Space Design and the Fantasticness of Fog
In preparation for the final project of my social VR class, which centers around the notion of a “Shared Dream”, we went through the exercise of (attempting to) keep a dream journal, eventually sharing our experiences with each other. As part of this exercise, we’re meant to make a virtual environment inspired by the dreams of our classmates.
One classmate told me about one of their dreams, which featured lots of non-geometric spaces and things that didn’t quite abide by the laws of reality. An instant memory that jumped out to me was the “Super Mario 64 Infinite Staircase” which wasn’t too far off a particular endless-hallway scene my classmate described. However, in a different part of this dream-mansion, was a scene that captured my interest a fair bit more.
A good chunk of this dream took place in what was described to me as an old, musty, victorian-style sitting that seemed to go on forever, piled high with assorted furniture, strewn wantonly about. I was captivated by the idea of this infinite room, piled high with a maze of chaotic furniture, but alas my conceptual dreams were shattered by technical limitations.
As I went about recreating the space, (beyond not being able to replicate any true game-engine style teleportation trickery), the practical limits of Mozilla Hub’s Spoke meant that I had to tread carefully with the triangle count placing objects in the scene. This led me to make a few optimizations that I hadn’t considered initially, such as “decimating” coffee table legs (which were already mostly-cylindrical), saving me nearly 2700 Tris per object instance, without much visual change in the object. Even with these optimizations, however, it was still hard to get a decent number of objects in the scene, so I decided to change my focus to getting the “tone” of a long-abandoned parlor.
Mmm… nice and spooky!
After struggling for a while, I found the secret missing ingredient: FOG! A slightly red-hued fog (along with some dim lighting) went a long way in giving the limited space a sensation of emptiness and endlessness, and I’m not too unhappy with the result! Furniture layout is its own beast however, goodness gracious tip your local level designer and/or interior decorator. Intentionally placing objects in a way to not make them seem so arbitrary is HARD!