The Norman Rockwell Museum and the Academy of Art University partnered up to create an immersive virtual reality experience showcasing Rockwell's Four Freedoms. Focused on Rockwell's four paintings, Freedom from Want, Freedom from Fear, Freedom of Speech, and Freedom of Worship, users are able to "enter" each painting and interact with several objects inside each of the paintings. Instead of reading about how life was like during that time period, users get to experience it themselves and be immersed in that kind of environment.
This VR exhibit is set to go on tour starting June 2018 with exhibitions in New York, Detroit, Houston, Washington D.C., and ending up in Normandy, France on June 6, 2019 for the 75th anniversary of D-Day.
This VR project is a collaborative work of more than 25 students with the help of four instructors. The students belong to the following schools: School of Animation & Visual Effects, School of Illustration, School of Music Production & Sound Design for Visual Media, School of Game Development, and School of Web Design & New Media.
Since I belong to the School of Web Design & New Media, I was in charge of working on the interaction design, UX/UI design, and scripting. When I joined this project, the interaction design and UX/UI design had to be redone because some of the scripts were not compatible with several game objects. Some scripts also needed editing along the way because of Unity's ever changing updates to their software.
Our main audience were people in their 40s and older, or those who are familiar with Rockwell's paintings. It was a bit of a challenge in the UX/UI part since people would heavily rely on the audio or visual cues within the VR experience. We always had to keep in mind that the people who might use this application aren't very familiar with virtual reality and what it does. To solve this issue, we decided to add visual cues to objects that they can interact with.
When I joined this project, most of the scripts were already made, but non-functional because of incompatibility issues. The previous people who worked on the script created everything, but did not test it on the actual project. One of the tasks that I had to do was to debug most of the scripts and make sure that no errors would pop-up during testing. Some scripts were fully non-functional so me and my fellow scripters had to rewrite most of them.
Another thing I was tasked to do was to find bugs within the project and try to recreate them. Recreating the bugs helped me understand what the problem was and how to fix it. In my opinion, looking for bugs and trying to recreate them was the most challenging among all the tasks that I was assigned to.
If you want to experience Norman Rockwell's Four Freedoms in VR, go to the Norman Rockwell Museum website to see where the current exhibit is located.