SCALED VR is an interactive virtual reality application to visualize the resource consumption of everyday food items. Experience the true scale of C02 production as well as water and acreage expenditures.
time
2019
3 weeks
tasks
Lead Development
Game Design
Source Control
context
4th semester project
experimental game jam
Game Design (BA)
HTW Berlin
team
Marc Meyer
Kateryna Pinchuk
Sarah Hallek
Florian Gelzenleuchter
Florian Wolf
walkthrough
This VR experience sets the player onto an abstract platform, littered with various food items. Any item can be picked up and dropped again. You can chose from different meat products, eggs, milk, cheese, various fruits and bread. By placing food onto the scale in the center of the platform, the food stacked onto it gets measured and various attractions start to appear around the player. They each represent a statistical piece of information about the total scale of production expenditures.
implementation
The application was developed in Unity3D, using the SteamVR plugin and a HTC Vive. All food objects extend from an interactable script. During controller input the nearest interactable gets parented into the hands of the player. Food objects also contain information about its emissions, which is stored in an emission struct. All emission structs of all items placed in a parented area above the scale object get accumulated. The total emissions are then dispatched via UnityEvents. Each data-visualization-attraction listens to that event and if the value has changed, it will start interpolation Coroutines, fluently aniamting the value changes.
motivation
Climate change demands and deserves education. For that reason we wanted to create an experience that puts certain facts into a very neutral and unprejudiced perspective. All data visualized has been thoroughly researched and equals real life averages. After seeing our data in VR for the first time, we were quite surprised how different the scaling was compared to what we imagined. Before, I actually had next to no concept for their volumes and suddenly I was able to put the data into context. The project helped me gain some perspective on the consequences of my own food consumption.
learnings
Without actually wanting to make a game, the result turned out to be quite a game. The data visualization required some very natural interactions, such as picking things up and placing them. Players frequently tried to stack as many things as possible or juggled with some eggs. I learned that fun doesn't always have to be intended. Overall, this experimental game jam helped me reinforce my VR development workflow in Unity3D and opened me up to new approaches of designing a game. It also showed me how the VR development pipeline still features lots of obstacles, such as having to deal with overly complex input mapping, device compatibility and performance limitations.
