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Under Control is a VR narrative-based game, in which the user embodies an officer that his mind inserted into a new and improved hybrid body. while learning to control his new body, the officer (and the user) discover the surprising and suspicious circumstances that brought his mind into this new body.
About this project
This VR experience is the creative work and the grad MFA degree project of two TAU University students: Yotam Tadmor & Tomer Messer. this project develops inside the Digital Media Program of the Steve Tisch Film and Television school.
The main goal of the project is to convey and deliver a narrative in a new groundbreaking way, that's built to immerse the user into the experience and to embody it with the help of a new and special engineered interaction system.
The medium is the message
The core of this project is all about our relations with technology - what are the risks and benefits of using technological tools? how we change ourselves through the use of technology? and how it affects our minds?
As developers and storytellers, we try to infuse our thoughts and fears about those topics into a tangible experience. we try to create a situation, use as a warning sign to the risks of overuse and over embrace of technologies like social networks, deep fake programs, and AI bots. we try to raise our concerns about fake news, freedom of information, freedom of the individual, and loss of the self.
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In a couple of years, or maybe a few decades, will we control the technology to better express and develop ourselves - or will we be under its control?
SYNOPSIS
Synopsis
The operational officer Grey Anderton wake up in the research and development laboratory of the police force hybrid-body program. although his body is still in shock from his early wakening, Anderton can recognize clearly the damaged body on the operation bed next to his on - it's his old body, but what happened to it?
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The lead scientist of the lab, Doctor John Danowere, rushes into the room and tries to come Grey down, he guides him towards a testing station. thought sires of tests John calibrate Grey's new body, he now wants to send him for an interrogation mission, to extract sensitive information from the mysterious rebel Tim Jason.
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a couple of odd abstract flashbacks attacks Anderton's mind, but he decides to disregard them and go to interrogate Jason. in the interrogation room Anderton meets Jason, he seat behind a metal table and got handcuffs on his hands.
from the other side of the metal table, Jason is surprised to see Anderton, again.
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Tim uncover an elaborate conspiracy, that involves both him, Gery, and Doctor John, and now, confused Gery have to decide what he gonna do with that new information - can he do something about it? can he act by himself?
INTERACTIVITY
It's all about the interaction
One of the most interesting features of this narrative-game is the development of the VR different and innovative interaction system. the system is built to embody the user into the virtual officer avatar but at the same time, try's to creates points of lack of control and frustration within the user. we aspire to achieve an interaction effect that will balance between control & lack of control.
To get that special effect we use an array of interactive tools - special camera/eye filters and HUDs, haptic feedback, change of the time perception, voice reaction and activation, and a simple but smart dialog system.
On top of all the tools mentioned above, we develop a unique interaction-animation VR system, and we never saw anything like it in any VR game or experience we tried before! the system is designed especially for the project and will ensure a new VR interaction and experience.
THE WORK PROCESS
The Pipeline
As a small-scale VR experience and a student project, we had to design a realistic and particular line of work. because our time and resources are very different from triple-A VR game studios, we are building a line of work that is based on many tests, many backup planes, and many different tools.
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Our Pipeline builds upon the main building blocks: Interaction, Art, and Animation:
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The interaction side of the project includes the development of the functionalities and the ways for the player to interact with the virtual world. all the functionality is designed by as, in C#, on Unity Engine, with VR developer integration tools.
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The Art side of the project includes the artistic style and design of the virtual world: the environment, the colors, the character, the props, and even the lithing. this side of the project is the part that sets the tone of the experiences and gives shape, volume, and color to the written narrative. the art process starts with a breakdown of the script and continues to an initial concept design of the elements mentioned above. from the references of the initial design team of talented art people are create concept art and style frames. from the concept art, the 3D team and us build the models, in software like Autodesk Maya and Blendr. alongside the modeling process, we also search a number of sources that potentially can provide us some of the models we need. with all the models in our position we start the level design step and bring all of our models into unity - some of them will be interactable and some will use as the level setup.
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The last part of our project is the animation, this part is giving our characters the option to react to the player's actions. for most of our animations, we using Motion Capture technology, with Rokoko's Smart suit, Smartgloves, and Facecaptur features. another use of animation in our project manifest in our "mechanic body" interaction system, and using to create a lack of control feel within the player.
As with every production, we divide our project into three stages:
Pre Production: Script, logistics, designing, and planing:
In this stage, we plan the production and design the technological processes we will need later on. this stage includes technological tests, script breakdowns, budget, and schedule planning, and 2d art.
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Production: voice and motion capture recordings:
At this stage, we focus on getting cover and finish anything that involves actors, animation, recording, and sound. at this stage, we mostly record the actor's voices and motions the will later will be integrated into the characters.
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Post Production: assembling, coding, editing, and building:
This stage is the most complicated, in with we assemble everything together. we connect the animations to the characters, connect the functionalities we based in the Pre Production stage altogether and place every 3D model in its place. after the level design and the functionality will work perfectly we will end the production with a build, that we plan that will be played in festivals and through the VR applications store.
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constant updates from the pipeline are always in our Dev Logs section, you can see the pipeline work as it happens! you can find them by clicking the button below.
Technology
TECHNOLOGY
To start, our development environment: Unity. Unity is one of the most popular, accessible and flexible real-time game engine that is out there in the market today. both of us, as Unity-oriented developers, set the starting point and guidelines for this project as "unity compatible", so ane technology, software, or equipment we use have to be and indeed is "unity compatible".
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Unity, of course, is a C# based environment, so 99.9% of our code and functionalities are C# based as well.
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Second to our main developing environment is our target devices: VR headsets. as for now unity mostly supports Oculus VR devices supported, with that said we target our project also for Open VR devices, such as the Valve Index and the HTC Vive. for our development we use both Oculus Rift S and Oculus Quest II, which are providing and developing tools and integrate perfectly with Unity. it's worth mentioning that we are targeting not only PC VR for our project but also standalone VR devices (as the Oculus Quest).
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The third most important theological aspect of our project is the Motion Capture animation. we use Rokok's platform, which provides Rokoko Studio, that connects to the Rokoko's Smartsuit, Smartgloves, with an extension of Facecapture features (that include the use of one additional iPhone devise). the platform provided by Rokoko enable us to use a variety of characters models, integrated into numerous software (including Unity) and that provides us the possibility to assemble flexible animation and 3D pipeline that include third party and outsourcing services and a variety of compatible software, like Cinema4D, Autodesk Maya, Blendr, Daz (that we will use in our project) and many more.
WHO WE ARE
About us
As two individual developers, both with VFX and interactive backgrounds, we decided to team up together for our final MFA degree grad project, and create something big, bigger than any of us could have done alone.
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Tomer Messer brings to the project a strong base of developing force, with proven professional knowledge in web development, and of course, comes with former experience in Unity Engine development.
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Yotam Tadmor, also with a strong developing base knowledge, and with former experience developing in the Unity Engine's 3D, 2D, and VR environments, enforce the functional and preformative side of the project.
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Together, we assemble a solid game-interaction C# based ground for our narrative to take place in. in the process, we are designing a new and unique indy pipeline, that runs on two main developer-creators and a very small team of talented students.
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Our main goal is to bring the project out to the world - from film and media festivals to the common online game & VR stores.
Click to look at our full production and development team:
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