The inspirations should be fairly obvious once the name of the science facility and the nonchalant commentary is revealed. "Red Canyon" is a reference to Half-Life's Black Mesa science facility, and the commentary of things working perfectly "fine" is from Portal. As a result, this project pays homage to Valve's style of storytelling, both directly and environmentally. The script was written and recorded by myself before being introduced to the film. An original plan was to use a Volumetric Capture system to create recordings of myself talking. However, it did not look quite right for the experience, so I scrapped it in favor of finding a procedural waveform generator.

This VR short film is interactive. Through the facility, there are a total of 5 levers and buttons that can be flipped and pressed to avert the destruction of the fusion reactor (see above, right). Due to this interaction, I thought of the "Viewer" more as a "Player," as what they do or don't do will result in a different outcome at the end. Figuring out how to make everything interactive in VR was a challenge. I had to carefully read through the XR Interactive plugin's documentation as well as play around with the given pre-built modules. Further complicating things was the extremely limited ability to test on an actual VR headset, as I did not own one at the time. 

A key to this experience is how the Player is moved through the experience. A slow moving platform brings them close to the levers & buttons but also lets them see the environment I built. Controlling the experience was done through Unity's Timeline system, which can be used to animate objects and turn particle systems on & off. One aspect of animation is moving the Player's little platform at a constant speed and never rotating it. I wanted to minimize the possibility for invoking simulation sickness in any Player going through the experience. Giving a warning in the introduction as well as maintaining a constant, slow pace hopefully prevents anyone sensitive from needing to skip the video.