Social Virtual Reality -Week 06

A Shared Dream Project — ➀Project Declaration

Project Statement

Working Title: Untitled

What is your project about?

A shared Dream project is declared as a group project by Lily Hsiao and Fiona Feng. We will be working together as a team till the end of the semester. Our project provides users an environment that is related to different kinds of Disney theme parks. Each entertainment facility is built on a floating island that users can “fly” around to navigate, enjoy our park, and interact on the facility with partners.

What are your project’s theme(s) or conceptual underpinnings?

Happiness/Memory/Joy. Unordinary social experience. Imaginary fantasy land. Rebuild Story.

What is your project’s “elevator pitch”?

Virtual Social Amusement park during the pandemic.

What is your short, project description? Write a 200–300 word paragraph that addresses four of the five essential questions:

why (does it need to exist? why does it need to be Social VR?)

Since we are all influenced by the Covid-19 pandemic, going to Disneyland or an amusement park could be an unrealistic dream or a luxury thing to do now. What if people would like to experience a traditional theme park, but the parks are almost closed all over the world or are too afraid of getting infected by the virus, so they can’t fully enjoy it? We will provide people a virtual theme park full of imagination, which you cannot experience in the physical world. For example, unlike traditional parks, the islands we will build are floating in space. Our project is based on Disney theme parks because Disneyland carries a happy memory for almost everyone, but it has been shut down worldwide. In our virtual world, users can hang out together with family, friends, or even strangers and interact with facilities. Each facility will have different ways of interaction, which may be an indoor exploration or simple interactive games so that users can achieve happy memories and fun social life with partners in this virtual Disneyland. We think that “people” is a crucial factor/influencer for the experience in amusement parks, which will bring the different atmosphere, different events, and different sparks.

who (is there a target audience you have in mind?)

Our target audience will be anyone who:

▸ Likes Disney theme parks or wants to experience this virtual imaginary Disney park with other people

▸ Cannot go to physical Disney theme parks or any other amusement parks, but willing to explore virtual Disney theme parks.

▸ Likes to socialize with people online, do not mind interacting with strangers online as well

▸ Likes virtual reality experiments

what (is it about? an art experience? a story? an educational environment? a space of protest?)

An entertainment environment, a space full of joy, memories, and imagination. It can also be a story that you have experienced or created with your partners before, and you can rebuild that scenario again inside this virtual world.

how (do you have the intellectual and psychological investment to see this project through? do you have the resources to manifest it in the way you imagine?)

I think we would need to spend a lot of time each week to work on the project, from brainstorming to building 3D models in Blender. The resources we could find are online Blender tutorials and Disney theme parks pictures/sketches. For the VR environment development platform, we are still searching for the appropriate one that can achieve our interaction effect. We are still at the very beginning stage of researching; later, we would probably need to iterate our ideas and original sketches several times.

Responses to Wade and Martina’s visits (working)