Islands / Seom
January 2018 – Present Unity/Shaders Programming, Sound Design Consultant | Interactive AR Installation
Islands/Seom is an AR archive of developing artists that we are close to and feel inspired by. The audience enters a room of floating cube block sculptures called Islands. Each cube encapsulates the perspective, voice, and beliefs of one of the artists.
In the first stage (the Navis), the audience are invited to explore the room and encounter the artists, listen to what they want to share, and decide which artist avatars they would like to send to the world simulation system called Lacus.
In the Lacus stage, an installed-iPad stand is used as a navigator for landing the avatars on a 3D-animated floating lake, as well as the worldview control panel. When the avatars land, they reveal their embedded attributes, interacting with other artists and the world around them. The audience observes these interactions via a pepper’s ghost installation.
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I worked on the Lacus half of the project: specifically visuals / programming, and audio implementation.
On the visual / programming side, I designed and programmed character interactions , world behavior, and also helped resolve merge conflicts.
Each of the characters has their own special ability when they encounter other characters. I implemented these interactions using C# to modify materials, physics, and other properties in Unity, also writing custom shaders for the characters.
A few examples:
When two objects interact, an effect reminiscent of paint mixing is generated.
When the Candle is in control of an interaction, it ignites the other object by spawning a particle system with a custom flame shader on it.
A good example of both above events happening:
Meteor (left) interacting with the air avatar, which applies a voxelize effect to the meteor (like a pixelize effect, except using a vertex shader):
Here you can see the meteor's growths (the crystals) being affected by the modem's power. The bright crystals are the intact ones, whereas the ones with the dark shimmer are the crystals that have had the modem's glitch effect applied to them:
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For the world, I designed shaders for the water and water ParticleSystems, as well as used Perlin Noise to create wave-like motion in the water.
I also created a reveal animation using an image effect shader
Normal Ending:
Scarlett's Ending:
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On the audio side, I managed Wwise integration in Unity, helped designed the sound playback behaviour in the game, and guided the audio team through how to use Wwise.
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For more information on islands, you can visit here.