‘The Dinner’ provides a virtual reality experience that captures the specific way of media consumption today. Surrounded by numerous screens and devices, swimming in the pool of fragmented multimedia has become such a natural part of our lives. As we move our attentions and eyegaze from screen to screen and device to device, people consume big amount of data.

‘The Dinner’ hopes to provide a reflection through an immersion massive and swift media consumption in the virtual space full of fragmented media pieces.

Tools : Unreal Engine, Houdini, Zbrush, 3ds max, Maya, ffmpeg

The character design was a critical part of this project, as this character has to suitably reflect the form and the movement that as adapted to consume media particles swiftly. Inspired by the sea anemone and flexible tentacles, this unique character was designed, modelled, and textured.

In this project, 100+ videos were played as textures simultaneously. For optimization, 128 videos were rendered into two 4k video textures in checker pattern. ffmpeg program was used to make the mosaic. Corresponding UV coordinates are calculated for the material. Each videos were mapped with u, v position and extracted audio files were played each time the particle was touched by the character.

Houdini was used in order to give natural movements to each of the tentacles as to randomly spread tentacles in specified area just like hairs. The movement of the tentacle as if it’s in the deep ocean was shader programmed with noise, and two branches of the tentacles were rigged in Maya.