Siheyuan
My roles: Unity developer & programmer
Collaborators: Isabel Wu (art & design)
Made with: Unity, C#, Maya, Photoshop
Awarded Senior Design Session Best Award
As part of my senior design project, I teamed up with a studio arts student to develop a tool that would help teach students how to write Chinese characters. Siheyuan is a VR learning experience that allows the user to gain a better understanding of the Chinese written language using visual storytelling and interactive drawing of Chinese characters.
Features of the project include
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Immersive storytelling
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Stylized 3D models and 2D animations
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A physics-based drawing feature that allows the user to draw the character
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Gesture recognition to check the user's accuracy
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Accessible to non-English speakers
Demo Reel - 06/14/2021
Painting in VR
To create an immersive experience, I developed a painting mechanic that allows users to paint onto a 3D canvas in VR. The mechanic allows for different line weights based on how much of the brush is touching the canvas, creating flexible drawing styles for the user to use when drawing Chinese characters.
Visual Representation of Words
As we wanted to recreated the experience of learning their first language, my teammate created a collection of 2D animations to portray meanings of words a child would typically learn first, such as "happy," "sad," or "hungry."
These animations are 2D to contrast against the realistic 3D environment, and to be easier for the user to find.
Happy
Sad
Environment
The best way to learn a language is to be immersed in its culture, so the environment of this experience is a traditional Chinese housing complex, a siheyuan.
As the siheyuan is a closed complex, it's perfect for a sandbox experience as there is little opportunity for the player to go out of bounds.
My teammate created all of the 3D models in our project, with the exception of the plants.
