This is my first approach to VR experience last October 2020.

Ideation

This contains all of my initial ideas about VR experiences, grouped into types of experience such as games, productivity, experience.
These initial ideas lead to some bigger stories where ideas are selected, combined, and deeper generated into the story, develop which visual styles, interaction, concepts, topics will be used.

Inspirations:

Depression is getting more common than ever

Depression is an illness affecting worldwide with a number of 264 million people (1). Especially in this period of time, when Coronavirus is not only destroying humans physically but also mentally. More people stay at home, losing their jobs, delaying major plans for their life. Nowadays, keeping your mental health is really important, as the more modern life is, the more “modern” problems we have to deal with.
This encourages me to create an experience that can help people relax for 5–10 mins after a stressful day; a walk in a wonderful land, with interactions that can warm their soul and learn to deeply focus on their inner selves.

Summary of Mantras

“Darling, I’m here for you”
“Darling, I know you are there and I’m so happy”
“Darling, I know you suffer. That is why I’m here for you”
“Darling, I suffer. Please help me”

These are 4 sentences that Buddhist monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh always reminds himself and others. From these 4 sentences, I am inspired by how we can live a peaceful life with all creatures and meditate every moment if we can.

I am personally not in any type of religion, but the philosophy really reaches me in terms of how we have compassion for each other, how we share happiness as well as sadness, how we can be open to getting help from others. My target in creating this VR experience is for people to feel love and to share the love. from children to adults to see themselves in some scenes of the experience, to learn the lessons of how should we view and accept our surroundings, etc all about our soul.

5 mins of appreciation

This idea comes naturally from the activity I practice myself to do every day: either think about or write down one thing that makes you appreciate today. Even if it is a hard day, when I failed to do something, or it’s a normal day, my intention in doing this is to find at least one good thing to end that day. I feel better when thinking about it even though my day at school is rough, I arrived home safely in the rain. If people choose to see the positive thing, despite how small it is, they still have one and one nice thing, every day.

To remind people of positivity every day, I want to add to the experience short stories and missions for people to see, or achieve. Moreover, the fact that they can just wander around the environment, listen to soft, nature sounds, see the creatures as their friends can nurture the appreciation from the inside, can be a healing treatment.

Story of Soulvana: a journey of healing

Visual mood board

I really love the cute side of 3D modeling when you can create adorable characters and environments. I choose to go with this visual style because my target users are of all ages so I need to come up with something that many people enjoy and feel relaxed to see. Ain’t most of us will be melted by these fluffy objects?

The 3D objects will use very minimal to none texture to have a clean look, together with rounded and smooth forms. These will make people more easygoing and attracted to the scene.

Below is the color combination for the project. I tend to use a more warm tone to have a welcoming mood.

Soulvana Poster

Soulvana Official Trailer

Process Recap

From here on, I will be writing about the process of making this VR experience. If you’re curious about how virtual reality products are made and my huge struggle with technical issues, then keep on reading. 😜

3D assets build

💁🏻‍♀ ️Here’s a quick recap of the 3D assets building process.

Unity environment build

Yep, here comes trouble. And nerdy technical stuff, you can skip to see the final product. 🥸

Testing V1

What doesn’t work?

So much, much more than I expected. 😰

When I import the worm together with its animation, the worm refuses to drop to the ground, even though I apply it exactly like the basic grabbable box in VRTK
Turns out, I have to copy the whole scene including its SDK Manager and all its scripts, everything.

I started the project with a Mac so when I import the project in any Window computer, especially when I switch between a few computers and Unity Versions, the file gradually build up errors and losing interactions. Exporting the file into exe does not even work (Mac does not support exe)

The painting texture that I made cannot import here. Unity only shows the color that I choose, not even other things like metallic, clearcoat… I have researched about it, and turns out Unity and Blender are two different engines, which Unity and Blender may or may not support features built specifically for the purpose of that app such as specific materials, cloth simulation,…

Testing V2

What doesn’t work?

At first when I use scene 4 to start. I make things dropped on the floor, but when I copy and paste scene 5 to make interactions, things messed up. When pressed start, everything goes crazy and objects are jumping or moving every fast, here and there. It’s chaos. I think I messed up with the placement of the script. 🤒

I also find out that when we export fbx from Blender, we should pay attention to the Pivot point of the object. If is it not in the center of the 3D object, it will be hard to apply Box collider in Unity or making Animation in Unity.

🔥 Quick reflection:

• Unity is hard and complex if we don’t pay attention to the little details
• Since I fail too much, I learn that I should constantly test in Game mode after applying each interaction or moving anything like scripts, SDK, from scene to scene. If I move too far and too fast, I can not come back and know where I messed up.
• The software is hard to manage so I should be prepared, be consistent in the machine, the Unity version I use.

Final approach

(and thank God, it worked)

- Create a new scene, make the base scene as Scene 4 Locomotion
- Copy and paste EVERYTHING from 2 scenes, make sure the hierarchy is not messing up.
- Move the Terrain down a little under the Base Floor for Scene 5 because this base floor can be teleported wherever you point to.

Change the Texture of the Terrain to the above Texture. This looks pretty much like sand texture, but it is actually Leather texture. Apply the Texture to the Base Floor also.

• At first, when I import the head, some parts of the objects have errors because I can see inside and outside at the same time.
• I figure out that we have to import a plugin called Ciconia Studio to make the texture double-sided.

• At first, when I apply the mesh collider so that things can be put on top of the head, I cannot do and things keep falling, even though I try to add this component to every single element.
• Finally, I find that creating an Empty and putting all in can make it works perfectly.

• now it's the tree stick. I make it to be grabbable to sweep the worms on top of her head.
• I used the components from the Box that can be grabbed at a precise point.

• I apply animation for the worms by using Animation Controller.
  However, with the animation, the worms somehow cannot be grabbed when I apply to grab interaction.
• So I end up not using the Animation I make from Blender. I will have to figure out why this happens later on.

• Making stairs for climbing up to the head. together with the teleport spots. Since when using Oculus, we have to use teleporting, rather than moving controller.
• I make my own beam texture and apply it to the teleporting spots. I also change the color of the circles to match with overall tones.

• Paint to raise up the terrain to make a small pond where the girl is at the middle. Then soften some of the edges at the front

• Change the Skybox by applying the image that I made below. The sky contains crystals and water-like textures.
• The color is warm and cozy to have a welcoming vibe, and it actually affects my scene underneath so I have to change some of the material colors to make it balance again.
• I re-create the materials here in Uniy by Create Marterial Preset. The materials are mostly matte and no patterns are complex texture.

• Change the tutorial board into a welcome board. You can see how to do the tasks in it.
• I import the Flowers and put in the pond. Add Animations to it and it is floating just like the water is moving in real life
• Add Scaling Animation to the worms so that it looks like it’s breathing slowly during their sleep

• It cannot be a cry-baby if she is not showing tears, right? I quickly make a 3D object from the faces of her head in Blender and use the same Material of the pond. It looks like she is crying all over the pond.
• Add animation to make the crying lively.
• Import mushrooms and apply the below texture that I made. The mushrooms will fall down when grab and throw away. This applies the same components as grabbable boxes, but without the Rigidbody so they don’t fall down from the first place

• Make the door that can be open, using VRTK reference.
• At first the door is quite lagging and jumping if I move it too close to the entrance, so I move it a bit futher away
• Have to make sure thet the Terrain is not block the way when opened.

• I added inside the door a heart that can be scalable, but it cannot be scaled up very fast. This measn when you want to truly fulfill someone, things have to be made gradually and their heart will be full oneday
• Zen relaxing sound is added to the experience

VR Environment Walkthrough

Yes, it’s not just 3D animation for show, the game actually works 🤣

Final Reflection

First of all, I cannot appreciate it more that you have come this far to read through my process of making Soulvana.

A. What works?

• This is the first time that I have a close approach to things related to coding and gaming, so I feel like I learn so much yet still so much more to discover. Unity is an amazing software that helps me to bring ideas to life, in the virtual world. It is also not an easy horse to ride, because you have to evolve with it and deeply understand the core of coding to manage it.
• I am proud of myself to not give up when I come up with so many mistakes and I failed so many times, to the point that I sometimes think that I should just quit.
• This project helps me to know capability for the next projects and be prepared because a lot of technical issues will pop up if I don’t pay attention to details

B. What did not work?

• I need to learn about how to apply Animation from Blender and the object still works as interactable in Unity. If this can be done, I can make my visuals closer to my imaginations.

C. Future of Soulvana

Though this is just my first approach in ideating and executing a project in virtual reality, I believe the idea of Soulvana where people can help heal their surroundings and healing themselves at the same time is very potential. In Soulvana, there can be way more many scenes, environments, situations, and stories that can evoke human compassion. Soulvana, however, will not be published just yet on any platform since it’s just in its testing phase, but I believe in the near future, when I have enough skills and have a team with the same mindset, this direction can be improved and produced as an official product for all the souls out there.