This project was made for a class at the Savannah College of Art and Design called VRx for Good. Our class received a grant to work with Hospice and Palliative Care in Savannah, Georgia to provide patients with VR experiences to help reduce their pain, help them to relax and break up the monotony of their day. The class in total created 3 complete experiences. The Birdfeed team consisted of five members and worked over the course of 9 weeks to create this experience. We aimed to bring back small, everyday joys to patients by recreating an experience they may have enjoyed when they were in better health. We incorporated birds and plants that are local to Georgia, a retro radio and camera, and music familiar to the average audience age to invoke a sense of nostalgia. We worked to incorporate different levels of interaction so a player could enjoy the game if they have low mobility and are bed-ridden or if they are fully mobile. It is intended to be used as distraction therapy to provide pain relief.
We worked with Dr. Laura Farless, M.D, and Director of the Steward Center for Palliative Care and Dr. Kathleen Benton, DrPh, President & CEO of Hospice Savannah to discuss the needs of the patients in order to tailor the experience based on their feedback. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic more patients were extremely isolated so we focused on creating realistic, outdoor experiences. Throughout the development period, we met with them virtually three more times to present our work.In this experience, the player can enjoy a day in a Georgian park and feed and interact with birds and has been developed for the Oculus Quest 2
Tools: Maya, Substance Painter, Photoshop, Unreal Engine 4
Team: Armand Andrade, Nadav Ben Haim, Maya Peleg, Boyan Zhang, and myself
In this project, I was responsible for look development, textures, and UI design
February - May 2021
See the full breakdown of our experience here: https://www.therookies.co/entries/11784
In game screenshots
One of the main roles I took on for this project was look development. While keeping the environment realistic was important, I wanted to create a feeling of idealized reality. Here are some of the references I looked at to achieve this
We decided to achieve the essence of idealized reality by making the player feel like they are walking into a painting. I did a variety of texture tests and decided the oil paint style with a normal map with the same style captured this feeling the best.
In order to save time since our team was small and our timeline was tight, we decided to create all of the birds using the skeletons of pre-rigged birds we got on the Unreal Marketplace
However, we wanted to have a large variety of local birds so I adjusted the models and created custom textures for about a dozen birds.
I hand painted each bird in Photoshop and applied the oil paint texture to it to create the brush stroke effect. Any birds that required altered models were adjusted in Maya
The second role I took on was UI designer. Having never done this before, it took a few iterations to find a balance between matching the painterly style of the environment while still being very easy to read
Here is the final design for the widgets.
The widgets are controlled by a simple collision box around each object that sets and resets the visibility of the widget.
