Black Room

Idea & philosophy

The idea of the artists was to give an experience to the subject (user) that is really disorienting and confusing. Instead of trying to compensate the nauseous, disorienting and confusing feeling of the (known issues of the) Virtual Reality experience, they wanted to act upon these characteristics and make people feel naturally nauseous, disoriented and confused. By using the Virtual Reality itself as part of the story, they complete in connecting telling immersive stories in VR. Not only is the technology a way to show the story, it is part of the story, and whichever is normally seen as not desired.

Therefore the story is made to confuse and to overtake the user. Creatively they tinkered puppets and costumes from cardboard and acted in strange ways in the video. While the story continues, the room changes and surprises constantly in a way that the subject doesn’t know what’s going on, though trying to find the meaning of what the story means.

Even though the story is pretty abstract and confusing, it does seem to have a lot of meaning in it. Try to project the story on our society, and we will see a sad truth or something similar to achieving something. By going through the ritual that is going on from the beginning where puppets show up and strange things happen, it could be much seen as someone trying to find his/her way in society, and by copying it's behavior you will be accepted by society in a way that might not be the path you should follow. By doing what’s being told by society, you will become a great part of it. The big puppet, or the head of society in this case, accepts and touches you so you also turn into a puppet. You can start moving your cardboard limbs as if to finally being able to move in society. However when you look up you see them attached to strings that are being handled by two big people in masks. They control your movements so that it looks like you have no freedom to however you want to move. You are controlled by bigger forces and there is nothing much to do about. On the other hand, it’s also possible to interpret it as if working hard made you achieve something. By going through hard and confusing experiences, you still managed to stay up and kept on going to that point you reach your destination. At that point you were given limbs from society (the big puppets on the strings) as if they appreciate what you did. It feels like the story was trying to say; It is when you give to get something, you won't actually get what you deeply desired, but then when you do give without any desires, it is then that somehow you get.

And in even more perspectives the meaning of the story changes. Reflect it to you personal life, and you will find a meaning in the story. Reflect it to your job, or achievements, and you will be able to find a meaning in this. The meaning lies open so that everyone will somehow find a meaning in this story leaving you confused and wondering why and what happened. The abstractness of the story gives the freedom to the subject to however to interpret it, without being forced to believe something specific (which ironically contradicts the ending with the strings in the story, or not).

Technical

We chose this project since technically it’s the most complex project where we used the most different techniques to accomplish certain actions so the story could be told the way it was the most immersive.

The different actions we used on technical level are:

• Switch shot on looking to direction
• Make an action possible after another action occurred first
• Using fading lights
• Rotating video
• Reversing video
• Proper settings of camera in darkness
• Add sound

Switch shot on looking to direction

By switching shots when the user looks to a dark side of the room, we could change shots without the user noticing it. The next shot could then be used in any way we wanted since it couldn’t be seen (for example turning the room upside down).

For code see here.

Make an action possible after another action occurred first

• Timer

In certain videos we had to wait untill a certain moment in the video to be possible to change the shot (lights going out, smoke disappeared, …). By putting a timer on the shot, we could make it possible once the timer ran out, the shot would be able to change.

For code see here.

• Something that first must be seen

In a video there is a girl sitting in the corner, but because the user can look in different directions (on which the program reacts to undertake an action) it sometimes happened he/she did not see the girl when the shot changed, leaving an important piece of the story out. We then made sure that the girl must first be seen to be able to change to the next shot.

For code see here.

Using fading lights

By using two lights that stood in the middle of the room under the camera and of which both directed to a different side, it was easy to play with the user's attention. If then the user looked towards the dark side of the room, it could change shot. Or when both lights went completely out, we could change to any shot possible since because no hard cut would be visible. It is an interested way of playing around with shots, because it give endless options for following shots.

Though the issue existed that the user must look into the complete dark side of the room so that everything the user sees is completely black. Trying to minimize the user had to rotate around, we noticed that the angle had to be small and pretty far behind the user because the user sees at an angle of 120°. If the angle to change shots would be too large or too close to the sides, the user could see changing of shots in the sides of the glass.

As we see in the left image, if the user doesn't look far enough, then the switching to the next shot won't be triggered because the user can still see a part of the light side of the room. Therefore the user must turn a big turn in order to trigger the switching of shots, like in the right image.

Dark side Light side

Rotating video

At a certain moment you will see the actors going in the dark side of the room. Once they’re in they can’t be seen, and then once the user after following (or after being bored because nothing is happening in the light side of the room) looks to the dark side, we turned the next shot upside down as it looked like when the actors came back in the light, they were walking on the ceiling.

This is easy to do by just adjusting the rotation variables on the sphere in the UI.

Reversing video

In the first shot we wanted to start the room full with smoke which would slowly disappear. We put a smoke machine in the room, which filled the room, then reversed the video (with HPV_Manager) so that we got the desired effect.

For code see here.

Proper settings of camera in darkness

Since we had to film mostly in the darkness, we noticed the quality of the video decreased. So we had to test settings to make it as good as possible. We changed the ISO settings as low as possible and edited it afterwards to get the desirable effect by someone experienced in editing effects on videos.

Add sound

To add to the immersion of the story, we added the chosen music from the artists on the project.

For code see here.