Tibrogargan Virtual Reality Experience
We reimagined the dreamtime story of Tibrogargan through virtual reality, casting gigantic moving mountains as main characters struck by a tsunami larger than you could imagine. Focusing on the perspective of the user relative to the scale of the characters to elicit empathy from people who have never felt any smaller.
Here's a quick preview of The Tibrogargan VR Experience:
A Virtual Reality Experience
We chose VR as the medium since it has an amazing ability to hijack your senses and become an empathy machine, which gives you amazing potential to engage an audience.
Camera positioning relative to character
To make a story about giants seem larger than life, VR gives us that ability to make the audience feel like an ant. With the latest production pipeline tools, it’s been more achievable than ever. I think the immersive nature of VR really helps the suspension of disbelief with an audience which helps the narrative immensely, creating a more powerful message – something we're looking to explore further in future work.
Ancient Dreamtime Characters
Initial mockup of Tibrogargan, Beerwah, and Coonowrin
The inspiration for the appearance of the characters was taken from ancient aboriginal artwork and then influenced by the mass of the mountains themselves…
1. Tibrogargan has the look of an older warrior. He’s getting on in years but is still strong and powerfully built as befits his position as head of the family and he’s still strong enough to be able to put his son in his place as the story develops.
2. Beerwah was the easiest character to develop and was again inspired by the shape of the mountain, she’s heavily pregnant in the animation and so struggles to move quickly and is dependent upon her family for help.
3. Coonowrin who’s the teenage son has a profile that’s reminiscent of the top of Mt Coonowrin, in addition to this he is taller, leaner and more gangly than the other characters.
Initial storyboard
Dynamic Lighting and Cinematography
Screenshot of lighting progressing from the beginning to the final product
Lighting was crucial to this project. Without the proper staging for each scene, it wouldn't set the proper mood and effect to portray the emotions of the story. But it's just as much about the combination of other elements - textures, music, voiceover, and camera angles that brought the whole things together.
Compatibility Across VR Headsets
Initially, the Tibrogargan Dreamtime VR experience was developed for the Oculus Rift DK2. We wanted to make this more mobile friendly, so we converted the files over to suit the Gear VR.
The problem is, we found the lighting results between Gear VR and Oculus Rift DK2 to be quite different. It wasn’t only for the colours, but also for sharpness, and quality. After the Mythology exhibition, we went back to the project to redo the lighting and textures across every scene to tell the same story seamlessly across these devices.
More Info
You can find out more about the Tibrogargan virtual reality experience, check out the case study or this blog post.
