Higher, Faster, And Stronger
Unity-based VR game art by Hua Yang, 2022
Tools: Unity, Google Cardboard, Trino, Meshlab, DaVinci, Pr
About the documentary：Under the Surface：Zhang Supeng is in the stage of entering junior high school. His home is his father's sex shop. His father had a double life. He is the owner of a sex shop and a volunteer group leader in the Zhuhai City. In 2002, the peaceful life of the Zhang family was broken by a quarrel between son and father. Zhang Supeng learned that he was not his father's biological son.With these complicated and challenging things, he still feels to be loved by his father. Thus, he gradually gains a new understanding of his life and his relationship with his father.
Different media are like mirrors of other materials, giving us different perspectives to understand reality. Therefore, I tried to sort out the stories of Zhang's family in various disciplines and media. In this work, I tried to use VR to reproduce the conflicts in life. Like Vertov's theory about Kino-Eye, I think VR can also capture the truth that a human eye usually can't see.
Shanghai is one of the most booming cities in China. As there is a port along the sea, it is also the earliest city in China to open up foreign trade and contact West- ern culture. I placed Mr.Zhang's store in the most popular and beautiful place on the Bund; to some degree, Mr. Zhang's shop is the epitome of countless low-in- come families in China. And there are many such marginalized groups in China under the capitalization blooming foamy surface.
1. Shanghai Bund, by Greg Zaal. The Hdri material used in this project was downloaded from https://polyhaven.com/a/shanghai_bund under the Creative Commons license
2. I used a standard double-sided shader created by Naoji Taniguchi, https://gist.github.com/naojitaniguchi/62ccf37c8 01ea55517b7 Thanks to Naoji Taniguchi.
It took me a day to scan the store. I used the scanning software called Trino, which is very friendly and fast. There were 42 models scanned in total. I tried to use the software MeshLab to crop all scanned original models, hoping to get as clean and perfect as possible.
I made a 3D character model by using the Character Creator soft- ware AI modeling function to imitate the father look in the movie.
I integrated all my design elements to develop an interactive VR game in Unity. Users can move around and play chess.
The overlap between the VR interface and the documentary content presents the boundary between the virtual and the real, allowing the audience to more immersively experience the child's living environment and the spatial constraints.
About the title, "Higher, Faster, And Stronger"：2008 was a turning point for Mr. Zhang and his son. That year, China hosted the Olympic Games, and the streets and alleys were covered with slogans "Higher, Faster and Stronger."Mr. Zhang's' restaurant shuttered down. He divorced, adopted Zhang Supeng, and moved to another city. The most highlighted year in China was the most challeng- ing year for this little family.
