assets/dear-nobody/demo.png

Title	Details
Roles	Lead Unity Developer & 3D Designer
Tools	Unity, Quest 2
Length	1 month with 3 iterations
Project	Dear Nobody is a love letter in VR to encourage us to embrace our vulnerability and insecurities.
Features	3D Text Formation, VR Interaction, UX/UI User Journey, World Building, Spatial Design, 3D Assets, Spatial Sound Design
Impact	Thesis presentation at ITP

This is a warm reminder to treat yourself gently and recognize that these sometimes uncomfortable feelings are part of what makes us human.

Teaser

User Journey

The VR App

Here is the app I created so far. It was tested for the second round of playtesting. I am currently working on the third version of the app. My goal is to upload it on Oculus store! Super excited!

If you want to download it, try to follow this link to download the Sideload so you can allow Unknown sources on your Quest/Quest2 to play the experience. Please share with me some of your feedback at my email or DM me on Instagram. Thank you so much. ❤

Background

Due to my personal close-to-death experience, I realized that I always had the feeling of suffocation, but in the form of self-limiting thoughts. So my goal for this project is to figure out myself and try to coexist with my negative feelings. I want to make it a journey of getting to know myself and others on an emotional and spiritual level. My goal is to allow people to face their own emotions and thoughts and reflect upon their own memories.

Process

Research

assets/dear-nobody/research.jpg

To create the story and build the character, I learned more about stoic and Buddhist philosophy. I became closer to my core soul. I used to limit myself from reaching my potential, but now I am slowly breaking down my invisible walls to limitless opportunities.

I also kept a journal of my thoughts and feelings throughout the process. I ended up using some of them in my characterization of Nobody.

Prototyping

Here are some of my iterations.

Iteration 1

In my first iteration, I created rough five scenes of certain emotions with basic interactions of grabbing the thoughts, animating the texts, and switching the scenes.

Iteration 2

After user testing, I reduced the amount of orbs in the scene, changed the white texts of voice overs into animated 3d texts, fixed the skybox issue, and made the UI more poetic to fit the experience in my second iteration.

Iteration 3

I am currently working on my third iteration from my second user testing feedback.

Technical Research

Elements

Adobe Audition for Voice Over
Ableton for background music tracks
Cinema4d: 3d model, skybox creation
Unity: Shader, VR, Interactions, Scripting, & OculusIntegration

Feedback

User Testing Compilation Video coming soon

I tested with 11 people and 9 out of them tried with headsets. They felt they no longer are alone in the world. They were thinking about themselves while listening to the story of Nobody. More than 5 of them mentioned how they wanted to continue talking with the character and hug her.

Lessons

Design for the hearts

This journey taught me to design for the hearts. I am designing from the feelings I felt and tried to translate that through VR. Some of the feelings are so complicated and personal yet they are universal among people.

It is quite rewarding to hear that they did feel something deeply in their hearts. I enjoy all the feedback my users contributed to this project and to me.

Daily practice helps!

I spend at least three hours on Unity to work on my thesis each day just to get the rhythm going. Each day I am looking forward to tackling the problems. You can check out my daily post on Instagram or YouTube playlist that log all the process.

Don’t let tech get in the way.

My first version of the app has some technical hiccups. Through the user testing of six people, four out of which did test it out using a headset. I noticed there are some struggles when they try to grab certain things in the scene. Some of them complained about how it takes them out of the experience. So I fixed it in my second version of the technical hiccups such as the flipping texts, audio echoing too strong, etc.

Next Steps

For my next steps, I would like to save the recordings from users on a database. When they enter the end scene, they get to hear five responses from others that are drawn randomly from the database.

I aim to playtest with people with different levels of VR affordances to make the experience smoother.

I will submit it to festivals and exhibitions to allow more people to embrace their vulnerability and insecurities. Here is a demo for an ongoing exhibition/installation idea for the room.