The Reef

Check out the official website of The Reef here

Intro

The Reef is an exhibit that was showcased at Imagine RIT on April 27th, 2019. It set out to educate audiences about plastic pollution and encourage people to become environmentally conscious citizens through social media and technology. I acted as the Lead Engineer of the main exhibit, a double-widescreen Unity experience played using smartphones as game controllers. I created core gameplay systems including a WebSocket based network layer enabling communication between smartphones and the game instance and several graphical effects.

Pitching the Project

Initially our 6 member team was only given a simple two word prompt: "do good." Plastic pollution was a relevant issue we all quickly agreed was worth exploring. Knowing that families with young children and potential RIT students were the two biggest groups of people at Imagine RIT, we set out to create a simple to understand yet technologically novel exhibit in the span around 5 months.

The use a double widescreen projection display was inspired by previous Imagine RIT exhibit THARSIS. THARSIS was a static exhibit however, and we wanted to one up it and with something more interactive. The idea of pulling a piece of trash off the main projector display and onto a phone was an idea I brainstormed that was very inspiring to me. The rest of the team felt this idea might be too ambitious but I created a quick proof of concept that successfully got the rest of the team on board.

Empowering Designers through Tools

In order to empower our three designers to work on the game (none of who had any prior experience with Unity), I created several to allow them to edit and create graphical effects.

This included a "noise beam" shader, that uses two layers of procedurally generated noise to allow our designers to create effects such as beams of light, turbulence, and more.

Another important effect and tool I created was an animated fish shader, that allowed a single image of a fish to be procedurally animated.

In the final game these were used in a particle system allowing hundreds of fish to be rendered on screen at once.

Phone to Screen Interaction

The smartphones controlled the main game through a WebSocket based JavaScript app. The phones sent their current gyroscope/orientation to a Socket server hosted on Heroku, which then in turn sent this information to the main game. Orientation information was sent at around 20hz to reduce network congestion, with interpolation used displayed cursors to ensure movement at a smooth 60 frames per second.