Exploring the dynamic between an immersed human and observers, Goldfish is a joyful interaction between VR and the reality through the perspective of a goldfish.
Goldfish is created by Kimberly Lin, Roland Arnoldt, Hyiyi Chen, Maxime Gautier and Connor Henley at Reality Virtually Hackathon 2019 at the MIT Media Lab.
In most VR games, we are sitting in a small space alone looking into a boundless world. What if we revert the dynamic, experience VR in a swimming pool, free from the constraint of gravity while we interact with the environment above us? How does it feel like being a small fish looking at the world outside of the fish bowl? With an unconventional approach to VR, we want create a performative VR sculpture that resembles life through the lens of a goldfish.
Two players are involved. Player 1 is put into the perspective of a goldfish via a VR headset and a Leap motion that turns Player 1’s hands into fins. He/she explores the world he/she lives in contained by a fish tank. Player 2 acts as a cat holding a cat paw with tracker attached. He/she uses his/her paw to attack Player 1 where his/her claw will appear in Player 1’s point of view.
Goldfish is built with Unity, Wwise, Leap Motion, HTC Vive and a physical cat paw made out of recycling materials we found at MIT’s junkyard.
Working with a relatively big team on a same project is rather challenging. We had a lot of conflicts and merging issues with GitHub. We also weren’t able to scale the environment correctly in time due to limited VR headsets we have. Initially, we wanted to also add another interaction of an additional player fishing the goldfish with a marshmallow but we ran out of time.
We have successfully completed our cat interaction with the goldfish as a proof of concept but more importantly, we are really happy that we found a team of talents who are passionate about the same topic.
We would like to experiment how the sensations of our project can be enhanced by submerging in a swimming pool. We are in conversation with a fellow hacker we met during the Hackathon, Pierre Friquet, who have created an underwater VR headset. We also envision Goldfish to be an interactive installation at an aquarium or a science museum hence we plan to reach out to venues to show our piece. We are also interested in how haptics can improve motor functions and hand accuracy of stroke and parkinson's patients and would like to work with institutions to extend our research.