Drugmatic

VR Experience | Reality Virtually Hackathon 2019 | MIT Media Lab

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Drugmatic is an educational VR immersive experience to help teens fully understand the effects of drugs. Based on the research of true feelings after taking drugs, teenagers will have a taste of the illusion. During this experience, they will also have chances to make a change and to stop this dramatic wired and fake world. Once a decision is made, there is no going back. Fantastic or horrifying, they have to go through the entire illusion by themselves. By the end of this experience, they will realize the unpredictable result of drugs.

TECHNOLOGY

UE4 / Tiltbrush / Maya / 3Ds Max

Oculus Rift/ Leap Motion

time

2019.01

TEAM

Shimin Gu (Self)

Yunzhu Li / Shuting Jiang / Tianyue Wu / Wentao Pu

role

Technical Director

Award

Drugmatic was in Top 8 ‘Best VR’ Finalist of 105 Projects

INSPIRATION

Drugs have always been a serious problem, especially for the younger generation. Unfortunately, most teenagers started their journey with drugs because of curiosity. So how might we help them get away from drugs with respect to their curiosity and imagination?

What It Does

"Drugmatic" is a virtual reality drug experience focusing on teenagers. Based on the research of true feelings after taking drugs, teenagers will have a taste of the illusion. During this experience, they will also have chances to make a change and to stop this dramatic wired and fake world.

Once a decision is made, there is no going back. Fantastic or horrifying, they have to go through the entire illusion by themselves. By the end of this experience, they will realize the unpredictable result of drugs.

How We Built It

We started this project by exploring the VR drawing tools Tilt Brush and Quill VR in order to draw an illusion of drugs. With this VR experience, we tried to rebuild the scene where this event happened. Players could make their decision by themselves using leap motion.

  • BRAINSTORMING AND PROBLEM DEFINITION

In order to decide the concept, we did a brainstorming session. At first, we thought about several ideas but in the end, we made our minds dive into a drug experience.

  • RESEARCH

For us, it's very difficult to recreate an experience without a real reference. Thus we started our project by doing some research about what illusion would be like after taking drugs. We looked at some articles, videos and movies, decided to create the entire illusion world based on the research.

  • STORYBOARD

It took us a lot of time on the storyboard. We hoped our players could enjoy the fancy part of the illusion but also the scary side. It's very important to let our players know that the illusion of drugs can lead you to a horrible world with the scariest result you may never have a chance to regret.

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  • STYLE AND DESIGN

During our research, we found out that there are a lot of common things of drug illusion such as higher color contrast, fluid and strange world, strange physical contact...These changes remind us of hand-drawing. We decided to use Tilt Brush and Quill to build the world and animations. We also wanted to have some interaction with our players in the illusion world.

  • PROGRAMMING AND EXPORTING ASSETS

This is the time when everything started to become messy. We watched a lot of tutorials, tried a million times how to export our drawings into Unreal Engine, learn how to build animations...The process is bitter but it's also a fun journey.

Normal World
Illusion Stage 1
Illusion Stage 2
Team Working

Challenges We Ran Into

  • Develop a solution to explore the world of drug effects based on research.

  • Integrate Tilt Brush assets into different graphics engines

  • Limit time and resources to create an educational experience that depends on high-quality art pieces.

Accomplishments that We are Proud of

  • Successfully bring Tilt Brush VR painter into the whole creation workflow.

  • Build an incredible illusion world.

Interaction

  • Natural hand movement instead of traditional controllers

  • Create your own illusion by hand drawing

  • Choose your own adventure

  • Incorporate taste and touch into own VR experience

What We Learned

  • Drugs may make you high for a moment, but the cost of the illusion will be extremely high, too.

  • New creation tools

  • Teamwork

  • Time Management is important

  • Some toolkits are not compatible!!

What's Next for Drugmatic

  • Refine the project by adding interactions and visual effects

  • Research more on drug effects

  • Playtest among teenagers

  • Reach out to schools, provide this new way for advisors and teachers.

  • Reach out to researchers and medical centers, provide our project as an assistant to help people get rid of drugs.