Utopia
Speculative VR Experience
Team Size: 1
In the future, the rising of the sea level submerged the lands that human once lived upon. With most of the population sailing across the deep space in search of a new home, the last remaining people on earth created large artificial islands to live on: seasteads called "Utopia".
Exhibited in the NewView Festival 2022
The theme of this exhibition is "No Normal", and the class of NewView NY focused on the creative use of controllers. For this reason, I decided to get creative with movements in the VR world by replacing the default point-teleportation system with a pair jetpacks that allow the players to fly freely in the immersive environment.
As a gamer who enjoy the feeling of immersion from Virtual Reality games and experiences a lot, I always find "movement" to be a crucial source of this sense of immersion. Being able to move in the virtual space by moving my body and interacting with physical objects offers me a sense of satisfaction that I couldn't find when playing with traditional controllers.
The idea to use a jetpack system for movement comes from the combination of real water jetpack equipment and flying mount systems in most MMO and sandbox games. If the player holds the Oculus controller upside-down, it feels very similar to the joysticks in a plane cockpit.
System Design
For the jetpack, I started with a simple prototype that propels the character to the opposite direction that the controller points to. During the play test, I gathered some feedback on people's thoughts on this movement style, as well as several points on how to make it more realistic. I then implemented a more complex jetpack system using Playmaker. The new system includes a fuel meter and acceleration of forces, as well as a "ease falling" mechanism that offsets downward movement quickly when activating the jetpack while falling.
World Building
The world of Utopia was inspired by the aesthetics of Studio Ghibli movies and Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Since VR is often associated with art styles that are futuristic or cyberpunk , I wanted to explore possibilities of combining them with cartoony nature environments to create an immersive experience for more broad audience groups.
