In Her Eyes New – Yanxi Wang

Genre

VR Interactive Experience

Team Size

Duration

3 weeks

State

Completed

Contributions

Project Concept
Level Design
Environment Art
VR Implementation

Keywords

VR Experience
Mental Visualization
Art Appreciation

In Her Eyes is a VR project made in Unity. The player falls into the eye of a gallery visitor who is looking at the painting “The False Mirror” on the wall, then travels in her inner world, and eventually comes out with a brand-new view to observe the surrounding world. The project aims to simulate the thinking process of art lovers like me, when they are facing thought-provoking artworks. The pondering process is demonstrated by 5 abstract scenes players can travel through.

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1. Why Make the Game?

Art as magical mirror

“Mirror” as a concept keyword helped us establish the initial idea. The word soon reminded me of my understanding of Art at that time: I feel my world mirrored by artworks in an artistic way. Many friends and families of mine frequently questioned my Art major. They said Art was like maniacs making crap that only meaningful to themselves. I wanted to tell them why I love Art through this project: Art is like a magical mirror to me, reflecting myself and my recognition of the world through unexpected and inspiring filters.

2. Creative Challenges

3. Design Solutions

Solution 1:

VR scenes with Changing Somatosensory Perspectives

We utilized VR to demonstrate the idea by offering various bodily experiences of the entire inner process of art lovers like me, when we are looking at artworks. We decided to visualize these abstract thinking stages via chronological scenes with different playing perspectives, starting with a gallery visitor staring at an artwork. The inner process was then conceptualized into five stages: 1. observe 2. get confused 3. recall personal experiences 4. have own interpretation of the work by relating it to themselves 5. rethink their experiences, find inspirations and new perspectives.

Solution 2:

Rene Magritte’s The False Mirror

After reading critique articles of various artworks, we found this piece to be the best expression of our project theme. One huge eye filled with a blue sky and a dead black pupil, the piece suggests eyes being a “false mirror” of the world, for them being subjective and selective. Magritte expects the viewers to understand the world differently, which corresponds with my comprehension of Art’s virtue. The surrealist photographer Man Ray who once owned the painting described it as “sees as much as itself is seen”, which demonstrates the mirror effect that I think Art possesses.

Solution 3:

Playtests from ideation stage

Sometimes artists can concentrate too much on expressing their ideas, neglecting the efficiency of people receiving those ideas. During the scene design phase, Lou and I made plentiful proposals. We had a hard time filtering these designs, since we thought all of them expressed our ideas in appealing ways. However, after showing the designs to our friends, we found most of our designs too abstract for people to understand. We then adjusted the designs until they can effectively deliver our idea. Although art is subjective, I found early stage user testing also important for artworks that aim to create meaningful interactive experiences.

4. Level Design

Scene 1:

Gallery
(Perspective - Forward)

The first scene is a gallery. The gallery visitor is looking at Rene Magritte’s The False Mirror on the wall.

Scene 2:

Eyes
(Perspective - Spherical)

The visitor then fall into her own eye – the entrance to her inner world.

Scene 3:

Skyscrapers
(Perspective - Falling)

The skyscrapers constitute an long aisle with combination of reallife and fantasy elements. Player falls through the aisle to reach inner thoughts.

Scene 4:

Phoenix
(Perspective - Flying)

The player enters the inner world. A phoenix shows up to lead people pass through chaotic clouds. It represents an initial period when visitor gets confused of the artwork and tries to figure an way out.

Scene 5:

Masks
(Perspective - Overlooking)

The masks with various facial expressions represents different sides the audiences have created in order to confront different people. The process of getting to the mask that serves as the key to the next scene is the process audiences reach to the real self that appears only when they are pondering alone.

Scene 6:

Room of Windows
(Perspective - Surround View)

The black room with windows is a room hidden at the deepest corner of the audiences. The windows get lightened up one by one is the process of how artwork could lead people to pursue different answers of themselves.

Scene 7:

Gallery (After)
(Perspective - Free Exploration)

Finally, after opening the door of the room and coming out of the eye painting, audiences return to the original gallery. However, the gallery is now without the originally European style texture. The change represents that after viewing artworks, people could get new understanding of realistic world, because the understanding of reality is subjective and flexible. Art could serve as a way to transform people’s subjective cognition of the real world.

In Her Eyes