Meditation Station
Lose yourself in a peaceful VR forest as you pet the local wildlife, play a harp made of vines, and take in the sights and sounds of the riverside.
About the Project
Meditation Station is a VR experience created by a team of Bradley University students for FUSE, Bradley’s annual event which showcases projects created by the interactive media department. This project was developed with Unity and built on the Meta Quest 2 headset. The official FUSE website page for Mediation Station can be found here. Meditation Station also contains a few plants made in Theia, another exhibit that was shown at FUSE. These are the pink trees you can see in the demo video.
Meditation Station was presented at FUSE 2022 and won the Best Impression award, presented at FUSE by Float and The Iona Group.
What I did
My role in the development team of Meditation Station involved work on the environment in Unity, including sculpting the ground, placing many of the environmental set pieces such as flowers and rocks, and creating some vfx such as the waterfall particle effects, the river, and the lantern glow.
What I did
I placed many of the assets into the world, including the floating islands seen at the end of the experience as well as the foliage, trees, rocks and other forest debris arrayed around the world.
I arranged these environmental assets in a way that is visually pleasing and assistive to the game design. For example, colorful flowers surround important or interactive objects, like the harp pictured to the right. The player’s eye is drawn to the flowers, which leads them to interact with the object.
Koi pond shader
First screenshot with all the trees placed into the world
Challenges
I was a Freshman when I joined this project, so I did not have much knowledge going in. As such, most of the tasks I took on were new to me – I had never used Unity’s terrain tool or shader graph system before, and the whole team was new to VR development. In order to navigate these challenges, the team learned together and shared knowledge between cohorts and disciplines – communication was key to making the project work. This project was a tremendous learning opportunity for me, and I have used the skills I learned from working on Meditation Station on most of my later projects. I am very glad I took on the challenge of joining a FUSE project as a Freshman!