PROJECT DARK ROOM
A Sensory Deprived VR Experience
WHAT IS PROJECT DARK ROOM
Project Dark Room is an Oculus VR art project that explores what a visually deprived experience would be like and how the audience's perception of space differs in this situation than in traditional VR scenarios. During the experience, the player would have to navigate through a set of corridors and reach the destination in a completely dark environment in VR. The player has to rely on his/her sensory feedback, auditory feedback and sense of direction to find the correct direction.
By doing the project , I wish to highlight the importance of using senses other than visual in VR by completely taking the visual aspects away. As the user will have to navigate through the room and map out directions in their minds, Project Dark Room transforms the spaces around the audience into an imaginary virtual space in their minds. I believe that integrating multiple senses instead of focusing only on visual helps to create a higher level of immersion for VR users, and there should be more explorations on how Virtual Reality can further push the boundary of the physical and the virtual space with more ways for the user to interact with the virtual world.
WHY
I came up with the idea of this project when I was taking my first VR development lesson. We created scenes in VR and explored each other’s work as a class. My classmates came up with many creative ideas, and trying their work makes me realize that Virtual Reality has the potential to sound and feel differently than existing media without changing our actual space in reality. However, most work in developed in VR merely features a gigantic visual display, and at most with some motion controls.
Besides the deprivation of visual sense, I also want to use the combination of tactile, auditory senses and the sense of direction to achieve synesthesia art. By definition, synesthesia art means artwork that involves the cooperation of senses, such as seeing and hearing. Most existing synesthesia art are the visualization of music and musification of paintings, such as color organs and musical paintings created in the 20th century. As art in the forms of music and painting is practiced very frequently and often associated with each other, the term “synesthesia art” today seems to be exclusively about the combination of visual and auditory elements. However, as technology progresses and art becomes more interactive today, I believe that it is possible to explore more possibilities of synesthesia art.
TECHNICALS
The Project is built in Unity 2019.3.0f6, and runs on Oculus Rift, Oculus Quest via Oculus Link, and Oculus Quest in standalone mode. A custom script is added to all physical objects in the scene so that the the controller vibrates whenever the virtual hand touches any objects. The footstep sound is implemented as 3D stereo sound so that it resonates in the room. There are also several movable obstacles in the scene, so that the user may feel like the room is changing when they accidentally pushed one of the obstacles.
REACTION
from an early interaction of the project
RELEVANT WORK
