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Good Girl


ROLE        Director, Lead Engineer
DATE        2017 - 2018
EXHIBIT   SPRING/BREAK Art Show x FEMMEBIT, Oculus Next Gen, Ottawa Animation Festival
AWARD    Jaunt VR Experimental Grant


A mixed reality art installation where the artist’s body has mysteriously froze.

Plug in to the artist’s subconscious to diagnose the cause.

Enter Good Girl Labs where my body lies frozen. Visitors are guided by a lab technician to use VR to study my subconscious. Inside resides a slew of neural nodes inhabited by performance art personas representing the different social, political, and cultural demands and desires of American't life.

The Challenge

User experience wise, the immersion could not be broken for tutorialization. Everything was diagetic from the moment the guest even sees a flyer for the experience. To support this, the controls were very intuitive one-button interactions. I also pulled from theme parks embedding safety information within the world’s lore. Content wise, each personna’s performance had to be able to be hopped in and out of. I pulled from durational performance art to support this play-style. 

Tech wise, our production pipeline had to combine composited stereoscopic live action with 3D environments. However, the final realtime rendering needed to feel spatially like a subconscious. To support this, I only let each personna take up a limited of the full 360 and maintained the subsconscious brain background audio and visual ambience whenever you looked away from the active personna. Breaking the laws of physics in this way supported the subconscious logic and made the virtual world feel more vast and alive than it really was.

User Flow
  1. Guests are welcomed to the laboratory by a live technician who addresses each one as an acclaimed doctor who may have insight into Tonia’s frozen condition.
  2. Guests can catch up to the lore of the universe by engaging with the live technician and/or watching the projected news clipping and testimonials explaining the dilemma.
  3. One by one, guests can enter the “Brainwave VR” headset to connect to Tonia’s subconscious and explore the looping diorama’s that make up their internal state.
  4. To dive deeper, a laptop has an “Though Highway” app that processes and reveals the inner thoughts connecting any two nodes of Tonia’s subconscious.
  5. Finally, guests can fill out and submit a diagnosis on their way out.


LABORATORY INSTALL 

Clinically sleek, the labs have preserved Tonia's body and prepared a means of entering Tonia's brain, and sorting through her thoughts. A live technician guides you through your research. Calling themselves believers, their kink inspired aesthetic and protocol assures a well-meaning intrusion.




BRAINWAVE VR

Within the subconscious are characters who, though figments of imagination, metonymically represent facets of the artist's mind state within a state of the nation.





TRANSMEDIA EXPERIENCE

The alternate reality of Good Girl includes news stories of Tonia's disappearance, Good Girl Labs infomercials, an interactive Thought Log for visitors to access transcribed thoughts caught running in the brain, and diagnostic reports vistors fill out and submit for the study!






Ask me about: Stereoscopic Compositing, Interactive Soundscape, Transmedia Immersive Design, Lifecasting Prosthetics.