OVERGROWN

Work in Progress

Can we experience digital nature? How does it affect us and what makes a virtual experience truly immersive?
With this project I'm exploring a topic very close to my heart.
It's the middleground between a gaming experience and an immersive exhibition piece thats meant to be intuitively explored.

Art / Creative Direction - Self
Programming - Self
Sounddesign - Julien Hecker

Category

Virtual Reality Experience

Date

2022 - Current

Client

Self

Current State - Early Tech Testing

Right now this project is still in the early gameplay testing and iteration phase and the specifics are still open to change depending on whats needed to enhance the experience.
I want to explore ways to use Virtual Reality as an immersive and accesible medium that even players without prior gaming knowledge can navigate intuitively

Immersion

Immersion is a key element of this experience.
This means reducing any gameplay aspects that break the illusion to a minimum. Because of that picking up objects is not an obtion and the room is designed in a way that is walkable having to use teleport as little as possible.

Touching objects triggers vibrations in your controller while your handmeshes are physics based and collide with the meshes instead of following your hands completely. This combined with the haptic feedback of plants growing and deforming under your touch creates the illusion of a real collision while nothing is there.
Interestingly our brain does not recognize this dissonance between real hand location and the virtual hand and thus assumes thats hand is indeed still stopped at the mesh if the distance doesn't get to large.

Gameplay Experience

The Player/exhibition visitor stands in a sterile and bleak room filled with appliances of everyday life giving the whole space a liminal and surreal corporate feeling. right in front of you is a floating mass of particles. Interacting with those sents out an impulse through the level that lets some flowers grow on the floor with a unique sound breaking the opressign silence while objects start to float.

During your first steps you notice plants growing under your footsteps and touching meshes you will be able to paint them with foliage growth.

Soundesign

The Soundscape starting out will besilence filled by irregular noises made by the objects in the scene such as keyboard typing printer sounds etc.
Interacting with meshes will trigger a soundscape during the growth process.
The specific sounds will be controlled by the electric resistance taken from real plants using an amplifier.
Each of those will be uniquly assigned to a plant giving each mesh with multiple specific plants on it a unique soundscape and thus turning the space into a natural concerta

Level Design

The level will be a room filled with everyday life objects that a procedurally stacked and floating through the room to give easy acess to the player to interact with. Procedural generation offers replay value to the players wanting to relive the experience as different meshes also create different plants and with that another unique soundscape

Blueprints

To achieve this a system in the player pawn sents out a check to every mesh it's colliding with if it has already been interacted with. If not it will create a dynamic material with a dynamic render target texture assigned to it. every collision will record the location in UV space it's been hit and draw that onto the render target using 3 hit points to avoid UV seams.
These render targets in turn get used in the dynamic material to paint a moss mask onto the mesh and spawn the niagara particle system scaling up the foliage when touched and triggering the assigned soundscape.

The player pawn also reconizes any collisions and has a dynamic physics deform applied that will slightly offset the hand if resistance is met to avoid clipping through meshes and breaking the illusion.

Content used


https://quixel.com/megascans/
https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/stylized-shaders
https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/big-office
https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/storage-house-set
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