top of page
VR EDUCATION
Each year Parsons MFA Design & Technology Graduate Students team up with middle school students from Learning Community Charter School in Jersey City. Throughout the semester MFA DT students collaborate with one student from a class of 6th-8th graders to bring their creative storytelling skills to life in the world of virtual reality.
Role
Product Design
UX
User Researcher
Unity
VR/360 Film
Goal
Our team worked with Ella who wrote the story titled Story Elf. We were challenged with the idea of recreating these students stories in virtual reality. Mediums such as Google Cardboard, Unity, & Oculus are used to develop these students stories. Towards the end of the semester the final stories are presented and shown at Parsons and at LCCS in Jersey City. The entire course is documented on this website
​
From Left to Right: Sisi Ma, Ella Lopez and Kris Li
Ella and I
Process
Storyboard & Character Development
Ella had created a story about a young girl who travels to a magical place where characters named StoryElves read books and have fairy powers. We began by working on an outline of Ella's story along with reviewing sketches she had made of the characters.
Game Mechanics
The course was focused on telling storytelling through virtual reality, however it was very common for these stories to add a level of interaction which allowed the story to also be considered a game. In order to work through the game mechanics we decided to create a small narrative arc for how Tina would defeat the Monsters with the help of her StoryElf friend.
Understanding 3D Space
In addition to working with Ella on how she esthetically wanted her story to come to life, we also walked through classroom exercises to by paper prototyping positioning of the characters within a 3D space.
Recording Ella's Narration
An important goal of this project was to ensure that these stories remained guided by the students and we were there to help, but not alter too much of the storyline plot or visual esthetics outside of what they wanted. In order to stay true to this mission, we thought it would be great for Ella to narrate the character voices. Below is a sample of us recording narration for the final story.
Listen to some of the script by pressing the play button next to the coordinating narration.
Mood Board
Before developing within Unity we wanted to get an idea on how Ella imagined the magical land of Storyelves. The main theme of our story was about a human character is transported into a different land to help magical creatures defeat monsters. Some of examples that we worked on focused on a mixture between Ferngully and the Dr. Seuss Movie, The Lorax.
Final
Summary video of the VR Education course
bottom of page