VR: Mini Me

As we are finishing up our first VR project "In My Room," we are asked to experience our rooms in a different perspective. For this assignment, we could have scaled up the room but I decided to scale down the player to a tenth of the original size 10:1.

Since I kept everything the same and technically scaled down myself, everything in the classroom stayed the same as far as alignment goes. I did notice however that some of the objects weren't in high resolution anymore. I noticed this mostly on the piano keys which I couldn't really get a good photo of. Looking at the space from afar, it all looked the same, I only really noticed the scale change from the ground perspective.

In general, I thought this perspective was quite interesting, it makes me think of Toys Story because it's as if I'm a little toy wandering the room. Because the way we currently navigate the room is a kind of point and shoot style where we just face a direction and just go towards it, it didn't really feel like I was little. If I, as the player, had to walk the space rather that fly across it, I think navigating the room would be substantially different. I did notice that it took a bit longer to get from one side of the room to the other, which makes sense because as I scaled my player down, the rate of my movement would match the scale of my player.

I think that this kind of manipulation-either scaling up or down a space-could be useful for a variety of applications. For example, exploring the human body, or in general exploring the insides of something that we as humans can't quite access because of our larger size. And scaling things down could be applied for looking at the bigger picture of the things around us, like in designing a city or a building, and then scaling back up to see how it would feel in our perspective. And of course, this kind of capability would be interesting to incorporate into video games, possibly as a game mechanic like the shrinking ability in Rayman: Origins.