Rêve
Rêve is a VR puzzle game that guides players to gradually understand the philosophical and artistic gestures of surrealist artist Rene Magritte.
It was rewarded Outstanding Thesis Projects for The Year 2017 by Communication University of China (Beijing).
The Experience
- a given mission and a twist -
Players are given the mission of finding objects in scenes. Through interaction and exploration, they eventually encounter the artist in the virtual world and realize that what they are told to look for does not exist. The conversation between the artist and players reveal the topic - the untrustworthy common sense and the treachery of words and images.
Research
My Pain Point
"How to reduce the alienation between ordinary people and art pieces?" That was the question that led me to the idea of "Rêve", which means dream in French (the language artist spoke).
Why Surrealism and Why VR?
As a cultural movement, surrealism aims to resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality or surreality.
We see virtual reality as alternative reality and headsets as its portals. The controversy of what's real and what's surreal in the medium itself is a perfect example that demonstrates the central ideology of the surrealism movement.
Also, as one of the most cost-efficient ways to create a fully immersive experience, I was attracted by its potential of unleashing one's creativity.
Prototype
Questions that I had to answer before committing to the medium and the design, including "Should it be a sitting experience or not? ", "what should the scale of the objects to be to achieve the feeling I'm creating?", "How can I direct where the viewer looks? "…
Interaction
- interactive versus reactive -
Visual Style
Optimization
- the balance between performance and quality -
Considering the equipment I had access to, balancing the performance and graphic quality became crucial. To maximize the graphic quality while keeping the FPS above 90, I used the following methods.
Use as much GPU power as possible instead of CPU power.
Reduce polygons count by generating normal maps using higher poly meshes, and apply the normal maps to the reduced polygon meshes.
Reduce realtime lighting. Surprisingly, this became a big headache. Since this was my first VR project, I wasn’t experienced enough to visualize every lighting edit that I made. But because baking was time-consuming, I had to train myself to be able to visualize the adjustments before making any changes and make sure they were on point.
Use the combination of the precomputed GI, and baked GI as the GI solution.
My Role
This is an individual project with help and suggestions from peers.