Stranger Things in a Stranger Reality
(Hey copyright peeps, I don’t own any of the rights to this show.)
I really don’t think virtual reality should be used for entertainment as much as it is. Video games, porn, etc. Just stop.
That being said, I’m a huge fan of Stranger Things and wanted to make this anyway.
It’s pretty simple — the iconic scene where Joyce Byers is frantically speaking to a wall covered in letters in hopes of communicating with her lost boy. The lights are flickering, she’s screaming bloody murder (which to be honest, I’m surprised she can still do given her 6 pack-a-day habit), a jam-covered monster is about to emerge from the cracks, and everything is getting real weird, real fast.
My creation is shown in the video below. I had my friend walk around in the environment while I controlled the Demogorgon. You can observe the moment when I startled her.
It’s been fun getting back into Unity. Unity offers a lot of complex lighting features that are very intuitive to use whenever you’re creating a certain ambience, and the full documentation is available on their website. I spent a while trying to capture the faint orange glow of the Byer House with a directional light and creating the different colors of the string lights using point lights. You can achieve extremely realistic lighting by adding baked lighting, realtime lighting, and emissive materials to your scene.
The concept that I wanted to experiment with was physical immersion into a story world. Humans become obsessive over a show for a reason — they’re drawn into each character’s narrative and feel emotionally connected to the storyline. A successful show is able to mentally immerse you. But what if the media physically immersed you as well?
Would that be effective? Would it enhance your reactions to the story, and if so, do we even want to achieve that?
When you press play, the lights in my scene begin flickering and the Stranger Things music starts playing. You walk around nervously. Something might fall from the ceiling. A monster could come clawing out of the wallpaper. You don’t know, and that’s the fascinating part. You’ve watched the plot unfold through Netflix, you’ve seen the absolute chaos that occurs in this very room, and you have all of these pre-formed ideas of situations that could happen if you keep standing there doing nothing. But you also know that you’re in a perfectly safe room wearing a VR headset and that nothing you currently perceive is your reality (the reality you were in 5 minutes ago, that is).
It’s another level of immersion. You have full autonomy in virtual reality, which means that the director can’t explicitly present specific details or shots for you to focus on like he or she would in a movie or show. I’d argue that an individual who visits my Stranger Things scene in virtual reality would remember the events as an addition to their personal collection of experiences, another room that they’d visited at some point in their life, because of the mental and physical interactions you have with the scene. If you only watched the show, you’d remember your deep love for the show and your emotions associated with the characters, but you would not reminisce about being in that room trying to calm Joyce Byers down.
So now that we have this different and potentially more powerful form of immersion, what stories can we represent through this medium?
I leave you with this as you contemplate that question:
(A huge thank you to the talented souls who provide free models and textures on the Unity Assets store, I only creatively rearranged them — Monster 3 by 3DMaesen, Free Furniture Set by Lef, Minimalist Christmas by Broken Ellipse, Modern Sofa by Rendwork Studio, PBR Armchair by Next Level 3D, Cardboard Boxes Pack by Poly Workshop, and Wooden Floor Pack by Mikelarg)
