Final Deliverables Magic

Team Members: Jessica Boye-Doe, Nia-Simone Egerton, Prim Rattanathumawat, Yubo Zhao, Jose Pescador

Short Description: For our Final project our group decided to create a sequencer that interacted with the music inside of the environment. Along with playing around with sounds inside of our world, we wanted our user to get a taste of what it is like to travel across the globe. Inside of our project, the user will be introduced to different environments and music. In turn the player will be invited to play around with the objects they see. Our goal is for the user to create music with the items in front of them. We want our player to leave the experience with a feeling of satisfaction and an intrigue to continue exploring parts of the world and composition.

Longer Description:

Our Experience starts in the first location, a beach in Jamaica. We tackled our project by breaking it down into 3 sections. Design, Programming, and Music. Using the expertise of our group members we were able to divide work each week based on the need of our project.

The design asset preparation for the beach was divided into three processes: 1) 3D model greyboxing, 2) interaction motion design, and 3) post-processing. Our beach includes a generated terrain, natural vegetation layers, and props. We have successfully set up our beach scene which includes the sand terrain, skybox lighting, and seawater visualization with wave effects.The sea water is visualized through a water shader. Our sequencer dashboard is our main interface throughout scenes, which includes sequencer pads and basic control buttons. The style of this interface is modern and minimalist. We implemented dragging and dropping in XRTK. The sequencer was able to move with the player by adding a script that keeps their distances the same. Dragging and dropping with normal XRTK is implemented. Dropping using raycast is being used so that the user can point at each box of the sequencer to place an object’s icon on it instead of using the push toggle on the controllers to move an object to a designated spot. The raycasts work up to detecting what cells of the sequencer have been hit by them. Raycasts have the ability to place an object’s icon instead of the object itself and to make the object’s icon stick to one box of the sequencer. The sequencer will then use a timer to play sounds of the objects in the sequencer on beat.

The music of the world was intertwined with the ambiance of the beach to create a semi realistic soundscape. We wanted the music to represent Jamaica with a twist, the use of synths, and electronic based instruments was utilized to create a virtual vibe. This soundscape is played under the drum sequencer. The music is a 2 minutes long loop. The objects that are used in the sequencer all have unique sounds, broken into 2 categories natural and unnatural. The Sounds that were created this week were for the various seashells. Specific sounds were assigned to the objects in the scene.

In addition to music, A “natural sound library” was created and utilized for the Jamaican Beach. Because this project is being made for educational purposes, we are utilizing sounds found on the ProSoundEffects Library with access granted by Berklee. These sounds, once compiled the sfx were implemented into the Beach scene in Unity.

Our Experience ends in the second location, a bamboo forest in China. We tackled this scene similarly to the Beach by breaking our process into 3 sections. Design, Programming, and Music.

A big challenge for our group was creating a cohesive transition from one scene to the next. We were able to add a user interactable object to enable scene switching. This allows the user to move freely from one scene to the next.

For our design we focused on creating a Realistic experience. Our biggest goal was to create an atmosphere. We collected 3D assets and created the scene utilizing a generated terrain, natural vegetation layers, and skybox.

We implemented dragging and dropping in XRTK. The sequencer was able to move with the player by adding a script that keeps their distances the same.

For Music and Sound Design we created a list of assets that included musical sounds, as well as naturally occurring sounds to implement into different aspects of the experience. For instance, in the Jamaica Beach scene, we included the sounds of seagulls flying and chirping, palm trees swaying in the wind, and the waves as they brush up against the shore. In tandem, these natural sounds create a virtual soundscape that reinforces the overall immersiveness in our VR experience. In terms of musical sounds, we created musical stingers that could be placed into the sequencer, allowing the user to create music in the world as they please. We also composed a musical soundscape for each scene in the game which plays in the background, giving the user a musical “canvas” to improvise with when using the musical sequencer.