ABOUT
What is Immersive Words
Immersive words is a brand-new style of an art gallery that integrates the traditional art gallery and online activities. This interactive VR art gallery allows users to experience different galleries, share ideas about artists, and interact with other users’ comments. To put it simply, it is kind of Facebook in the shape of an art gallery. There are five galleries in Immersive Words, and each gallery has its own theme and an artist based on the theme. For example, Andy Warhol is standing in the middle of Andy Warhol's gallery. When the game is played and a user wears a headset to enter the space, five galleries are shown in the scene. With controllers, users can teleport to any gallery they want to go. Once they enter the gallery, users can enjoy the immersive gallery, write their thoughts, or draw anything with their controllers. In any place, users are free to leave their ideas, drawings, or anything they want. Their comments are saved so that other users can see them in the future.
The more comments are made by users, the more words are floating around in different galleries. Then, Immsersive Words is created.
Integration
Why this project should be implemented through VR?
The idea for this project started by thinking about the different ways to look at artwork, both online and offline. There is a great gap between the traditional art gallery and modern social content. We visit art museums/galleries to enjoy various ‘artistic’ content. But we also visit websites and use SNS to enjoy ‘all’ of the various content including art.
Another important thing is the behavior after enjoying the content. In the art gallery, most of people don’t share ideas with other visitors, however, in websites and SNS, it is so common that people leave comments and share media, ideas, and thoughts with other users even if they don’t know each other. And this is a great power of the internet that makes it a gathering place for diverse and free thoughts.
Based on these ideas, I came to integrate advantages of art gallery, which is onsite immersion, and the internet, which is sharing ideas. For example, users are leaving comments about Andy Warhol or his art in his gallery like people who leave comments on YouTube. Other users will see it later and they will either respond to it or leave another comment.
The most important feature of Immersive Words is that there are no rules in this game. The high flexibility of this game gives users authentic freedom of expression. Users can draw their portrait in front of Leonardo Da Vinci's gallery and a funny mustache on the face of Van Gogh! In other words, Immersive Words is a challenge to the traditional way of appreciating art, and an integration of it with the modern way of enjoying content.
Virtual Reality
How I made Immersive Words
To combine an art gallery’s characteristic of being on the spot and online social space of sharing free thoughts, I needed a virtual space to fully experience my concept. VR is perfectly suitable for making a realistic feeling that people are in art gallery looking at artworks and a social system to interact with. Maps are made through Unity, 3D Modelings of artists were made through Blender, simple animations of artists were from UMA, and the equipment used in the showcase is HTC VIVE.
Equipment and assets used in this project:
From asset store:
- Steam VR Plugin
- VRTK - Virtual Reality Toolkit
- TextMesh Pro
- VR Brush
- UMA2 (Male base & animation)
- Post Processing Stack
- Dark Fantasy Kit
- Victorain Cathedral/Large Church
- 3D Scifi Kit Starter Kit
- Spotlight and Structure