At Night

Developed using Unity
Co-developed with Meihui Liu and Jinyu Li

Project Overview

An interactive virtual reality game with head mounted displays to portray the stress from an overwhelming amount of workload and disorganization that we may often feel. This feeling is significantly obvious at night, as all of these unfinished things would be stuck in our head, making us feel intimidated from starting a new day.
Through this project, we hope to convey the feeling of anxiety and make the players realize that they shouldn’t be escaping reality by immersing themselves in virtual environments.

Links

Project Walkthrough Demo Video

Project Highlights

Visual Distortion: To immerse players in the world of someone who is facing anxiety due to procrastination, we added some visual distortion (ripple effects) to the room.

Sound Effect: We also added a rainy storm sound to couple with the ripple effect when the user takes no actions. In contrast, a calm nature sound is played when the user grabs an object or is typing at the blackboard to couple with the ripple effect soothing. Additional sound effects include light turning on, door opening, and object grabbing.

Light and UI Hints: This room is meant to let the players explore the room without providing too many hints – players need to figure out what they can do to reduce stress by themselves and find which method is beneficial. However, since we also don’t want the players to feel lost in the game, we added point lights above some objects as hints to imply that the players may want to explore those objects. Some UIs we put in the room would also guide the players to determine a better way to reduce stress.

User Input: Users can use a virtual keyboard to add inputs on the blackboard, which makes the game more interactive and aligns with our intentions of allowing the user to become organized through a personalized to-do list.