Surreal Hazard

Surreal Hazard is a large surreal Virtual Reality world for the social VR platform VRChat. Upon discovering Social VR and creative VR applications such as Tilt Brush, I began building the world as a place for me to experiment with different processes for creating game art. It became my own personal playground to learn about social VR conventions and the new possibilities they bring to an online social environment. The world is an extension of some of the abstract architecture work I did during school, and is my first Unity world.

Every piece of test geometry I made with Tilt Brush and Blocks was imported into the world. I found a home for my initial VR sketches, even if I did not like the work I made and felt that it should be deleted. At the time the world was made there weren't many functional things to do in VRChat. One of the main things people did was climb to the highest point in the map, or to throw a friend that is sitting in a chair. I liked the idea of running on a paint stroke, and exploring/climbing on unconventional geometry. Scaling up my sketches to epic proportions was a fun way to make use of them, as I added collision meshes to them also so that they could be explored. I also brought in a museum I had modeled in school and found a way to stitch it into some cliffs without destroying the positive qualities of the cliffs. I played around with physics and gravity and the basic trigger/logic system that existed. The result of my years of work was an incredibly unique and unconventional social VR world that can still be visited today!

In 2021, Surreal Hazard was shown in the Venice VR Expanded section of the 78th annual Venice Film Festival of La Biennale di Venezia! During the event, people were able to explore a selection of 34 VRChat worlds and experience 5 special events in VRChat. There were physical VR setups on location in Venice, and also throughout the world at museums and other cultural institutions. People could also experience the VRChat portion of Venice VR Expanded from the comfort of their own home!

https://vrchat.com/home/launch?worldId=wrld_263f8899-e032-4dc1-8e1f-660f255db1a0
https://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/2021/lineup/venice-vr-expanded