At the end of 2019, we had the opportunity to work on a research project, with full creative flexibility on the theme, Astronomy. We were really excited and jumped in on this rare chance. The brief was simple, to create something that would engage and entertain children. However, we didn’t want to just settle on that.
We later found an insight; children are not well acquainted with science and nature in the real world as their understanding of the subject is b<p>ased on what they have mainly learnt in schools.
With that, the idea was born - Discover the Future, would be an interactive 3D animation series set in a Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) environment.
The story featured a futuristic apocalyptic Earth where the environment on Earth is unlivable and a team of astronauts are put on a mission to find life on Mars. We were thrilled with the idea of making interesting astronomy visuals for the animation. We believe that this animation would be fun for kids and inspire them to explore science, technology, engineering and more.
*Image reference from Tom Strong Comic, “Gamora” by Otto Schmidt What will future humans living on Mars be like? What challenges and issues will they face? How will they solve them? These were the questions we asked ourselves before we set off to research and conceptualise the project. We found many resources from scientific entries and official sources such as NASA, in which we ground our ideas on.
Setting the time frame to be in the near-future, this made our concepts feasible and believable. We feel that if we can create an interesting and realistic visualisation of Earth and Mars set in the future, we can spark children’s fascination in science, technology, engineering.
Production was very stressful as we realised that our ideas were very ambitious and were tight on schedule. Proper planning of workflow and production setups were essential to ensure that the production runs smoothly.
To save precious time on character animation, we used Rokoko technology. With their Smartsuit, our small team can quickly act out movements and transfer to the digital characters, reducing overhead which is often incurred in the traditional motion capture process.
Working with Unreal Engine meant that our assets had to be optimised, this was crucial as the same assets can be imported into VR and AR environments. It was evidently important when the AR required running on mobile devices.
With the tight timeline, we were glad to partner with Voodoo Visual on the creation of characters and props, Sidefx Studios for conversion of our animation to VR, and DreamAR for assisting in AR. Needless to say, we are honoured and grateful for the tremendous support, effort and resources by our partners.
After long hours of head scratching and button mashing, we were amazed with the results of our first animation renders and previews. The use of game engine technology and motion capture to create this animation was very impressive.
The project was first unveiled at the Earn & Learn Programme (ELP) event hosted by Nanyang Polytechnic (NYP), and we were very grateful and proud to be invited for the showcase. Our booth was swamp with guests watching the animation, and wanting to try out the AR and VR. We were also greeted by ELP candidates as well as the Minister of Education, Mr Ong Ye Kung. It was such an exhilarating experience to receive such a positive response from the public.
While we breathe a sigh of relief for completing what we set out to create, that is only the first step in our plans for Discover Our Future. We are currently working on expanding on the storyline in a major way, and building further concepts ideas. So stay tuned!
With this project, we hope to bring our audience on a journey with intriguing plotlines, thought-provoking content and impressive visuals through various technology mediums like AR and VR. This design of a participatory and immersive experience can engage a wide spectrum of learners, expand their imagination, evoke their emotions and internalise their learning.
An immersive digital environment with well-curated learning content can pique students’ sense of curiosity, facilitate self-directed learning, deepen language experience and ultimately foster the joy of learning. Notably, children with varying learning needs and abilities can be equitably engaged.
To sum up, working on this project has been a fruitful journey as we are able to gain new knowledge as well as overcoming new challenges and established collaboration with others. Our new discoveries and skills will not go to waste as we will continue utilising them for our future projects.