentic colours and garb of ancient China.
When you swivel your head, you’ll glimpse a golden Buddha nested in a mountain sanctuary. A flute and zither play in the background as trees sway in a breeze.
Team: J Dakota Powell
Experience: Gear VR
ESC (Escape) is a VR experience and peripherals built around one simple mechanic: flying.
Bracey Smith: “I, like many, have had recurring dreams where I was able to fly if I only concentrated hard enough. ESC will attempt to recreate that experience. In 2014 I received a Muse headband as a gift. It’s an EEG reader that is capable of distinguishing between an active and a calm mind. I’ts a neat toy, but I never really had much use for it, until now.”
Team: Bracey Smith, Rehmat Qadir
Experience: Gear VR
Glorious Era VR
Glorious Era VR invites participants to explore the remnants of an ancient temple in Thailand from the point of view of a conservator endeavoring to restore the temple to its original grandeur. Participants will be immersed in a virtual recreation of Wat Chaiwatthanaram, an actual Buddhist temple built in the 17th century and now one of Thailand’s most significant historic sites. The temple’s name means The Temple of Long Reign and Glorious Era.
Donning a Gear VR headset and brandishing a custom engineered gold applicator, visitors will assume the role of architectural conservator. Their mission, as they navigate a 3D-model of the structure, is to use the applicator to reapply the gilding that originally coated the temple’s once lustrous interior and restore its magnificent sheen.
The setting for Glorious Era VR is constructed from LIDAR data generously provided by World Monuments Fund. The organization recently surveyed the site as part of an effort to document, preserve and protect Wat Chaiwatthanaram from emerging environmental threats.
Team: Adrian Sas, Inpyo Chang and John Choi
Experience: Gear VR
Imbalance: A utopic ecosystem decays as a continually growing population of energy sucking creatures deplete its natural resources and leave behind mountains of trash.
Story: The story is settled in a beautiful low poly fantasy ecosystem with fictitious plants and animals, everything seems perfect and harmonic, all in balance. As the user sees this world they realize there are creatures (called the Otopos) that suck the energy of other living creatures (both plants and other animals) and defecate trash (human-like trash). At the beginning they are just a few, but they quickly start to reproduce at an accelerated pace, the fecal-trash becomes little mountains across the landscape and others start floating down the river. Later, as we get further from the origin, we see the land – full of Otopos, full of dead creatures and full of trash.
Experience: The user is carried around in this land and can only move their head (like being on a theme park ride). The three scenes or stages of decay exist on the same terrain, but in different parts of the world). As the user travels on a set path they see different scenes of the ecosystem, (there’s no direct interaction with the environment, the user is more like a fly on the wall).
Team: Natalia Cabrera, Tommy Payne and Isabel Paez
Experience: Cardboard
*inCahootsVR* – The growing popularity of VR over the past few years has seen a steady increase in VR content, games and applications. The proliferation of this new technology and its desire to create a totally immersive experience has an unfortunate drawback; it isolates users from one another and limits interaction in the physical world. This is not to say that multi-user VR experiences don’t exist, but rather that they tend to be focused on the actions of the individual as opposed to encouraging, or facilitating, a collaborative experience.
*inCahootsVR* aims to address this problem by allowing users to “feel” the presence of his/her collaborators. In this simple mobile VR proof-of-concept demo, users work together to construct an artifact in virtual space by manipulating objects in the physical world.
Team: Sergio Mora-Diaz, Eozin Che, Craig Pickard
Gear: Cardboard
Cast of “Light as a Feather”
Have you ever played Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board, Hard as a Rock? Well, you’re about to experience a rather terrifying version of it.
Light as a Feather blends traditional cinematic storytelling with the full immersion and interactive experience of Virtual Reality. This is a horror movie where you ARE the lead character. The story within the story is built solely with assets composed in a Unity built environment. Then when you move into the “real” story, you find yourself at a 13-year-old girl’s slumber party shot with the Freedom 360 camera rig. Light as a Feather takes you on a terrifying ride where you live the experience instead of simply watching it.
Team: Jamie Ruddy, Loren Abdulezer, EunJee Kim, Bittnarie Shin, Hao Tseng, Xuhui Xu
Experience: Gear VR
Museum of Stolen Art
The Museum of Stolen Art – A virtual museum for pieces that went missing.
The Museum of Stolen art is a virtual space for art that has been stolen or looted, It is an VR experience where one can enjoy artwork that is otherwise hidden.
The museum’s goal is to engage the public in culturally significant items that are in danger of disappearance. It serves as a photo array for a crime mystery, and a tool for learning more about the circumstances in which art is being stolen, looted, or destroyed. The visitors are encouraged to keep a lookout and report to the authorities if they encounter a stolen piece IRL. This information will go to our collaborators – Art Recovery International.
Team: Ziv Schneider
Experience: Cardboard
Night Owl
Night Owl: In this interactive bedtime storybook, an owl journeys through the four seasons, growing and changing throughout a year of nights.
Follow Owl as she guides you page by page and season by season through her story. Experience this pop-up book while standing on the pages themselves. Whoooo wouldn’t love to fly with Owl through her world?
Team: Timothy Cooper, Kristen C Klemenhagen, KC Lathrop and Eve J Weinberg
Experience: Cardboard
Ready Driver One
Ready Driver One is a multiplayer Co-op game.
A driver and up to three gunners must battle through hostile alien terrain on an advanced war rig. As the server, driver one controls the plan of attack with nitro boosted engines and devastating force shields.
Friends can join in as gunners using their smartphone. Gunners lay down heavy weapon fire, and all work together to stop waves of relentless aliens.
Team: Lex Dreitser
Experience: Gear VR, Cardboard
RecoVR: Mosul
RecoVR: Mosul, a Collective Reconstruction
With more than 3,500 archeological sites, including centuries-old religious and historic excavations, Iraq’s second-largest city Mosul has the majority of the country’s archaeological wealth. On June 10, 2014, Mosul was occupied by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Images of the destruction of historic sites and artifacts in the city’s museum made international headlines and shocked the world.
RecoVR: Mosul, a Collective Reconstruction is a virtual reality installation created in response to this destruction, allowing us to visit the museum again and find out what happened to some of its key pieces. While walking through the museum we see the destroyed artifacts, digitally reconstructed through crowd-sourced imagery. This virtual environment was created by new media artists Ziv Schneider and Laura Chen. Apart from bringing the historical collection back to life, it also sheds light on ISIL’s war on cultural heritage.
Team: The Economist Media Lab – Ziv Schneider and Laura Chen
Experience: Gear VR
The Syrian Journey
The Syrian Journey is a VR data visualization of the Syrian refugee crisis based on data from the UN Refugee Agency.
Our aim is to put the viewers into the shoes of Syrian refugees traveling from one location to the next while allowing high level understanding of Syrian refugee routes, locations, and populations.
The experience will be built in Unity for Cardboard and use audio recordings to frame the story. Data visualization will be realized in 2D images.
Team: Paul Hiam, Danara Sarioglu, Cassie Tarakajian, Jiashan Wu
Experience: Cardboard
Vicious Circle
Vicious Circle is a VR film that puts users in the place of a victim of domestic violence, inside their house with their partner.
Browsing through the scene, their presence causes smalls interferences: a cup falls, a door slams. The partner then reacts, sometimes with violence and other times being loving and careful.
The random reactions simulate the changes in behavior experienced by victims of domestic violence – they are arbitrary. The idea is to understand the vicious cycle they are part of.
Team: Karolina Ziulkoski and Dulphe Pinheiro Machado
Experience: Oculus Rift
Yo Sobrevivi (I survived): An Immersive Experience of the Colombian Conflict
After decades of violence, a small community in Colombia seek healing and justice by sharing face-to-face the stories of victims and offenders. A trio of initial stories recorded from interviews by Dan Archer in the field in Colombia will be turned into immersive VR experiences, using audio, video and photographs.
Yo Sobrevivi will consist of three 5-minute immersive experiences from all three sides (the villagers, ex-FARC guerrillas and paramilitaries), as they share their true stories of how the violence in Colombia has affected them. Participants will be able to choose which side of the story (FARC, paramilitary or villager) they want their POV to be from, to experience the conflict from multiple sides and see how personal and painful the path to violence at a national level can be.
Team: Dan Archer, Pierre Depaz, Francesco Marconi
Experience: Cardboard, Gear VR