VR news

Offshore Wind Turbine VR news

June, 2018 - Dec, 2018, half year VR development project

Environment | Sustainable Energy | Offshore Wind Turbine | VR News | HTC Vive

Introduction

This project is a VR news game talking about offshore wind turbines, a trendy topic in Taiwan. We hoped to use VR to explore the whole issue's pros and cons from a first-person perspective. Most people think that green energy is excellent. However, they don't see the negative impact of building offshore wind turbines on fishery, environment, and engineering.


At last, we hosted an exhibition in Huashan Creative Park, and there were almost 400 people to experience our project within three days reported on National News.

My Role

As a VR developer in this project, I cooperate with instructors, other VR developers, reporters in the development process.


    Main Tasks
  • Simulated an interactive gameplay on the engineering ship using HTC Vive controller
  • Built wind turbine simulators with electric fans and Arduino
  • Facilitated an exhibition visiting by almost 400 people in 3 days and got positive feedback

    • Tools

    Unity

    HTC Vive

    Arduino

    Teammates

    The Graduate Institute of Journalism, National Taiwan University (NTU)

    See the whole list

    Deliverable Results

    Wind Turbine VR News

    3-Day Exhibition

    VR Development Process

    VR News Flow Ideation

    Three components make up our VR interactive news.

    The first part lets people observe the fishermen's daily lives as well as learn their views on how they will be affected by the installation of wind turbines.

    The second part involves going directly to the ship to see how the engineering process will work and being one member of it.

    We will lastly dive into the water while keeping an eye on the influence that the Chinese white dolphin will have, as an endangered species.

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    Pile Driver Simulation

    To create the foundation of the offshore wind turbines, we need to drive piles into the ground.

    In the VR development process, I was responsible for simulating the pile driver on the engineering ship. I needed to connect the pile driver's controllers with HTC Vive controllers. Besides, I also acted the physical characteristics and animations of the whole process.

    Result

    Promotional Video

    Exhibition

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    Project Reflection

    There is a lot of research that shows VR news can create a more immersive and profound impact on people compared to 2D news. It was an interesting experiment to transform 2D news into VR news.

    Several users have reported that they have changed their views after experiencing the game because they received a visual of how harmful offshore wind-turbine engineering is to Chinese white dolphins, which are deprived of their right to live in peace.

    As a result of the exhibition for VR news, I concluded that VR was an effective medium for delivering knowledge and influencing audiences.