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Phe·nom·e·nol·o·gy
VR

Phenomenology is a seated Virtual Reality art game with gaze control, directed by professor Richard Lemarchand from the Interactive Media and Games Division of USC School of Cinematic Arts. It is a montage of visual musical sequences, slices of visiting an interactive Light-and-Space museum of art,  and its narrate in the form of 360° Live-Action Videography. Inspired by Oskar Fishinger's An Optical Poem(an object animation in visual music form),  James Whitney's Lapis(An abstract film of circles oscillating and accompanied by India sitar music) and some other notable Minimalism Light-and-Space works, Richard might through creating this art game experiment with directing players' experience in a virtual space with light by their own intends, and research players' constitution of those virtual objects in transcendental consciousness that makes up the meaning or content of the given experience.

​For official information, please check the homepage of the project by clicking the link below:

https://phenomenologyvr.tumblr.com/

I worked on this project for two academic semesters as the main developer and the only programmer during that production phase. The project, however, was gradually forming through the endeavor of plenty of other contributors including MFA candidates from the USC Interactive Media Division (in reverse chronological order of their contribution timeline) Jivitesh Dhaliwal, me, Jung-Ho Sohn and Atley Loughridge. My personal major contributions to this project are listed below:

  • Created the video subtitle system and the language localization, which support displaying any kinds of languages; then wrote the corresponding Unity Editor plug-in for updating the subtitle data.

  • Established the game save and load system that supports three save slots. 

  • Added or modified the codes to refine the interactions; fixed gameplay and graphics bugs.

  • Helped the director make the trailer through recording the experience walk-through following the specified camera shots and assisted the video editing.​

The Language Localisation 

A screenshot that shows the text mesh in Unity3D Game Engine which is used to display the video clips subtitles.

The Subtitle System Implementation

A screenshot of the subtitle data input in the Google spreadsheet
An xml file that stores the raw subtitle data generated from the "Export Sheet Data" Google Add-on.
A screenshot of the popped file-browsing dialog that seeks the raw subtitle file
A screenshot of the xml converter plugin that displays the raw data in the left text panel
An xml file that stores the subtitle data converted by the Unity3D C-Sharp plugin I wrote with the format fitting the subtitle system.
A screenshot of the file-browsing dialog that seeks the subtitle file in the converted format
A screenshot of the xml converter plugin that displays the converted data in the right text panel
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