In My Room

Janelle Cueto
Sep 25, 2017
4 min read

Download the classroom and view all of the assets here:

In My Room is a model of my dream office space created off the bases of our UIC EVL classroom. We were asked to take a previously designed scaled model of the classroom, as well as its surrounding lab spaces and the EVL lab, and decorate it to our liking, without destroying any walls and breaking the dimensions. This application is built off of an existing application which already had player/camera movements integrated into it. For the build included in the link above, there is an option for either downloading the "normal" version which controls the player using the VIVE Controllers or downloading the keyboard version which uses keyboard and mouse to move about the space.

My take on this project was to design the space to my liking, and my inspiration for this design was that of a music bar. I wanted to create a low-lit relaxing spot with a space for live music as well as a bar in the back for refreshments. I took inspiration from jazz bar scenes I've seen in movies and other video games, I actually watched "La La Land" recently and I think that may have been why I wanted my office space to be a jazz bar. My biggest inspiration actually came from a photo I found off of searching "bar scene" in Google (clicking on the photo below will direct you to the page I got it from). And as you can see, the back wall of the bar is a brick wall texture I found from Google, and I based the model of the bar shelves, counter, and light rail off of the ones in the picture which I will follow up in more detail below.

In this space, you can "walk" around and experience how the sound changes about the room-as you get further from the stage, the music gets softer and if you are on the stage, you hear fire crackling from the SAGE screens which imitate a big fireplace. There are also many little objects placed around the space such as a cup of fries and a laptop which the user can pick up and throw around. The piano also plays a song when you touch its keys.

A note on the VIVE Experience

When I first tested my room using the VIVE, I was aiming to make sure that the scale remained the same (human scale). As I was editing my space, I kept the original desk and chair included in the original class project as reference, especially for height. But I realized that I seemed to have made everything a bit too tall the first time. All of the models I used for the project were originally much much MUCH larger than the EVL space, and I had trouble resizing the objects to keep consistent with the scale. I pretty much guessed the size of all the items, and made sure that they looked proportionate in relation to each other. When I tested, there were really only a few things that looked out of whack, one being the very first item you see which is the standing mic on the stage. I am also quite short, and the VIVE does take height into consideration.

Moving around the space is pretty interesting. I personally like moving using the wand-based navigation. To me, it's much smoother and I just don't like the snappy feel of teleporting from place to place. Though flying around the room can get a bit disorienting, I felt that it was also a more natural way of moving around, other than physically walking around of course. I do wish I had focused some of my time on this player movement role. In previous games I've done, the player would be bounded to the floor and could only walk on surfaces rather than being able to fly around. I think that if this were the case, then using the wands might be easier too because you are grounded and it might feel less disorienting than flying around the room.

MODEL ASSETS

Here I will list all of the sources I used for this project. All of the items I used in this project are completely free(though you may need to create a free account in order to download the ones from TurboSquid). Clicking the images will lead you to the link in which they can be downloaded from. You can also view and download all of them here.