Constancia
In the semester project "Regen Tage" at the HTWG Constance, I developed the virtual reality application Constancia. The project was a collaboration with Konstanz Tourismus and the brief was to offer hotel guests in Constance the opportunity to experience the city from a new perspective in rainy weather without ever having to leave their hotel room.
The result is Constancia, a small virtual reality museum high in the clouds above the city of Constance. In the futuristic tour, designed for the Oculus Go, the visitor explores various sights and current features of the city of Constance. On the tour, the user encounters various NPCs and rooms that explain the background to Constancia's elevated location and shed new light on the exhibits within the museum.
Year: 2018
Collaborators: Andrin Hess
Programs Used: Unity, Cinema 4D, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, After Effects
Supervision: Prof. Jo Wickert
Constancia was my first contact with a game engine. In addition to Unity, I was also able to work with Cinema 4D for the first time. The application had to work on the Oculus Go, another medium I had hardly dealt with before. I therefore encountered several obstacles during the development of the app. As I soon realised, the performance of the Oculus Go was nowhere near comparable to that of the computer. All objects, rooms, and figures therefore had to be greatly reduced in their polygon count. The input options were also limited, not only by my modest programming skills but also by the single controller of the Oculus Go. I therefore opted for a very simple, low-poly style. This allowed me to create a relatively complex structure with relatively few polygons.
However, the biggest challenge was ultimately the narrative and level design of the application. I wanted to tell a simple, short story without having to programme too much and in such a way that the application simultaneously resembles a free course but still subconsciously takes the user by the hand. The user starts at the lowest level and makes his way to the top. The rooms are arranged in such a way that the story of Constancia is told analogously.