Design For Another World — Underwater Ruins
Another World
For our Design for Another World project, we chose to go with an underwater environment drawing inspiration from the famous city Atlantis and the Bioshock video game series. We wanted to build a network of domes and tunnels on the ocean floor and allow the user to navigate through these series of tunnels. The domes and tunnels are transparent to allow the user to see the surrounding underwater environment. We added a series of rock formations and architecture that takes inspiration from the Ancient Greeks, furthering the idea of an ancient city that is now underwater. We added fog and manipulated light in addition to using a specific shade of blue for background to really give it the feel of being on the ocean floor. We incorporated an ambient sound to bring the whole underwater VR experience together.
Environment
When brainstorming ideas for strange and unusual locations, our group realized that combining elements from two different settings could achieve an even greater level uniqueness. We considered settings such as the moon, the desert, under the ocean, on an asteroid, and many other rarely visited locations. The environment our group ended up choosing was an underwater facility at the bottom of the ocean, surrounded by the sunken ruins of a temple. In order to navigate, the user must walk through the many glass tubes that which sit between the ruins. We also wanted to capture the dark eerie mood that you might expect at the bottom of an ocean, and we achieved this using a dark blue haze which is meant to represent the dark ocean water.
Inspiration
Once our group had decided on the combination of two settings, we started looking at reference of similar locations. Some inspirations for our environment include fictional places such as the underwater city of Atlantis, or the City of Rapture from the Bioshock series of videogames. Our goal was to combine visual elements from these two sources, and see if we could make a new environment from them.
Another source of inspiration were some of the existing ruins from ancient Egypt. Specifically, the Temple of Karnak in Luxor, Egypt was a major source of reference for the ruins we modeled.
Development
The development of our environment went through many stages. First, we had to model up the set-pieces in a modeling software. We ended up using Blender to model our 3D models, since it is free to use and powerful. After modeling the main set-pieces, the next step was to texture them. The software we used for texturing was Substance Painter, which we had luckily gotten free access to thanks to earlier participation in an adobe design contest.
After texturing, the final step was to get the models into our development space, which was an A-Frame project hosted on Glitch. This step was actually one of the more difficult, as web-based platforms have specific requirements for the model format. Luckily, one of the accepted formats were .GLB files, which can be exported to directly from Substance Painter. Once the models were on Glitch it was simply a matter of scaling and moving them into the right places.
Iterating on the Design
One issue that we quickly ran into on A-Frame was that it didn’t handle transparency quite the way we wanted to. In some cases where the user was looking through transparent glass, other transparent objects on the other side would not render properly. This made navigating the series of tubes somewhat confusing, as the users view of the outside world would sometimes not line up with the way things were actually laid out. To improve on this, we made added a thin frame to the pipe model, so that even if the transparent sections of pipe weren’t visible, the user could still see the outline created by the frame.
Sound
For the audio portion of the project, we went with a low deep sea hum along with spooky positional sound cues to continue building the eerie environment. We drew a lot of inspiration from Berrak Nil, a creative code musicologist turned programmer. Her post dedicated to A-Frame sound gave important insight to build the perfect alternate world for the ears.
Atmospheric Ambience
The ambiance is the background audio that is looping throughout the experience. It consists of 4 simple layers, each serving a specific goal to build into the final product. The Main Ambiance track is the bulk of the sounds, it has a deep reverb and mostly bass sounds to mimic the underwater nature. The Wave Ambience track consists of an oscillating pattern or deep water wave sounds that focuses more on the lower frequencies. The Radar Pan track is a sound that pans from left to right of a radar seeker, this is then equalized to only let low frequencies pass. The Radar Phasor track is the same radar sound but passed through a phasor to chop up the sound. This is then EQ’d to let the highs pass; producing a sharp frighting signal.
With all of these components combined, the ambience has its waveform all filled in from each track, allowing for a full bodied output that really puts you in the place of an underwater mystery. This is then attached to the user controlled camera, to make sure that the stereo sound is not displaced. This is easily done though the <a-camera> sound parameter with the loop setting checked to true and positional set to false.
The audio was exported to a .wav file and set to loop when the view is rendered. Nil recommends to export looping sounds as a wav or ogg file due to the compression artifacts that other popular formats can cause. The truncation/extension may cause issues in the looping. She also suggests to let background sounds be rendered in stereo, since it is always playing and thus is not actually diegetic sound.
Instanced Audio
The instanced audio serves as the spice that helps the environment come to life. Nil states that since this is VR, these soundbites sound be exported in mono to allow for the VR’s innate spacial sound render engine.
In the project shown, you can take a look at the different sounds we considered and each of their waveforms. These include, monster sounds that would play randomly from an object outside of the tube system. Steam pipe sounds that play when walking past some specific pipe objects that may look cracked. Dripping water at various locations with water dripping down into the tube system. And various other creepy and indiscernible sounds to scare the users and really make them feel in the place.
It is important to notice that all of these sounds are only one track, i.e. mono, which allows the VR system to easily let the sounds be attached to physical objects in the space, or even an invisible object. This way, when you look around, the sound would be coming from a specific direction/entity.
Conclusion
Looking back on our project, we think that the strengths definitely lie within the environment building. The ambient sounds, depth of field loss, and lifelike 3D models create an experience that we truly think could make a user feel immersed in this underwater world given a VR headset. On the other hand, we think that the biggest weakness of our design lies within user interaction. There was no simple way to create collisions with our 3D models due to their abnormal shapes, so our user immersion becomes dampened when they start walking through walls. Had we been given more time on this project, we would want to continue developing these user interactions. Finally, we would also want to add more interesting visuals inside of the environment in order to make the location seem even more amazing. Some of our ideas were bioluminescent coral that would add different color light sources to the environment, and sea creatures that could swim and move around the ocean floor.
