Stranded - An immersive dome experience
Responsible for:
- Programming
- Networking
- Modelling of rocks, village buildings, alien ships
- Texturing of houses
- Material set-ups (e.g. emission, variable water roughness)
- Lighting
- Particle systems and weather effects for rain, stars, fog and clouds
- Game physics (variable explosion forces)
- Prototyping
- Post Processing
- Setdressing & Scene Design
- User Interface
- Sound integration
​
(This work was made for Campus Party, a 3-day public event. As this work is made to be experienced in the 7m dome by Fulldome.pro, the images and animated GIFs here are NOT representative or capable of delivering the original intended immersive experience.)
​
Stranded is an immersive 360 environment you can control in real-time. You are able to do many things, like change the time of day:
Or summon some dolphins if you're feeling lonely. Be careful, the wrong button surrounds you with sharks!
Not exciting enough? Call in some fireworks and make the sky rain with shooting stars to satisfy your wishes. You have to switch to night first though as this only happens in the dark!
This next one is a crowd favourite - a giant whale bursts out of the water and splashes into the sea. In the dome, the whale is seen leaping over your head, its massive body covering the entire sky and easily induces awe from audience seeing it for the first time.
(I have moved the whale in front of the screen for demonstration on the PC version below.)
I'm not one without a sense of humour (and destruction). There are different options to explore, one of which allows you to call in some 'friends' from the outer space. The large ship plays with a sense of scale, which is further amplified in the dome.
There are plenty of easter eggs hidden as well, and you never know what you can discover. One idea from Professor Ben Shedd, my professor who had introduced me to creating content for the dome, also had an idea for 'global warming'. I loved the idea and added it in. The effect is both humorous and subtly touches on the topic of climate change.
(A small detail: if you look closely, the icebergs actually shrink as the sea level rises!)
Everything is being rendered in real-time as well - you can even bend the laws of physics and change the reflectivity of the water:
Because there are so many settings, there's tons of possibilities. Someone went to create a very atmospheric sepia-looking appearance through a combination of settings which I didn't know was possible! I was blown away by the creativity of the audience.
In a later update, I added physics simulations, so you can be Michael Bay and blow up civilization to bits! People were naturally surprised when discovering the all-along static buildings could explode like that.
But if you're not so violent, you can let the village chill out at night and turn on some party lights! This is the only action that changes the background music. It triggers party music to play in the dome, and as the music echoes around, the mood is changed instantly.
I used a dome projection plugin to adapt the experience for the spherical curvature of the installation. This involved using two cameras to capture the 3D scene which are then stitched for displaying through the physical dome projectors.
Above, you can see how it actually looks when rendered for the dome. Imagine standing in the center of the dome room and you look up and see that. As the whale flies over your head, it is meant to block out the sky, and this temporarily darkens the room. With the 3D surround sound system, you hear the whale splash at where it landed in the water. This always blows the crowd away and I am always asked to demonstrate this to the audience as a surprise.
I created the environment models of the village, rocks, aliens in Maya and created a dynamic environment with a day night cycle. With it, I also drew an interface and programmed a mobile application using Photon Networking to remotely connect to the desktop application running on the dome, allowing users to conveniently control the dome via multiple mobile devices or tablets.
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
This project revealed how cool it is to combine art & programming to make something cool. If I only knew programming, I might not have created something so visually compelling. If I only knew art, it would look beautiful but it would have just been a static video lacking audience interaction.
While not exactly a game like my usual work, this was an extremely fun project for me to work on and explore creatively. I had inspiring ideas contributed from friends, Jake Tan and Ernest Wu, who saw my prototype in the dome and kept me busy with their suggestions for adding new features and content. It was an honour to have my work featured at Campus Party Singapore in July 2018.
This is me (leftmost) with my friends (left to right: Justin, Jake Tan and Ayesha Fathima), standing in front of the 7m dome where our work was showcased.
​
I would also like to thank my Professor, Ben Shedd, for the opportunity to be part of this wonderful experience to make this project possible.
​