Natural Resonance – An Immersive Healing Environment

Xiaoran Chen

Advisor: Sharleen Smith

This is an immersive healing experience that combines peaceful natural environments and geometric patterns that represent different emotions, aiming to help users release anxiety.

Project Website Presentation
Forest

Abstract

A lot of people have to face anxiety caused by the fast pace of modern society, and so do I. Getting close to nature can be a helpful way to release stress, so I built a series of immersive natural environments in the game engine for users to have a healing experience by using a VR headset. The whole experience has 4 natural scenes: the lake and sky, the forest and grassland, oasis in the desert and the universe. They represent distinct themes and aim to release users’ pressure and bring them happiness. In addition, I added some geometric patterns in the environment to symbolize different emotions, which can help users feel the atmosphere of the environment.

Wave of the Lake

Technical Details

This project is made by Unity, the most difficult technical problem is rendering. To make attractive visual effects, I learned some rendering techniques. In the lake and sky scene, main techniques are planar reflection, depth texture and simplification of Mie scattering. The forest scene used ray marching, vertex animation and gpu instancing. In the oasis scene, I made the material of the sandy terrain based on Alan Zucconi’s tutorial. Some techniques cannot not run independently on VR, so I recorded a 360 video and played on the headset.

Mie Scattering - Lake and Sky

Research/Context

I feel passionate about building 3D environment to express my feeling. My research focuses on different visual elements that can evoke different emotional responses and what kind of rendering techniques can achieve the visual effect I want to have. For example, the motion of waves can represent different emotions: subtle waves can remind users of a peaceful relaxation and a huge wave can evoke thoughts of significant events. Shader can achieve these distinct visual effects by Gerstner waves in vertex shader.

Wave of the Lake

Further Reading

Cat Like Coding Waves https://catlikecoding.com/unity/tutorials/flow/waves/
A Journey Into Journey’s Sand Shader https://www.alanzucconi.com/2019/10/08/journey-sand-shader-1/
Emotions Evoked by Geometric Patterns https://zevendesign.com/mood-lines-giving-designs-attitude/#concentrating

  • Mie Scattering - Lake and Sky
  • Forest