Discussion

Discussion of how your perspective on your scene from Project 2 changes when you see it and interact with it in these different ways

Project 3 Write Up

Project 3’s main study is dealing with using virtual reality to present different types of perspectives from the same environment. In this case, I am taking the circus scene from Project 2 and implementing 3 other scenes that place the user in the perspective of being tiny, the circus being tiny, and the circus being flipped upside down. Each perspective gives a different mental view of the circus but also could have real world benefits.

When looking at the perspective of the circus being turned into a toy sized room, displayed on a large table, the user becomes much more separated from the scene. Here the user is able to look down on the environment from a birds eye view. This view allows the user to see a more broad aspect of the environment as the details of each item become miniscule. As the user looks from above or from the front, they are able to see the overall form of the environment. This has many real world applications as being able to shrink a room or any environment will allow a person to design or build in a broad aspect. Designers can work on the functionality of a room as a whole, and then focus on details later. Also being able to interact with the different objects like toys would allow designers the ability to have a very modular space. For example interior designers would not have to physically move a refrigerator across the room, they could simply use virtual reality to move a toy sized refrigerator without any effort. This would allow designers much more speed when designing prototypes. This idea can not only be applied to interior designers, but to engineers, architects, and city planners.

On the other hand when looking from the perspective of a tiny person in an environment, like in the Land of Giants scene, you receive an opposite perspective than the toy sized room. Being placed very small in an environment allows you to see the details. This has a very beneficial real world use case when looking at display small complex models. For example, engineers creating a new engine would have a hard time to present a real life sized prototype, since the inner workings of an engine are small and detailed. Using virtual reality, users would be able to expand a model and easily be able to see the details. This could help others understand models that are small, not easily maneuverable, or complex. Not only could this help engineers, but it could help in the education sector as well, as students would be able to easily grasp small scale concepts.

Finally the third scene, Dancing on the Ceiling, focuses less on size but more on orientation. In this scene, the user's environment is flipped upside down. This gives the room an entire different perspective as now you can see the details of different models from a different orientation. In a regular orientation, the first thing you would notice about the circus stage would be the “Scare Co” sign in the middle, but as the world is flipped upside down the user focus changes. Now the user is less focused on the sign and more focused on the lights that are now by the user’s feet, or the concrete that makes up the room of the ceiling. The perspective of orientation affects the user by changing their focus. This type of perspective could have beneficial real world applications, by using VR orientation change to educate people on models that don’t necessarily need to have an upright orientation. For example a model of the inner workings of a computer does not need to necessarily be upright. The model could display the different circuits and parts from different orientations. This could help users learn more about the model as their focus changes when the orientation changes.