album is a sketchbook of New York City that viewers can experience in VR. There’s no single person to be pointed out as the protagonist, the experience portrays a collective narrative, we witness it all in the form of a city panorama that surrounds us.
album
VR Experience
Year: 2024
For the first 18 years of my life, I lived in my hometown, a small city in China. If my home is the (0,0) on the coordinate axis, then my kindergarten, primary school, middle school, and high school are all on the x-axis, because they are all on the same avenue, and the furthest one is only a 15-minute bike ride from my home. I have been to many different cities, but the path between home and schools was my main life trajectory before I went to university.
About 7 years ago, I started to live in different cities away from my hometown. I went to university in Yantai where I stayed for four years, followed by Beijing, New York.
All these experiences have made me reflect on how the history of my life has been unevenly distributed among different cities over the past 25 years, how I have felt, seen, and participated in these cities, and how I have become a part of the narratives of these cities. It has also made me wonder why the people who have appeared in these narratives have flowed through the cities in a certain image or identity. These reflections have helped me understand myself better and appreciate the experiences that each city has brought to me.
After deciding to embark on a project related to city observation and the people in the city, I began to consider from which perspectives I might view the city. Perhaps from the viewpoint of pigeons in the sky, rats on the streets, or as a person filled with curiosity and enthusiasm for the cityscape. My instructor, Andrew, recommended the insightful article "Death to the Flâneur"2 to me, introducing a new concept—the Flâneur, which means an aimless observer who strolls through the city.
Being a Flâneur exploring the city and meeting the people is akin to being an angler waiting for the fish that willingly takes the bait rather than a hunter in pursuit of a specific target. This perspective transforms urban exploration into a more receptive and passive experience where the city reveals itself in unexpected ways.
After finally running the scene within the VR headset, I realized that this was just a starting point. There's still much to resolve. In recent tests, new issues have continuously emerged, such as complaints about the resolution of characters and scenery, and distortions in the 2D images within the space due to orientation changes. These issues involve variables such as the distance and orientation between the camera and assets, as well as the arrangement and layout of assets, making it impossible to find a straightforward solution. Instead, they can only be addressed through continuous testing and trial, that is the complexity of VR animation projects.
Additional VR production tutorials/ documentations of this project can be found here.