Scitories
The Snowpore story takes the audience to the melting world of a polar bear — a bright day of storytelling that turns down to a place of silence.
24,000 people visited Scitories during a three-day virtual exhibition — exploring Snowpore's melting world at their own pace.
Scitories — "Almost before we knew it, we had left the ground."
Snowpore — the melting world hosted by Poba, the polar bear.
Scitories is a platform to share science-related stories. These experiences use elements of storytelling to communicate the adverse effect of climate change. The Snowpore story takes the audience to the melting world of a polar bear, a bright day of storytelling that turns down to a place of silence. Followed by a brief set of reading that the audience can then take away with them.
Knowing that the world that they have entered is an abstract representation of somewhere real, the audience will be able to navigate an abstract immersive world of Snowpore in the melting snow hosted by a polar bear named Poba, with virtual web and spatial sound. The audience can navigate the Snowpore world while the instructor briefly narrates them the story — aiming to give the agency to the audience to shape their own journey.
Literature research
The detailed writing on the research findings can be found on my blog here.
- Artistic visualization of scientific processes
- Attention economy through information hierarchy
- Learning through immersive adventure
- New media exploration — 3D visualization in science
Ethics
For the evaluation of the platform and the story, I reached out to several peers and officially emailed them with the context of using their feedback, and received consent from them to use it.
Constraint
The real life simulations need a lot of processing power, which is beyond the scope of the project.
Medium
An interactive VR experience on the web, followed by an optional reading via PDF download. The choice of adding another layer of medium through a reading list was made to consider the prevention of switching the attention of the audience as well. While the audience is in the virtual world they will be able to navigate through these abstract experiences and further go through more information — this also helps repetition.
Visual Identity
Mindmap
Moodboard
Audience journey
The journey of the audience starts at the Scitories webpage. The journey mapping tool was used to define several stages of the audience navigating through the stories.
Information roadmap
This tool was used to brainstorm all the information the audience will receive through each step of the journey, and the information was further chunked to make sure it is cognitively compatible for the audience.
Wireframing
The wireframe was made on InVision Freehand — an easy way to digitally sketch the pages of the audience's journey, and a convenient tool to invite anyone for feedback.
Scitories — the website prototype
This is a platform where the audience can come scroll around to see interesting glimpses of stories and the conversations that follow.
The prototype was made on InVision as well — clickable, and it helped in the initial visualisation of the website.
Snowpore: Story of a melting home
The audience enter an immersive WebGL story — navigating Snowpore's melting world at their own pace.
Visit Snowpore↗
Inspiration
In front of the Tate Modern, I saw the 'Ice Watch' — melting icebergs in space so close to humans that they could see and touch. It was a powerful message on climate change by Olafur Eliasson, but after the ice melted, people got back to everyday life like a passer by. The Ice story came to my mind because I wanted to take the audience to the melting world of a polar bear, a bright day of storytelling that turns down to a place of silence — followed by a brief set of reading that the audience can then take away with them to read.
Level design
I completed the course with level designer Adam Crespi. The space is designed keeping in mind that the audience gets attention resources to explore around, and there are elements in the space scattered for free navigation.
3D modelling
I was lucky to be able to book the VR room at White City, where I made the polar bear named Poba in virtual reality, using the app Gravity Sketch.
Sound
The sound was recorded at home and edited on Reaper. I have also used a special sound effect to enhance the perception of a 3-dimensionality of the space through sound. In this particular story I have placed a doppler effect on the polar bear as its narration faints with distance.
User Experience
The testing phase was conducted on Zoom, and I shared the GitHub link with several friends and collected their feedback on it. One major outcome of this process was the interactive guide button that can help anyone who is not able to navigate in the space.
Follow the link to experience the website: