The title is inspired by the movie, “Honey, I Blew Up the Kid” which was an adventure/comedy movie which was released in 1992. Writing this article made me reminisce about another a movie I saw as a kid called, “The Borrowers”, which released in 1997. This movie really does justice to how we see the world from the perspective of tiny 4-inch people. The movie is about how these tiny people living amongst us giant human beings and their plan to take down an evil real estate developer who wants to destroy their homes. Thanks to the technology you can achieve this duplicating this experience in VR.
It was very interesting being tiny in a space that you designed. But in reality the world has been made bigger. Hence I scaled up a space that was originally designed to be a scene in a normal 3 meter x 3 meter room for a Unity game using VRTK to a 10 meter x 10 meter space. It is a truly amazing experience having yourself live in your everyday world as a small being. In my opinion it is humbling and at the end of it I was left feeling at ease as I realized how insignificant I am in such a vast space. A feeling similar to the one I get after going to the planetarium. But anyway back to the project.
On scaling all the object tenfold we start noticing the flaws in designing that people hardly notice. For example imagine you have a small stain on your shirt and ignore it thinking no one will take notice of it. On scaling it up you can see the really ugly patch and it can be very putting off. This is the same case and maybe even more repellant in VR. The models in the virtual world are hand crafted and a small modeling flaw can immediately break the player out of the immersive state he is in. We definitely do not want that!
This is not the only flaw scaling models up. A very much known issue is that of textures becoming pixelated on scaling up being it on any screen. VR isn’t any different, only issue being that you live in that world for the time period the headset stays on! As you guys can see it can be a very serious issue. Also spaces where materials overlap can cause rendering issues in real time that constantly flicker and is painful to watch. These also get amplified on enlarging the space. It is similar to the real world in which no one wants to study under a flickering a light. This can cause serious health issues like, eye strain, headaches and, in some cases, nausea.
The audio given to each of the scenes were carefully thought out to not give the user a bad experience except the sound effects for the ingredients which I think could have been different. The sound effects were limited and nice to use. The Smokey Os cereal box had a realistic smoking sound effect. The placemat had two sound effects one for bringing up the ingredients and a whistle kind of sound to indicate of the Kettle whistling and the Mad Hats cereal box is that of crunching cereals. All these sound effects are aptly given to have a real life feel for the models.
I have a question, can an ant lift a wooden table? The answer is yes! It can, in VR. This is yet another issue that we face on scaling things. The originally interactable objects, which are much bigger than you are, can still be lifted with the controllers in VR. Superhero enthusiasts will enjoy this.
Ground plane scaling can be hard sometimes and we can also go through the floor, in which case you will be able to see how it is from inside objects and this will show you how the objects are modeled from the inside, which can make the player lose interest.
In my project I have a monster that attacks you and sends you down to the depths of the void. The monster is already designed to be bigger than you. Hence when the world is made bigger you are left thinking that am I being ignored by this monster. Or it can be really horrific depending on where you stand in the scene. There is also another girl zombie that crawls towards you, which was really scary as you are tiny!
When you look at the mountains and try to walking to them. But it will take ages to get there, although it feels like it is close by. In another scene you can experience being on a table top with the rest of the room scaled up. Even though we feel like we are walking we cannot reach the end of the table fast.
In conclusion, while making small models that requires intricate detail and scaling up to learn more about the model always check for the above mentioned points. Lesson learnt!