Sam's Cabinet of Curiosities

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...