Video Overview:
Visual Design:
For the feeling of suffocation I used black, dark purple, and dark blue colors to reference the cyanotic tissue colors of asphyxiation. Cyanotic tissue is described as blue, black, purplish in color. After death, changes in blood chemistry and the breakdown of clotting factors lower the viscosity of blood (Rod, 2015). Additionally, the environment is really small with not enough space to move around and with dark stripes alarmingly close to where the user is standing meant to “suffocate” the user. Similar to environment 1, the ground is a UV light blue/purple tone to represent the idea that it is disinfected and one can walk on it.
Embodiment through visual feedback is achieved with the inclusion of virtual hands of the player. The hands are stylistically in line with the suffocation color theme depicted in a transparent purple color.
The proportions of the environment are distorted in such a way for everything to look small and suffocating, as if there is nowhere to go. The interactable mushrooms interchange from big to small scale to enhance the feeling of entrapment. When a player hovers onto a mushroom, a new mushroom appears in the scene, slowly filling the whole environment. Lastly, the navigation is also slightly slower than the average continuous movement speed in VR.
Sound Design:
Layers:
- General room tone
- News broadcast clip from Boris Johnson’ announcement of the first lockdown: The theme of environment number 2 is suffocation. For that reason I wanted the background sound to enhance that sense of confinement and for that I used bits of Boris’ Johnson announcement of the first lockdown and what it entails. You can listen to the full announcement here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc11uZ7_PnU&t=289s.
- Hover Interaction Sound: When the user hovers on a mushroom a heavy breathing sound is present that is line with the scale change of each mushroom
Haptic Feedback:
In this scene the interactable objects only need to be hovered on in order to unlock an “event”. Therefore, the haptic feedback needed is only for when hovering.
- On hover enter:
- Haptic Intensity: 0.5
- Duration: 0.2