Video Overview:
Visual Design
The environment design for the feeling of madness is a ‘van-Goghianesque’ scenery with the color yellow as a protagonist. Yellow has been associated with insanity for a variety of reasons throughout cultural history. More specifically, in Russia a common title for an insane asylum is “Yellow House”(Morton, 2015). Moreover, “Safety Yellow”is a bright yellow that resembles the natural color of several venomous snakes and insects. Humans instinctively perceive yellow as stressful and/or dangerous. Van-Gogh had paintings with the color of yellow dominating close to the end of his life, similarly, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Gilman, has been tied to some sort of OCD. Finally, studies on the effects of psychedelic drugs such as LSD have shown art works by “crazy” people with much more yellow as the effects of the drugs advanced (Morton, 2015). That is why in this environment design yellow is a dominating color that is depicted in a multitude of shapes and flowy-moving forms to recreate a restless and irrational feeling. The plane 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 madness color theme with interchanging colors of yellow. The proportions of the environment are distorted in such a way for everything to look huge. The interactable mushrooms are large in scale and bounce around to enhance the madness of the scenery. When a player hovers onto a mushroom, a sneezing lady appears. Lastly, the navigation is also slightly faster than the average continuous movement speed in VR.
Sound Design
Layers:
- General room tone
- News Broadcast clips of the first 100 days of the coronavirus in the UK: The theme of environment number 1 is Coronavirus madness. For that reason I wanted the background sound to be a hectic absurdity of different news clips from the first 100 days of COVID-19 in the UK. The main sound of the scene is based on the audio of this youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJycNmK7KPk&t=2s.
- Hover Interaction Sound: When the user hovers on interactable objects, in this case mushrooms, there is audio feedback to let the user know that these objects are more than just environment design.
- Animation Sound: The consequence of interacting with each mushroom is an animation of a woman sneezing. While that animation is at play the sneezing sound is present as well.
Haptic Feedback:
- On Select enter:
- Haptic Intensity: 1.0
- Duration: 0.15
- On hover enter:
- Haptic Intensity: 0.4
- Duration: 0.1