Design
First, to turn give my area more of a room feeling, I began by modeling a bit of an abstracted/surreal version of waiting room furniture in Maya:
I also made a fuzzy texture based on some tutorials I found online and used the car material set to find some other materials. I also made a custom material for the walls and floors based on the tutorial Jonathan shared with us. Then I placed the colored balls in the scene in order to see what they looked like together and in contrast to the room. I had some trouble with the lighting initially, but Jonathan showed me how to turn on the “bloom” setting in order to get the emissive material for the florescent lights to activate and how to use spotlights to achieve the lighting effect I was looking for.
I also added signs based on quotes from a radio program I listed to on boredom that another professor shared with me. I wanted to include them in order to frame the experience for the user and prompt them to think about waiting, the narrative we tell ourselves about our lives and what we think we value. I had originally wanted these to be implicit in the piece and to not overtly say them, but I think that VR is such a new medium that I wanted to help people engage with it critically.
I also came up with a narrative around the piece. After listening to the podcast, I began to imagine a future where waiting is essentially eliminated for elite members of society - basically an extreme extension of the current trends we see today with automation, personalized experiences with AI and stimulation from devices. I imagined that in this extreme scenario people started making underground waiting experiences in order to get into the “default network” brain state or have a down time when they are doing “nothing.” I imagined that this piece was being shown in a museum 100 years later and created a brochure for the exhibit (see next post).