Thesis: Fabricated Preservation
Here is the link to the full Electronic Thesis, officially published through Virginia Tech. Interactive Sketchfab views of the room are available below.
Overview
Fabricated Preservation examines how an environment can play a crucial role in a narrative. An environmental story was created that centers around a fictional character, influenced by a close friend's life. Virtual reality was used to allow the audience to immerse themselves more within a virtual bedroom environment, using virtual props to convey the personality of the character. A fictional genealogy company called The Fifth Turning was also created to convey that environmental story through a different perspective to the audience. There are two main narratives that go hand in hand with this experience: the primary story is the life of a college girl in the 1990s. The secondary story is of the fictional company, the Fifth Turning, which uses time travel technology to access the bedroom environment of the college girl to obtain more personalized genealogy information.
​
I’m very interested in environmental storytelling. It’s frustrating to me when a big box office film creates a beautiful setting that the audience only sees momentarily, or when a game creates detailed surroundings that the player immediately runs past to fight a monster. I wanted to create an experience that places more emphasis on the environmental aspect of storytelling. And so for my thesis, I created an environmental narrative centered around a character that was influenced by my close friend.
​
While working on this thesis, I looked for opportunities in my life that could lend themselves to an environmental narrative. I thought about one of my friends, and how her environment reflects her personality directly. With her permission and guidance, I decided to design a virtual bedroom based on her life. This person struggles with borderline personality disorder (BPD), depression, and suicidal thoughts. These internal conflicts manifested themselves physically through her environment. Her apartment was extremely unique, with each item in it affected by these battles: every corner of every room told a story of loneliness, laziness, kindness, quirky passions, goofy habits, child-like imagination, and superb intelligence, all wrapped into one. All of the miniature stories contributed to an even greater theme of struggling for control of one’s emotions. With every single object I placed within the virtual room, her experiences were kept in mind. I also integrated my own experiences as well as the experiences of several other friends, in order to construct a uniquely realistic character.
Small section of the bedroom apartment exported to Sketchfab
Context and Influences
Many of my previous works over the course of my undergraduate and graduate career have shaped the direction of Fabricated Preservation. In the Fall of 2015 I created a virtual experience of a tightrope walk between two skyscrapers. This was my first hands-on experience with virtual reality, and the beginning of my fascination with the medium. Looking down in virtual space and realizing that you’re several hundred stories above the ground was terrifying, but it also excited me for future experimentation because it showed me the potential of immersive presence within VR.
​
Following this I worked on “Blacksburg 16 Squares” and “Dig Hill 80”, two research projects that aimed to communicate historical stories through technology. These opportunities provided a new perspective on storytelling that I never considered before: storytelling through the objects of one’s environment. These projects used historical artifacts to tell about the people who interacted with them, with each object containing a treasure trove of information. In addition, Dig Hill 80 also influenced my decision to explore genealogy for my fictional company’s service. The project’s focus on reconstructing WW1 artifacts in 3D for virtual preservation, and to convey the stories of lesser known battles, introduced a fascinating historical analysis through technology. This historical storytelling through artifacts led me to consider how else we can explore our pasts with technology.
​
A few years later I had the opportunity to work on a research project with Facebook. Through collaboration with the Virginia Tech Computer Science department, the project focused on recreating a set of photorealistic rooms for VR visualization. It was during this challenge that I learned the full 3D pipeline from object scanning to placement in a game engine for virtual reality. This knowledge would later serve as the technical foundation needed for me to engage in this thesis work at a capacity that I desired.
​
During my VR research with Dr. Wallace, I noticed that the volunteer participants took the VR studies very seriously and engaged with them at a high level. This change in perspective while interacting with the simple virtual tasks contrasted with how most consumers playfully enjoy a VR game. This led me to consider how the presentation of the VR experience can play a role in how much the audience will immerse themselves in the task. As I iterated on versions of the virtual bedroom, I also iterated on bringing this fictional genealogy company to life, so that it may fulfill its purpose of delivering the virtual bedroom to the audience.
Creative Process
What really drove my work was an imbalance I noticed in the theatrical elements of traditional storytelling, which forefront text and human characters over architecture, props, and the environment. I’ve looked at other media, and oftentimes in movies and video games they guide your eye specifically so that you can’t focus on other stuff in the work. They demand the audience’s full attention to simply absorb the events occurring. This has a negative impact on the environmental side of things, which takes a more passive and subtle approach to storytelling. The environment requires the audience to pause and visually explore the space, which can be difficult when a movie or game wants you to focus on a character talking or a gameplay interaction with an enemy.
​
“We may be transported into ever engrossing and elaborate theatrically lighted cathedrals, but the fact is, we are still simply killing each other… on many occasions I have been blown to bits because I dared hesitate to admire a beautiful piece of virtual architecture.” - Don Carson, Senior Show Designer at Walt Disney
​
Books however provide a more open option, dedicating paragraphs to simply describing the visuals of the environment surrounding the characters. This written exposition allows time for the reader to consider the scene itself and the story it provides. I believe that environments can be equally as important to other story elements in visual media, and as a result sought to create an experience that critically analyzes them as a standalone element. I wanted to tap into the essence of written media and apply it to visual media, coercing people to actively think about the environment they’re placed in without distractions.
​
To accomplish that goal of critical analysis through environmental storytelling, I focused on two methods that would support the experience I was going for. The first was adding many layers of storytelling, to provide enough content and depth to keep people interested and engaged if they so desired. The second was narrative misdirection, which provides real world context and reward for choosing to engage with the story.
Layers of Storytelling
Inspiration for the Room
​
There are four layers to the overall story. The first layer was the room itself: the story of the girl living in an apartment in the 1990s. Many personal inspirations shaped the design of this environment. The 1990s time period was chosen as an opportunity to research and reflect on the decade I grew up in; the decade was also far enough in the past to differentiate itself from the modern era, but not too far as to make it impossible to find relevant objects from that generation for reference.
​
The story of the room draws inspiration from my friend with borderline personality disorder. In addition to personal anecdotes I reached out to Jessie Mann: a Virginia Tech doctoral student researching Neurorehabilitation, with a Masters degree in Science, Technology and Society, and a Bachelors in Psychology. She suggested that being immersed in a virtual environment is a way to tell this specific personal story: “We are exploring the boundaries where our personalities manifest themselves in the world through our bedrooms; the virtual room is a metaphor for getting inside someone’s head and externalizing an internal experience.” The objects in the room are environmental clues that inform the user about that symptomatology: they include subtle details for amorphous symptoms, such as having low lighting in the room as an indicator for lack of emotion.
​
To prioritize the layout of objects, I put myself into the headspace of the character as she first moved in and how she used the room over time. Each object was carefully considered and categorized into 5 groups based on stationary permanence: the first group was permanent objects that she moves in with (such as a bed or desk). The second group was permanent objects that she acquired soon after moving in (such as a laundry basket). The third group was permanent objects that she acquired gradually over a long period of time (such as the posters). The fourth group was temporary objects that don’t change their location often (such as the papers). And the fifth group was temporary objects that do change their location often (such as the articles of clothing). Every object was added to the room and arranged based on this priority list.
Rules of Realism
​
In addition to categorizing each object, I also created several “Rules of Realism” that would guide the placement of each object. These rules were used as a guideline to ensure that the virtual space felt realistic and lived in.
​
-
No object shall be placed at a perfect 90 degree angle. Humans are not perfect with aligning objects to walls: they are crooked slightly because of our own flaws in perception and how we indirectly move objects slightly when we interact with them. As such, every object was placed in such a way to imply how it was used and the angle that it was used from. For groups of objects, such as a deck of Magic cards or cat food in a bowl, scripts were used to randomize the rotation of each object by a few degrees.
-
Every object needs purpose. Every object is used for specific reasons and would only be used in certain parts of the room. A TV would not be placed on the floor if there is desk space available to place it on. This rule seeks to address the issue where video game rooms are often filled with random reused assets that don’t make sense.
-
Objects are clumped together rather than equal spacing between them. 3D artists often try to give the illusion of a full room by spacing objects out, but this isn’t realistic. Objects tend to clump together as we push them around and use them, creating dense spacial areas alongside empty spacial areas. We naturally stack books or place them vertically next to each other for balance, and we throw clothing into a pile rather than separating each piece throughout the room.
-
Objects need to be affected by gravity. Certain objects such as clothing and papers were given ncloth simulations to accurately deform to their environment.
-
Objects need contextual redundancy. Certain objects in the room are unique and realistically singular, such as a TV. With other objects such as Reese’s Pieces wrappers, it’s normal to have multiple copies since many people eat several at a time.
-
Each object should not only contribute to the main story of the room, but also sub-stories as well. Groups of objects shared their own mini narratives to provide layers of environmental storytelling. The arrangement of beanie babies on top of the dresser and the Magic: The Gathering cards laid out mid-game are examples of this.
-
The room must abide by safety regulations and include all foundational elements of a real space. This includes but is not limited to: smoke alarms, cables and cords, wall bevel, outlets, thermostat, and heater. Countless architectural visualizations have beautifully rendered objects such as televisions… that aren’t plugged into anything.
-
Each object must adhere to the passage of time, as not all objects entered the space simultaneously. The posters are an example of this: the early posters were given plenty of space to hang using her favorite color of thumbtacks, and the later posters brought in were crammed into empty spaces using whatever thumbtacks could be found.
Supplementary Layers
​
As mentioned previously, the first layer was the story of the girl living in an apartment in the 1990s. This was originally going to be the only layer, but when I ran the story by people, many were confused as to why they were exploring the room in the first place. I realized that a lack of outside context caused a disconnect with the audience and weakened the overall experience. It was for this reason that I created the other 3 layers. This first layer is told entirely in the headset in the virtual reality room, while the other 3 layers exist beyond it.
​
The second storytelling layer is the fictional company, which provides a reason for exploring the character’s room: acquiring information about a client’s ancestor through basic time travel. This also justifies using virtual reality as a futuristic conduit for this experience. There’s a problem with this though; most companies nowadays would love to use time travel technology as much as they can to help further their greed. In order for The Fifth Turning to resonate with the audience realistically, it needed backstory with ulterior motives.
​
The third layer was the futuristic landscape in which this company existed. To create a believable political climate, I scoured the news for laws, scientific breakthroughs, and philosophical theories that could contribute to the emergence of The Fifth Turning. From there, I created a set of hypothetical events that pushed forward a timeline filled with conspiracies. Almost all of this story layer is implied in the experience rather than directly presented.
​
-
In 2008, America entered the housing crisis. This event kicked off what is known in the Strauss—Howe Generational Theory as the Fourth Turning, a period of destruction that often involves war or revolution. The theory states that American history repeats itself roughly every 80 years, cycling infinitely every 4 generations of people. The Fourth Turning is set to end around 2027 with another theorized golden age in society. This sociological theory was the initial inspiration for my fictional company, setting up a problem to be solved: If we can predict that a crisis will occur in the future based on these turnings, how can we prevent it? The Fifth Turning answers that call, seeking to break the cycle and stabilize society.
-
In October 2014, several scientists published a study in the journal Molecular Psychiatry announcing the discovery of two specific genes that are associated with violent crime. The two genes were the MAOA gene and a variant of cadherin 13 called CDH13. The latter has previously been associated with substance abuse and ADHD. This scientific discovery serves as the reasoning behind the Fifth Turning’s plan: the company believes that monitoring people with the associated genes will inhibit crimes from occurring, and in turn prevent a larger crisis from breaking out. Since the discovery of the genes were through DNA testing, the company would pretend to be a service that requires DNA in order to lure people in and obtain their genetic information.
-
In 2015 China began to quietly test a “social credit” point system, where the government monitors the behavior of its citizens and applies a reputation score to them based on their actions. This reputation score would give citizens either rewards or punishments that the government seems appropriate for their economic and personal conduct. A low reputation score could cause citizens (and their families) to be excluded from private schools and hotels, banned from travel, denied from jobs and loans, given a slower internet speed, publically shamed, and many more. Reasons for punishment were anything from “bad driving, smoking in non-smoking zones, buying too many video games and posting fake news online”. This point system was the inspiration for how the Fifth Turning was going to implement its own plan: by working with law enforcement and government agencies, people with the violent genes could be punished in society by restricting their privileges. Those punished by this system were less likely to obtain power in society, and if they resisted then police were given cause to arrest them.
The final layer of storytelling, which ties together the entire experience, is the presentation to the audience. Conveying the mistrust and unsettling tone of the company was achieved through bad acting and providing false story clues within the virtual simulation. A simple iPhone X placed within the room throws the accuracy of the entire simulation into question.
Narrative Misdirection
In addition to the layers of storytelling, the second method that I used to encourage critical thinking was narrative misdirection.
​
There is a fundamental flaw with many virtual experiences: they are treated like games. The idea of interacting with a virtual world carries a certain stereotype that skews our perspective of how we act in it. This can be attributed to many pop culture uses of VR, glamorizing it in sci-fi movies like Ready Player One and the rise of video game companies adopting the technology at a consumer level. While this isn’t necessarily a problem in many experiences, it does pose a problem to this research: users are less likely to approach the experience with an open mind if it mimics a game too closely.
​
Games provide a systematic gameplay loop that players adapt to subconsciously. Players become conditioned to respond in certain ways to gameplay elements. If there’s only one interactable item in the video game, players automatically know that this item is important, because why else would it be interactable? Likewise if every item becomes interactable, like in Skyrim, players begin to hoard all the items just in case they need them later on. They pick up everything without considering the context of the item, and so the player ends up with over one hundred wheels of cheese in their house.
​
I needed the audience to think about the environment critically, and simply handing a VR headset to them would not be enough to break the standard perspective. This problem can be fixed by accompanying the VR experience with some sort of real world context to influence a player’s perspective. When Lockheed Martin came to Virginia Tech, they offered a challenge to all students on campus: complete a series of their engineering problems correctly to open a mysterious puzzle box and win prize money. The flashy experience that Lockheed Martin provided was paired with a real incentive for people to participate to the best of their abilities.
​
It was this idea that was inspiration for the presentation of my thesis. The Fifth Turning would visit Virginia Tech, offering its own challenge and rewards. With real employees running the experience in a professional atmosphere, access to a booth with high end technology to use, and the reward of free merchandise and potential internships, the stage was set for a thoughtful attempt at environmental storytelling. The college students would be able to act as themselves seeking personal gain, and would be unaware of the stage they were on.
Technical Process
My general pipeline for the development of the room used several design programs: I started with RealityCapture’s Photogrammetry software to scan each object to obtain a rough mesh. I then moved to Maya and ZBrush for 3D modeling details, and transitioned to Substance Painter for texturing details, before finally putting it into Unreal Engine for virtual reality.
​
All 135 unique objects in the room started out being scanned with photogrammetry to be most efficient with time constraints. Unfortunately many of the scanned objects ended up looking melted and unfinished, and so I decided that each object would be 3D modeled by hand to maintain a high level of realism. The photogrammetry data was still invaluable though: even for the objects that didn’t turn out well, I could still use the texture data it captured and the proportions of the scanned models as a reference for accuracy.
​Maya and ZBrush were used to 3D model each object. Geometric objects like books and electronics were made in Maya to maintain sharp edges and smooth surfaces, while organic objects like clothing were modeled in ZBrush. With the objects modeled, they were then brought into Substance Painter for texturing. Here I recreated the object’s colors, roughness, and metallic properties that were then converted into a set of 2D image maps (base color, normal, ID, and occlusion/roughness/metallic combined) at 2K resolution.
In addition to the software side, certain ritual elements were needed to convey the illusion of a real company visiting a college campus. This was necessary in order to frame the audience’s perspective of the VR experience. Taking inspiration from companies that visit Virginia Tech’s own career fairs, as well as articles online that discuss successful career fair booths, many of these ritual elements included: a company website, booth, banner, employees with t shirts, business cards, and merchandise to give away.
​
These elements were mimicked appropriately, hiring a programmer to code the website and an artist to design the banner. Student volunteers wore matching t shirts with the company logos to signify knowledge and authority. Each volunteer was given fake business cards to hand out in case any participants had genuine interest in the company beyond the afternoon experience. The merchandise was decided to be stickers with the company logo, pens with the company logo, and candy to offer a small variety to those that participate. Each one of these elements was important in establishing a credible atmosphere for an unknown company, in order to solidify the illusion and sell the VR experience.
The Final Product
The Fifth Turning is a fictional genealogy company that visited Virginia Tech on December 12, 2019. During that time, the company advertised its futuristic Time Glimpsing technology: an invention that allows participants to see into past environments using virtual reality. The company mimicked the signs associated with real companies visiting a college campus, in an attempt to blend in and not raise suspicion. The overall purpose of this was to convince students that the company was legitimate in order to influence how they perceived the virtual reality experience provided.
​
The company set up a career fair booth in the Multi-Purpose room of Newman Library and welcomed anyone who was curious to stop by. At the entrance of the room was a table where two students sat, hired to be fictional employees representing The Fifth Turning. They wore Fifth Turning t shirts, handed out free company merchandise (stickers, pens, candy) and gave an introduction about the company to any nearby people interested. A company banner hung from the booth.
The experience was framed as a company visiting Virginia Tech as part of their “career fair tour” across the US, where they stopped at various colleges looking for good applicants to join the team. Students at Virginia Tech could participate in a “glimpsing challenge” set up by the company to help understand what the company does. If a participant did well, it was implied that the company may later contact them with employment opportunities, although no personal information was actually recorded.
​
Students that wanted to participate were given a temporary ID number that represented them. They used this ID to access various parts of the experience, such as the company’s online training and the client feedback report through the company’s fictional website. They were given an iPad to begin the training. The training consisted of several web pages of information, starting with a cheesy introduction video. Afterwards they were shown digital copies of health and safety handouts to read and accept, and some background client information.
Once they had gone through the necessary steps, they were ready for the VR glimpsing challenge. This consisted of using an Oculus Quest to explore a virtual bedroom made in Unreal Engine, that conveyed the story of a fictional college girl in the 1990s. The participants’ goal was to interpret the fictional character’s personality, occupation, mental state, and hobbies based on environmental clues in the room, and then afterwards report their findings to a fictional client. They had only 3 minutes to explore, with the reason being that it takes a lot of power to run this type of simulation technology. This particular time was chosen due to being a popular length for maintaining engaged viewing on Youtube Videos. The virtual room itself was constructed using a combination of Photogrammetry, 3D scanning, retopologizing, and hand modeling objects from the real world.
​
After the VR experience ended, they were given back the iPad and asked to provide their feedback to the client, pertaining to the fictional character’s life. The questions they answered were multiple choice, based on online personality/psychology tests such as Myers-Briggs and Enneagram 9. To avoid any answer bias, the questions offered 5 answer choices based on a “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree” scale. Once the participant answered the questions, they were free to take some of the free merchandise and were told that those who provided good responses may be contacted in the future.
Future Work
The experience from the very beginning was designed to have room for growth. Given the scope of the project paired with limited time constraints, it was important to modularize the design so that it could be improved upon in the future. There are three key advancements that will be focused on for subsequent installments.
​
The first improvement is through sense engagement. Currently the experience involves sight with VR, hearing with headphones, speech while talking to employees, and the occasional physical touch with iPads outside of the testing area. This can be expanded to include more physical sensations and smell as well. For example, having a fan blast the audience while they are preparing to use the VR headset can give them the feeling of a cold sterile laboratory setting.
​
The second improvement is through replay-ability: more variations of the room as well as more unique rooms further down the line. Variations of the room can be achieved with clever coding of item placement to rearrange things procedurally. With more objects and a larger pool of questions from the client, each play-through can be different and tell the story of a unique fictional person.
​
The third improvement is through interact-ability. Two additions that would enhance the experience while allowing the freedom for detective work are: being able to pick up objects, and using an in-game Google app. Being able to pick up any object in the room would not only increase engagement (proven in games like Job Simulator) but would also allow players to see information on parts of objects normally obstructed from view. The in-game Google app, similar to the cell phone in Grand Theft Auto V, would allow players to access a virtual search engine while in VR. This would allow them to dig deeper and obtain extra information about things they are curious about, such as potential reasons why someone might be taking a certain type of medicine.
​
And with that, I’ll leave you with the Fifth Turning’s official error: 404 frog that appears on the company’s website. Thanks for reading.
.png)