October 5, 2021 Update: This project was included in the "Youth during COVID-19" Virtual Reality Film directed by Sojung Bahng and produced by MPAD program director Vicky McArthur. It has been selected for screening at a prestigious Los Angeles film festival and has been on the Fivars Official Fall Selections 2021 list. The work was also selected for the 2022 Palm Springs International Film Festival and the 2021 Festival of International Virtual & Augmented Reality Stories in West Hollywood.

Concept‍

This project first began in 2021 Winter's immersive storytelling course, where we thought the concept of immersive storytelling was broad and there needed to be a consensus on its definition. Immersive narratives give people a sense of "being there and in the story." This technology is blurring the boundaries between the real and digital worlds.VR technology enhances viewer engagement and immersion. Its advantage as an autobiographical tool is that it allows the viewer to observe the surroundings (and the trigger that caused the event to happen). That's why I decided to create an autobiographical VR storytelling project about COVID-19.

Background‍

The number of international students as a percentage of Canadian institutions is increasing annually. As of the 2019/2020 semester, the number of international students has reached 388,782, or 17.8% of the total number. （Statistics Canada）According to the report, there is a shortage of readily accessible mental health resources available to international students, who may be unable or unable to communicate their need for assistance.

Research

A Canadian communication theorist, Marshall McLuhan, coined the phrase “the medium is the message.” What matters is not how the content transmits but the form of the medium itself. The medium is not a neutral delivery system and could reshape human behaviour. The breakthrough of physical barriers by digital media has brought about a new level of social accessibility and access to information, changing the balance of perceptions of different types of people in relation to and about each other. In this project, I took a different approach from traditional media (video, photo, text, etc.) which is VR technology - and tried to use it to tell stories, exploring its strengths and weaknesses.

As we furthered our research on the autobiographical project, I was inspired by Dr. Diane Gromala, the Founding Director of the Pain Studies Lab's research, and aimed to provide practical artistic healing effects in this project.

“For many patients, clinical environments bring about anxiety, stress, uncertainty, and sometimes fear. Studies have shown that high anxiety levels can cause a breakdown in communication between patients and doctors. ”— Dr. Diane Gromala

As an international student growing up in the East Asian culture, I have lived overseas for the first time since the start of university. Therefore, I think my personal experience might help the community to substitute the perspective of international students and gain a deeper understanding of the enormous challenges caused by cultural differences facing the pandemic. Since the pandemic started in early 2020, it has been a miserable journey for me as an international student. From home self-isolation in Ottawa, going through multiple Covid-19 tests, air travels, to hotel quarantine. To create this environment, I chose the scene of my apartment in Ottawa during self-isolation. Because that is where I was living abroad, it encompasses my complex state of mind and the underlying mental stress.

Sketches & Prepare

These two sketches come from when I first designed the structure of the environment. I mapped it based on my apartment floor plan last year. Then I determined the floor height to ensure the realism of this interior environment. I also tweaked the first-person camera ratio to ensure it fits most users' viewing angles.

The picture above shows my first contact with the 3D engine and the virtual world. This is my first attempt at modelling the room and adding materials to 3D objects. I tried to make the material for the windows, which is a crucial prop and clue to reflect the passage of time through the change of sunlight throughout the project.

As the school term ended, my project was invited to join the research project about VR storytelling on COVID-19 by Dr. Sojung Bahng. I further developed the project with the help of Dr. Sojung Bahng, and she transformed it into a 360-degree storytelling project.

360-degree Storytelling Project

A successful story is only complete with a variety of good factors. And among them, visuals and sounds always bear the brunt. If the set of the film is still simple to control, for a virtual scene, you can hardly be sure that the audience always follows the storyteller's train of thought. The solution for this is to add more details to the project to make it look more aligned with real-life experience. The uneaten pizza, the randomly thrown towels, the cluttered room, the books, and the papers all are enough to suggest the state of my life and my lazy habits.

Do you remember the Great Toilet-Paper Panic at the beginning of the epidemic? Does your home have some similar decorations? Did you need distance learning when you were stuck at home? Do you also like to sit in a little corner of your home and play on your phone or read a book? Through these props, I want to convey the idea that everyone is similar. As individuals face more significant challenges, our lifestyles might be similar and enhance the local community's sense of identity with international students.

With the suggestion of Dr. Sojung Bahng, I recorded the sound of my walking and the game footage on my computer. Sound, as one of the essential dimensions of immersive storytelling, further enhances the credibility and authenticity of the overall 360-degree video.

Result &Reflections

This project began as an autobiographical VR storytelling experience. In the future, I'd like to restructure and form it into a form of art therapy, if possible, a type of complementary psychotherapy in which, unlike traditional psychotherapy, art therapy takes a creative format, allowing users to examine and explore personal difficulties through art-making. After the graphics rendering quality was reduced, the original project files were packaged as a WebGL application and hosted on the Unity Play server. When you click the Play button below, please be patient and wait for the resources to load; the project will probably take a longer time to process.

Project Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-EQKN5sNTQ
Trailer for Youth During Covid-19: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cix8aeVy9XM
For more information about the festival:https://fivars.net/stories/storiesfall2021/youth-during-covid-19

❤️ Special Thanks

Sojung Bahng: Postdoctoral Fellow & Instructor, Carleton University.
‍Brendan Currie-O’Brien: Research assistant, Carleton University.