I am thinking of two main ideas. I will try to document both, but there’s one I like the most and would be even more meaningful to me. This idea came by having a conversation with my partner about how I was struggling on actually coming up with any idea that I liked. It was really magical that communicating my thoughts to her resulted in ideas flowing up from both of us until I was able to come up with a crazy but, maybe, logical one. I wonder if this idea would be too hard to create from the Unity side. However, I am watching the tutorial and videos trying to learn the most I can to make this real.
The concept of my idea is to have us, as a starting point, in a reflection moment and portraying the frustration of getting a ‘good’ idea. In this idea, the objective is to have the user interact with the scope/perspective of the piece to prove/question the significance of that moment in the universe. The user would be able to increase/decrease the value of a knob and, in each step, changing the perspective farer away from the moment to the cosmos. First getting out the cafeteria to a street, then to a city of New York from above, later to the US, the planet earth, our solar system, our Milky Way Galaxy, the galaxy cluster where we come from and then back to the idea inside the cafeteria as a loop. The visual movement would be like zooming in or out the place. I am still a little unsure on how to achieve this but I will try to use the control of scale and physics to give a nice animation to the rest of things entering the box, like if each world is embedded to each other. Sometimes we can feel overwhelmed by life and responsibilities. However, we can rest and find peace in the fact that our worries are just a tiny moment of stress in a universe where everything else works perfectly as a well designed clock. And if something is wrong in our life, we can think that there are other miraculous things in the larger scope of the universe to be thankful for. This idea came in a moment of introspection and an overwhelmed feeling of lack of creativity.
First, I’ll start by sketching some of my ideas to paper. The idea is to have us sitting on a cafeteria having dessert and me having this overwhelming thoughts regarding coming up with an idea. As the user turns the SCOPE knob, we see us from the outside of the cafeteria. Followed by portraying the cafeteria from the street level within the city of NY. As we go further, we see Manhattan located on a map, the continent and suddenly we go to outer space to see the earth.
Moreover, we get farther away to the solar system, then the Milky Way, the galaxy cluster where our Milky Way is and then more Galaxy Clusters. The loop would happen to transition from those clusters all the way to the beginning of this idea.
After this, I used runway to create some still images to better portray this idea. I tried to use it to transition from one to another. I figured that using credits was the best way to achieve this. I was not able to get all the runway transitions but this is the overall idea of how it would look like until the solar system image. In the video there’s also a mockup of a similar animation style compared to the one in my head.
https://vimeo.com/1135505868?fl=ip&fe=ec
As for interactivity with the user. I am inspired in big knobs like this one to be the tool for the user to control the level of scope. It may seem like a very simple idea, but maybe this would be enough due to the visual elements and movements that I would have to create on Unity? I believe that a complete version of this would have also other control/controllers that interact with each level of scope in some way. If I have enough time I would look to implement these. I am thinking in something that moves the waiter or instantiates cars in the street, changes the angle of the solar system or make the Milky Way or the Earth spin.
search for powers of ten video