BETHANY YAO
Music
Playground
About
Music
Playground
About
PROJECT TYPE
Personal Project / Interactive Art
RESPONSIBILITIES
Experience Design, Modelling, Music Composition, Coding
VIRTUAL SANCTUARY This project was inspired by an observation - our desire for mindful experiences has permeated many facets of our culture. Whether in the realm of video games, websites or Youtube videos, there have been an increasing amount of contents that are designed to evoke emotional resonance. These creations delve deep into unquantifiable internal experiences, providing holistic experiences that enrich and nurture our hearts and emotions, something that’s equally important as our other fundamental needs.
RESEARCH and EARLY PROTOTYPE I started my project by addressing some of the anticipated technical and artistic challenges. Based on my vision, I broke down what I wanted to achieve into smaller goals as demonstrated in the following slideshow.
DESIGNING THE 3D SPACE - A MODULAR APPROACHTo evoke calmness and warmth within my users, I decided to make my scene be cozy interior spaces that could easily resonate with the users. Rather than going directly to construct the entire scenes, I modeled out a bunch of individual assets first. This approach would make the process a lot more modular, because I could then take these components and compose them into any scenes I wanted. This would also ensure that my assets have consistent scales.
DESIGNING THE MOTIONSTo add liveliness to the project, as well as to ensure that visual feedbacks are in place upon user engagement, I incorporated motions by creating static animations using Blender and more dynamic visual effects using shader programming.
DESIGNING THE COLORSNormally, if I were to render a 3D asset in a browser, I would bake the colors and lighting into a texture, so that the model could be loaded faster. However, this approach would not work well for this particular project due to its dynamic requirements. Furthermore, if I had to go back to Blender or a texture creation tool for every color revision, the iteration process would be slowed down. Therefore, I chose to color the scene directly using code, while exposing the color values within the browsers, so that I had an intuitive visual interface to work with.
DESIGNING THE SOUNDSOut of a passion for audio exploration, as well as a curiosity to better understand what role audio plays in shaping an immersive experience, I created the sounds of this project on my own. I made one piece of music for each of the scenes, and recorded some sound effects to make the fictional worlds more persuasive.
FINAL OUTCOME
NEXT STEPS
In the meantime, I’ve explored another possibility of this type of interactive art by developing an experience called Interactive Aquarium, for which I collaborated with a vet friend to merge this design approach with educational content. Our aim was to experiment with an engaging alternative to conventional education formats.