THE LABYRINTH: A VR EXPERIENCE
A first-person view of a heart-pounding, room-scale virtual reality experience where the viewer has to battle minimal lighting and spacing as they make their way through a dark maze. Players must be careful though as one wrong step could plummet them to the deep abyss…!
Created in Unreal Engine, and built for the Oculus Rift S.
Structures designed in Maya3D.
INSPIRATION
I believe room-scale virtual reality is the pinnacle of immersion to date. It allows people the ability to walk, bend, and essentially exist within a completely different environment from theirs in actual reality as if they are there. I wanted to hone in on this affordance of six degrees of freedom, and was determined to learn how to create a room-scale VR experience.
I was also enchanted by the idea that within VR one can be present in an environment that they could never encounter in actual reality, but everything within them is telling them it feels so real. I wanted to tap into this sentiment and create an environment that triggered a real sense of fear - that if I could create an experience with this incredible ability to move within it, each movement would have consequence.
THE PROCESS
For this experience to have the suspenseful impact I desired, it would be really important that the maze be difficult to navigate - so I turned to Maya3D to build a unique structure:
I then brought the maze from Maya3D into Unreal Engine to create the experience. After making and applying polished materials to the walls of the structure, I added some color and spotlights in strategic placements to provide some differentiation to the maze walls’ presence. And with inciting fear being a priority, I made the environment pitch black:
Desiring to add visibility with a sense of awe that one couldn’t encounter in real world environments, I created an emissive element:
And built an emissive path that highlighted wonder and separation…and the importance of each step!
In addition, the emissive path would provide an immediate indicator that this is either some technologically futuristic or entirely alternate world to set expectations that this reality might not play by previously learned rules for settings - adding to the suspense.
I then added fire animations to dial up the terror:
In the essential final aspect of the project, I worked on a VR Pawn for the player in a n Oculus headset to be able to possess control of a “camera” (their first-person view within the headset) in the scene, and be able to move through the environment in Unreal as they moved within the headset in actual reality:
First-person views:
