Somewhere Out There
Role: Unity Developer | Tool: Blender & Unity
How can I convert my 3-D illustrations into an interactive VR experience?
‘Somewhere Out There’ is an immersive Virtual Reality Experience that enables the user to explore a surreal environment in Space. It gives the user the ability to navigate over terrain and through a landscape that they would only be able to see in animated films or illustrations.
In this project, the user controls their movement in the space through the up and down arrow keys, that move the user back and forth, as well as visually to control the rotation that imitates the turning of the user’s head.
Creating Assets in Blender
This VR Experience has been built using the game engine ‘Unity 5’, and the 3-D modeling and animation software ‘Blender’, for viewing through the Oculus DK2.
To build this project, the first step was to construct the 3-D environment that the user would be immersed in. I was intrigued by the idea of bringing a ‘Low-Poly’ environment to life. Low-Poly is a 3-D modeling technique that has evolved as an illustration and modeling style over the years, in which a 3-D object has jagged edges and still captures the essential form of an object. More specifically, the surface of the object is Triangulated and still creates an interesting overall visual style.
Unity Development
Once the 3D models were brought into Unity, I arranged them and duplicated some objects like trees to create the 3D space. I also widened the field of view of the camera, so that the user would be able to view a wider landscape.
Since the 3D environment was imported from Blender, it was necessary to apply a mesh collider or a box collider to the objects so that the camera would collide into the walls of the model, and make the experience more physically convincing.
I also used a ‘galaxy’ skybox that created the illusion of the galaxy around the 3D space.
The VR experience has a balloon elevator that traverses along the y-axis. I wanted the user to be able to get into this vehicle and control its movement. Since this experience was built was for VR, I created an empty game object called ‘camera vehicle’ that behaved as the parent of the main camera. The ‘Camera-Controller’ component was applied to the camera vehicle, to allow it to take inputs from the keyboard. To control the up and down movement of the balloon, I created a control paneI and used ‘Ray-Casting’ from the main camera, and deactivated the ‘Physics.Gravity’ component on it so that it could imitate the rising and falling movement of the balloon parent.
Project Takeaways
After building the 3D space and adding the movement functionality, I realized that the terrain would be more interesting to explore if the user could ‘fly’ through the space. Thus, it would be more useful to use the balloon elevator as a starting point for the experience and add additional actions that the user could perform to control it.
Going forward, I’m hoping to use the balloon elevator as a space/teleportation machine where the camera could be parked while traversing from one surreal environment to another. I would also like add more interactive 3D models like plants and rocks that would make the surreal experience more convincing.
Thoughts about VR
VR as a medium is extremely fascinating because it affects the user’s sense of perceiving space visually, acoustically and through balance. It convinces the senses into believing that the user is in a virtual space, and this is extremely powerful opportunity for the VR developer to convey messages that might otherwise be difficult to communicate. Thus, ‘Somewhere Out There’ is a VR experience that experiments with immersing users into an animated space and gives them the opportunity to interact with it.