Week 1

Finding inspiration at British Museum

Our group of 3 – Shujing, Neeti and I chose brainstormed on a few ideas and narrowed to two for our Critical Pratice Project

• Decolonisation of the British Museum : This has been a hot topic for a few years with not just the british musuem but from other musueums around the world that have acquire objects of heritage anf history from other countires are now refuse to give it back. We wanted to create an awareness and get the public talking about the repartation issue through our VR experience.
• A Graveyard Scavengerhunt : A fun AR night experience through the graveyard where you can use to your phone flashlight to navigate around, finding monsterous charatcers in the wake of night. This was inspired by Night Terrors , an AR game that maps the layout of your home, then becomes a game where Ghoulies and ghosties are then inserted into the environment, with accompanying sounds.

We finalised on moving forward with the decolonisation idea because it had more substance and value in making it in VR. We then visited the British Museum to look at all the stolen artifacts on display. The benign bronzes, the Hoa Hakananai’a were amongst the most controversial. Looking at their origin stories, we chose the Moai statue because it’s origin is from the Easter Island, the most remote place on earth. Being an island that very inaccesible, we thought we could bring together a beautfiul VR experience that transports the player into the Island, to learn about their culture.

Thinking about the narrative, we want to show two distinct scenes : The Moai at the British Museum & Moai on the Easter Island, to show a stark difference in mood and discusions about the two locations. We also started looking at other references or projects that have depicted similar topics.

• https://www.uncensoredlibrary.com/en : The Uncensored Library in Minecraft
• https://www.theexhibitionist.org/#tours : Uncomfortable Art Tours 
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjqlZQxiitc : AR experience inside Van Goghs Bedroom
• https://theunfilteredhistorytour.com/ : The Unfiltered History Tour

A couple of first-hand ideas I had were

Seeing stolen objects in VR back to where they came from in a happy environment. A VR website with a universal musuem gallery. Its like an archive of the world’s most precious artifact

• Each quest can lead you to saving an artifact and it adds to the musuem collection on Website?

AR – Empty museum with digital versions of things that have been loaned out.

Narrative Structure

Interactive Website – AR – VR – Website

We want the experience to be easily accesible to anyone, and not just people who are able to visit the british museum and so we wanted the narrative to start on an interactive website that gives you a background information of the past. This then prompts the user to scan the statue through AR and have the Moai be placed in your room. I also looked closely at the Google experiements examples called the pyramids of Meroe.https://artsexperiments.withgoogle.com/meroe/#pyramids

We are also thinkinging of having an online pole after the experience that allows users to input their opinions or favours regards the two sides of the topic or design a live data website that captures the essence of easter Island in real time – Ex : The wind speed, the population, however this was very ambitious and we were moving too far from the topic

Week 2

We started by looking at the narrative structure and interesting way to tell the story. Our main challenge was the type of experience we wanted to convey, whether it would be a game based experience like a heist or a mini game like in Wolves in the Walls, or a voyagers game where the player has to travel from London to Easter Island, fighting monsters to succesfully return the statue.

Since the brief stated that it had to be a non-linear narrative, we knew instantly that making the user choose between whether to return the statue or keep the statue at the museum would be the ideal solution.

We are looking at two ways in which users can start the game, either at home or at the museum. We want the story of the history of the Moai to be interactive and also captivating enough for users to read, hence we are thinking of creating a comic strip style in our website. We also want to incorporate the experience within the Britihs musueum so that people visiting can easily find and use it, ex : redesigning the current museum map with a QR code that starts the experience or an invisible map that can be revealed using the AR scanner perhaps. We also faced the challenge of defining who the player indentified as. Since this was based in a musuem we wanted to target it to school children and have the player be a student on a visit to the museum who discovers the Moai statue.

Cultural Significance

The people of Easter Island are called Rapa Nui people and they speak the language of Rapa Nui, They also have a rich culture in terms of types of headresses, sculptural artifacts, mythological stories and heiroglyphs that have not been deciphered. This got us excited and we deep-dived into finding a story within their past history of their gods. We stumbled upon the ‘Birdman tradition’.

During the Birdman Tradition,  young men competed by climbing down the cliff face of Rano Kau, swimming to Motu Nui (a small island off the coast by Rano Kau) and the first to capture an egg of a the Sooty Tern bird and swim back to Rapa Nui was the winner and named the Chief for that year. We decided to use this persona of the lost heir callee Luki to represent the user who is half british and half rapa Nui to discover the statue and return it back to his island.

Week 3

I was incharge of the VR part of the experience, I started by looking at different styles for the environment. I reverse engineered the process by looking at models that were available which represnted our idea well and then narrowed down the style. This helped in having assets that looked visually coherent, both in AR and VR and because all the modelling was done by Shujing, who was incharge of rigging and animating, we wanted the aesthetic to be easy to design. I also tried generating ideas for what the museum scene might look like in terms of lighting and mood through Midjourney and got some interesting results.

Week 4

We started thinking about user testing questions and creating the prototype for the AR experience since it was the first experience thats users starts with. We decided to focus on ‘instructions’ for the AR experience and how much instructions are needed to be able to fully complete the experience. I was in charge of the identity design and the UI/UX of the AR app. We dediced to name the project ‘Stolen Friend’ which translates to Hoa Hakananai’a in Rapa Nui and was the name given after the colonisers took the statue away from easter Island. I wanted the colour palette and visual design to be simple and clear but also have a visual significance to the topic. Hence I chose the colours similar to the british flag in but gave a warm ting of yellow to it. I started by sketching out the player journey and then creating screens for the UI.

Conducting the User Testing 1

We did the first round of user testing at British Museum, but because of the crowd and the busyness, we were able to get only 1 users to try the experience and they gave us feedback on the voice of the sculptures and to add subtitles to the talking ahu’s. We did a second round by inviting our close friends to try out the experience and received lots of feedback regarding the instructions and how we had to engage the user visually when the 7 ahus were talking. We have a lot of challeneges to be solved in terms of guiding the user to reach certain spaces in order to trigger the animation of the bird to lead them to the headset which would start the VR experience.

Working on feedback

I started working on creating mini model animations which depicted what each of the Ahus talk about. This way there would be a visual represntation that could engage users to listen to the story. Because there were 7 ahus placed in a circle I imagined that there would a center animation and as each of them spoke, elements would get added to the center, but we later decided that have individual animations pop up in front of each Ahu would allow for better interpretationa nd also let users to move their phone around and have a 360 experience in AR.

Week 5

Final animations are done for the AR. We also managed to add subtitles for each animation adding to the user experience.

VR : Player Journey & Basic Mechanics

I started working on the basic mechanics that the game/ experience would need and started to writing down the elements that will be present in the game along with what mechanics each of them would do

• The Player
• The Bird
• The Enemy
• The compass & Portal
• The Map

Level Design

To develop the level design, I wanted to take inspiration from the curent layout of the British Museum so that the player would feel like they are in the virtual realm of where they were standing currently. I was also creating the easter Island scene simultanously because i had found the perfect assest already on the Unity store. The only challenge was the demo scene had too many perforamce issues die to the particle effects of the fires and it was getting to heavy. I began by removing all the non essential elements on the scene. We were also looking for models of Hoa which were readily available on Sketchfab uploaded by the British Museum. However, they were too high-poly so Shujing is modelling the Hoa in the low poly style.