THE WAITING ROOM
An exploration of social norms in virtual space
the concept
This project was the culmination of a virtual reality (VR) development class I took my senior year at UC San Diego. This project is not only a technical exploration of VR development, but is also an artistic exploration of the nature of social norms and how they translate from physical spaces to digital ones.
This scene depicts the player (the viewer of the piece wearing a headset) standing in the back of a ticket line. This line is made up of of non-player characters (NPCs) who are waiting to get tickets of their own. The player has two choices: they can either wait in line for a while and eventually get a ticket, or cut the line and take it without waiting. Nothing is stopping the player from doing this, and there are no repercussions for cutting.
In developing this concept, I wanted to create a space that mirrors a real-life social interaction in a virtual space. I hoped to force the viewer to examine how social interaction in a virtual space differs from the “same” interaction in the real world. In particular, I wanted to see how quickly human players subvert societal expectations they normally would adhere to because of the physical isolation and anonymity afforded by their virtual experience.
building assets
I began my process by modeling various assets in blender, creating simple textures in Adobe Illustrator to add realism to my fairly simple scene.
building the room in unity
Moving forward, I created a simple room in unity which would then be fleshed out with my more complex assets built in Blender. During this process I added lighting effects as well as VR integration so that the scene could be interacted with using a VR headset.
programming movement in c#
Once the scene was complete, I wrote some C# code to make the NPCs in the room move through the line and out the exit extremely slowly. This was my first experience ever coding in C#, and I'm really happy with how it turned out!
Final Scene
Once the scene was filled with NPCs, lit, and staged, it was ready for new players. Shortly after the space was complete, I had the opportunity to watch a small group of new users immerse themselves in my digital space for the first time.
It was incredibly interesting to watch people experience and interact with a world that I built, especially because it was a space in which they were forced to be uncomfortable. Essentially, the player was faced with either with completing an incredibly long and boring task, or with prioritizing their time over that of other people. Visiting and briefly existing in this world served as a great jumping off point for deeper conversations about how the users' lived experience and adherence to modern social norms might change as we spend more and more of our lives in virtual spaces.