Concordia Projects
Virtual Reality
Role: Student
Tasks: Direction, 3D Modelling, Programming
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I started at Concordia in 2015 in the Physics program, but soon found myself changing majors to the Computation Arts degree. During that time I sold all of my old tech to fund a 2016 HTC Vive VR Headset. I instantly fell in love with the medium. I spent the rest of my time at Concordia using every opportunity I could to build VR pieces. The following are the 5 most important projects to me, all of which were huge milestones in my growth as a VR developer.
Flyboy was my first VR game ever. Built before the dawn of PC VR for the google cardboard. It was a joint project with Timothy Thomasson. The game was essentially Cube Field where you would look left and right to control your direction. It was build completely with code using the IDE Processing. Unfortunetly the gameplay is missing in action but I felt the need to represent my first VR game ever that set me on my professional journey.
Museum Mayhem was a class wide project lead by our professor Jonathan Lessard. You play as a janitor inside a museum and are told to keep to yourself. The idea is that you inevitably start destroying the art, as when players are in VR, they like to experiment. The most complicated part of this project was building the script to have the objects break into multiple new object pieces. This project was important to teach my how to work in a large group and delegate tasks. Learn More
Nothing Else was originally a track by musicians A l l i e and The Kount. For my final in my typography class I decided to build a ride along lyrical video. You ride an old car through the desert watching the worlds float by as different objects. I believe the potential for music and virtual reality is FAR from being fully tapped, but I was excited to try what I could given my skill level and resources. To watch a play through of the experience click here.
Speak your mind is a tool I built in my typography class to provoke the user to continue to speak without stopping. This creates a sort of run on sentence of the brain and causes the users to say some pretty ridiculous stuff in order to make the longest chain of thought (chain of thought is actually a way better name). It uses IBM's Watson speech to text AI to write the users words in around them. The experience takes place inside your own brain. Learn More
Don't Flood the World
Don't Flood the World was a group project for my Project Studio class at Concordia. The Idea was to create a more interesting way to present VR game play for observers. It involved a model of a house inside an aquarium, that was being pumped full of water at the same rate as google searches were being made. This was to show the relation between energy usage of using the internet, and the environmental impact of that energy usage. We often see using the internet as energy clean, but its far from the truth. The VR player would be "inside the house" attempting to slow the flooding.
I often credit Final Frontier as my first full VR game, but looking back at it, its pretty bare bones. It is an homage to 80s arcade cabinets, in particular, Galaga. It is still playable and available here. I really enjoy the link between the 80s and VR and it is represented in a lot of my other work. I see VR as the first tech to get people collaborating and thinking like we did with computers in their earliest days. The potential is so vast and its an experience I never got with computers.