Submergency

The environment

Most of the rocks are free downloaded 3D models but with different applied textures and normal maps. LODs are also added to all rocks. They are all saved as prefabs and placed out in different locations in the environment. Some rocks and corals (including the materials) are however modeled by us, and so is the kelp that we have used to decorate the environment. The kelp was also animated through weight painting and rigging.

To create the sand and mountains, terrain tools have been used and colored with different diffuse textures and normal maps. The terrain has also been painted to be lowered and raised in different spots to bring the terrain more to life. The development process for the sand and mountains were harder than expected as everything in the terrain is connected. Therefore, if you made one little change to one small part of the terrain, everything had to be changed. It was also not decided on exactly how we wanted the terrain so there were lots of tries and failures.

The fish are six different free downloaded 3D models with bone structure. Rigidbody, box collider, animation, rig builder, LODs and a FishMovement script that controls how the fish will move around has been applied to every fish prefab. Another script then spawns the fish in the environment. The fish started out as particle systems with sprites. This actually worked surprisingly well as a fish representation when swimming along the timeline and was a good optimization strategy. However, there were also a number of issues with this solution. As sprites are always facing the camera in the same direction, the fish appeared to be swimming backwards if looking at the fish from the back and did not cast any shadows. We thought it was important to therefore turn them into 3D models instead.

We started out by looking for free 3D Unity assets to add plastic trash to our environment, but this proved somewhat hard to come by. Therefore some of the objects had to be modeled in Blender, and then imported into Unity. One challenge with this part of the environment was that the amount of objects needed to convey the reality of how plastic pollution of the oceans has increased over the decades posed serious processing issues. To solve this, LODs had to be applied, and some parts of the environment where the user cannot go was decorated with static meshes, instead of interactable objects. Another challenge we faced regarded importing materials created in Blender, because Unity cannot read the entire node maps used in Blender to create materials. Thus, the materials we wanted to import had to be converted to a form suitable for Unity.

Saga

Created the sand and mountains, and worked on the fish.

Akshata

Modeled the kelp, the rocks, and a few different corals. Animated the kelp.

Sofia

Modeled some plastic objects and their materials. Responsible for placing plastic objects in the environment according to actual data on how the amount of plastic in our oceans has increased over the decades.

Swimming experience

In this vibrant underwater environment, we've created a lifelike swimming experience for players through numerous bold attempts. We have employed the Oculus SDK to implement the swimming interaction, aiming to allow players to interact naturally with the game while enjoying the most realistic swimming sensation possible.

During the development process, we used two different control methods: controllers and hand tracking. Although these two methods have subtle differences in implementation, they mainly utilize the Oculus SDK to obtain the hand's velocity. Based on the velocity's direction and magnitude, it's then translated into a force that propels the player forward.

Throughout this process, we encountered a series of challenges and obstacles. How do we simulate the most realistic swimming experience while allowing users to interact naturally? The Oculus SDK does provide a method to determine hand velocity, but its accuracy and latency can affect the quality of the interaction. Even minor discrepancies can be magnified, leading to player confusion or dissatisfaction. Swimming interaction is a dynamic and continuous process, introducing complications during testing as it’s not straightforward to identify issues just by setting breakpoints. In the end, we had to resort to continuously printing out key parameters to troubleshoot the problems.

It is crucial to delve into the SDK's source code during development. We cannot blindly use the methods encapsulated in the SDK without careful evaluation, as these methods might come with their own set of problems. In the process of developing a controller-less swimming interaction, our over-reliance on the Oculus SDK's hand velocity acquisition function became a glaring issue. We used this function as the foundation for our swimming interaction and based our algorithms on it. This decision subsequently led to numerous bugs and exhaustive debugging sessions. After several days of investigation, we discovered inherent issues with the method provided by Oculus, forcing us to reevaluate and discard a significant portion of our previous work. By rewriting Oculus's method, we finally solved the issue of acquiring hand velocity.

Jacky

Focused mainly on the swimming mechanics using Controllers.

Shiqi

Worked on both the swimming mechanics using controllers, and the hand tracking interaction.

Water and post-processing

To create the underwater environment, several methods were used. Different post-processing effects were implemented: Split toning with brown shadows and blue highlights; Bloom with a tint of blue; Chromatic aberration; Lens distortion; A dark blue vignette. A blue linear fog was also applied. To add more life to the water, bubble particle systems were placed throughout the ocean floor, decreasing along the timeline. Light beams were created, using a particle system with stretched additive-blended particles.

For the surface, we used the built-in ShaderGraph in the URP render-pipeline.

There are quite many assets for creating realistic-looking underwater environments, but not many for free. Since we did not want this project to have any paid assets, we had to create most of the water from scratch, which was time-consuming and required a good deal of Unity experience.

There was also the issue that the water looked quite different in the Oculus Quest 2 (i.e., blurrier) than on a computer screen, so we had to go back and remove the initially applied Depth of Field effect (Gaussian blur), and also take away the Color Adjustments we used in our first drafts. A learning from this process is that finding information about how to create advanced graphics, like underwater environments, can be rather complex and cumbersome, and might require a lot of prior knowledge.

Linnéa

Worked with the post-processing, created bubbles, and light beams.

Jacky

Worked on the ocean surface.

Audio

We created our own Submergency soundtrack and sound effects using Logic Pro. The soundtrack is played as background audio throughout the whole experience. We have sound effects for the swimming motion, i.e., a sound that is triggered when initiating a swim stroke, and a longer audio tail is audible as long as the user moves.

Linnéa

Created the soundtrack and sound effects, and worked with audio interaction.

Shiqi

Worked with audio interaction.

Swimming Tutorial

In the beginning of the process we used written instructions to let users know how to move, but we soon realised that communicating this novel interaction via text wasn't ideal. Therefore, we decided to create a swimming tutorial. This included checkpoints, to let the user know what actions are possible (such as swimming in any direction or grabbing water bottles). Using the Recorder Plugin, controller and hand tracking animations were recorded, so that the users could see for themselves how to hold the controllers or move their hands.

Jacky

Responsible for creating the tutorial scene and a smooth scene transition.