Sam's Cabinet of Curiosities

December had been yet another hardworking monthly for our team. While our course on the semester wrapped up as November passed, our early December was still preoccupied by exams and the Phrase 1 report of this project. Fortunate of us, we got half month of winter break after that, giving us time to spearhead on the project's progress.  Our progress of the month centered around the core element of Neon Atelier - the neon light itself. While our earlier implementation for the prototype only play with the shapes and VR interaction of the tube, this  time we move on the its shiny visual and more. In order to implement this, we had leveraged Unity 's Shade Graph module so that we can implement custom visual materials with the convenient of node-based scripting, as compared to traditional code by HLSL shader writing. Our neon shader begin with its glassy material. While the basic reflection is already built into Unity 's Lit material base, the refraction through to the clear gla...

Entering the middle of the semester, we have encountered enormous amount of workload for other courses. As we juggling with other coursework and project, the development pace of Neon Atelier has been down-tuned so that we can maintain a sustainable output. From this month on, the implementation updates of our project will compiled on a monthly basis, without spreading the records too thin. Since the last update, we have began on the implementing the electrode welding interaction for the neon tube, which involves setting up VR interactions and setting up 3D modeling. The expectation of the electrode welding gameplay is that the player grabbing the electrode, then place it onto the tube, and then weld the end of the electrode and the main tube together. By sealing both ends of the tube with electrodes, the tube is then prepared for vacuuming and gas injection, which is a step key for the neon light to work properly. In the beginning, we ideated that part of gameplay required literally ch...

As we have planned narrative elements for Project Neon Atelier, we need a way to present to the conversation between in-game characters. Our idea is to implement a dialogue system similar to that of visual visual, with clicking to proceed through the dialogue line.  Each dialogue line is defined as a DialogueLine   instance, each consisting of the speaker's name, the speaker's position reference, and also callbacks for when displaying a line and finish reading a line.  An dialogue path system is be added, so that we can group together some of the related dialogues, and allow the player to go back to a selection menu to load the dialogue sections one at a time. However, the path is not meant for dynamic storyline, as our narrative is not meant to be driven by player decision.  Each point of path divergence is represented by DialogueOption object, which consist of the description for selection, a list of tuple with text and custom callbacks for each selection option, a...

  Over the previous weeks on proof of concept, our team had implemented the core tube bending mechanisms of Neon Atelier. For now on, we can start to deliver our effort to other parts of no less important gameplay. One important but yet mentioned element is the inspection procedure before hands-on light tube making. Instead of throwing the player directly to each neon light quest, players are first introduced with a brief outline of the neon light schematics on a VR canvas. Players will use a VR cursor to navigate the schematic, in order to mark significant steps for the upcoming neon light crafting. This prepares the players with early impression over the crafting procedure, relieving the cognitive load during the actual hands-on crafting. The schematics inspection gameplay is built on a VR canvas object. While XR Interaction Toolkit has a  TrackedDeviceGraphicCaster  that can be easier plugged onto an conventional UI Canvas object, the VR cursor detection is only partia...

With tube bending being an core element for neon light craft, as we implemented the tube gripping mechanism, it is natural to us to also work on the  tube blending along the way. Rather then wrriting a separate script, we implemented the  tube bending part by expanding the TubeGripManager from our previous blog , as the bending mechanism follows shortly after an grip step, and also reads for the same active  PathContainer reference used by the  TubeGripManager. We isolate our aims for the bending motion first by setting both an start point and endpoint of the bending. Instead of moving in straight line for the bending, the motion ought to be in curve, accounting for the volume of the tube. While the bending is expected to go forwards only (the quest are not about free forming editing), we do have to account for situation where player release the grip during mid way of bending. In this case, the tube should remain partially bended, with the grip collider in appropriat...

The process of neon light crafting requires nimble grips, as the craftsman brings destinated section onto the torch, softening the section before twisting it into desired curve. In Project Neon Atelier, we implement this process in VR with Unity's XR Interaction Toolkit. XR Interaction Toolkit provides us all-rounded prefabs and a straightforward workflow, saving us from setup the complex VR scenes and controller controller, allowing us to spend more time tailoring it for the interactions of neon light crafting, with features beyond the workflow commonly taught by the online tutorials. While we have yet secured an VR device for testing, the XR Device Simulator from the toolkit allows us to test with the more simple interactions with keyboard and mouse controls. Our implementation relies significantly on the toolkit's NearFarInteractor and XRGrabInteractable components, for the mechanism of tube grabbing. XRGrabInteractable natively supports two-hand grabbing through its Select...

Our VR project Neon Atelier aims at faithfully present neon light craftmanship in a safe, virtual environment. One crucial procedure in neon light making is about bending torched glass tubes into desired shapes. Such malleability of glasswork really challenges our vision about 'a faithfully representation. Our initial attempt for a virtual tube implementation is to rely on Bezier curve, with its capability to represent curves in a mathematical way. We thought about an implementation that begins a glass tube as straight line, adding nodes to it as it collides with the collider flames, plus allowing it to bended into the desire shape.  However, it was not long before we were halted by an inconvenient nature of Bezier curves - its length cannot be calculated mathematically. ( A Primer on Bézier Curves , n.d.) The best we can get is a rough estimation by marching through curves step by step. This fundamentally challenged our expectation to maintain Bezier-based tube's length as pla...

Neon Atelier is a VR experience aiming at presenting the culture behind Hong Kong neon light, beyond its stereotype rooted in visual media. With diversity of perspectives in mind, we expanded our research onto a variety of news, cultural study literature and NGO materials, in order to discover alternative entry points into the neon light topic.  During this progress, we came quite some amount of interesting information. While the substantial amount of available materials are way beyond our project to cover, we were able to select a few pieces that are able to bring out the depth of neon light culture, maintaining the conciseness of our project: The shift in mindset of neon light practitioners : While Hong Kong's neon light scene generally considered at its peak during the 90s, practitioners at the time mostly consider it a form of  business. Despite the passion and talent of some practitioners, the design part is meant to tailored according to client requests, and the tub...

This project is in collaboration with Cheung Hiu Ching Apple, as our final year project in Bsc Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, and is supervised by Dr. Jussi Pekka Holopainen.   Neon light has long been icon for Hong Kong's vibrant street sight, signifying the city's economic prosperity with bold expression from the city's many businesses. The neon scenery has been well captured by the Hong Kong movies, serving as one of the visual expression that stands the test of time. While neon lights are rich in culture context and visual design, it is also based on delicate craftmanship. This inspires us to take on neon light craft as a gameplay experience, and take game as a medium to present a variety of narratives around the vibrant neon light, both of which we found substantial potentials during our ideation process.      For the neon light crafting , fundamental techniques includes elements such as torching, bend...

Identifying himself as a first-generation digital native, the Berlin-based New Zealand artist Simon Denny have long been interested exploring the influence of the advancement in information technology on contemporary humanity. This has especially manifested since his All You Need Is Data (2012), which laid out significant individuals, corporations and organizations of the Internet landscape at the time. Since then, we can see a significant proportion of his works evolved around tech related topic. From  some of Simon Denny's works, we can see how the collage of popular entertainment and gamification creatively and impactfully convey the discussed topics. From example in his exhibition Games of Decentralized Life (2018) and the related revamps in 2019 & 2020, Simon Denny had produced  a series of exhibits that drew inspiration from Milton Bradley's classic boardgame Game of Life . With the his research on the comparison of centralized and decentralized web technologies, the...