Not your traditional therapy

Project Brief:

Not Your Traditional Therapy is a VR rage room that allows you to immerse yourself into two different unique and stylized environments where you can smash and destroy objects without actually damaging anything in base reality.

Sometimes we find ourselves in situations of high stress where all we want to do is to smash something. In base reality, this isn’t always the best route to take for many obvious reasons, which is how this project began. Not your traditional therapy is not only supposed to allow users to relief stress, but through using the powers of VR, we have been able work against laws of physics and created a new sensory experience that incorporates touch, sounds and sight.

Instead of having to go to a facility and break physical objects you can do Not Your Traditional Therapy from the comfort of your own home so we encourage you to let go of your stress, break the objects around you, and most importantly, have fun with it!

Timeline: 7 weeks.

Why VR?
Because VR, it can offer a more immersive experience. When people put on their helmets, they can only rely on the virtual world's sense of reciprocation. That is the part where we can mess around with the sensorimotor contingency, redefining the “normal” and maximizing the effect. Also, perhaps you can find room destruction with objects in reality, but it is almost impossible to experience with different sensory feedback. And this idea is also a great hint for us to further explore if virtual reality becomes a regular part of our lives in the future, will our sensory systems change? And in that situation, which is an illusion and which is reality.

VR VS BASE REALITY
I believe we all have a moment when we are depressed, we want to break something or smash something. In real life, this action cause waste, noise pollution to your neighbor, and damage to our deposit. And it may hurt us or someone else. I believe VR is the best platform now for a destruction room. In the reality, the earth's gravity makes everything set. We have to consider many elements such as surroundings and consequences. In VR, everything is possible and less consideration. It’s a platform where we can break physics rules in reality and be as creative as we can.

Similar Experiences On the Market
Rage Room VR | SideQuest

simulating real-life environments and physics

Rage Room on Oculus Rift

simulating fps combat, real-life physics

Smash Party VR on Steam

cartoon art style, still aiming to simulate base reality

Challenges:
During the development process, we notice that the Apex Destruction system in UE doesn't work with Oculus. As we keep researching, we found something from the assets store called Custom Destruction System, which allows you to import breaking pieces, and it will generate the destruction for you. And it works with Oculus. So we pre-model break pieces for everything in Blender, then import them into UE4.

Room 1
We first created the darker room based on survey results, which favored the mysterious, foggy, space zen garden. It indeed is a good place for “violence” such as smashing, throwing, and destroying objects, ultimately releasing your anger and achieving a sense of satisfaction with absolutely no one around, afloat in a garden in space. It also provides a futuristic aesthetic and setting that you could never find anywhere in base reality. That is why we made every object breakable and interactive in this room. Lastly, we added a Christmas tree because it’s going to be Christmas soon!

Based on the feedback we gained from our midterm, we have added sound feedback for all the objects, new weapons, and changed some objects to make it more satisfactory. (We've added objects such as a ballon wall, more glass objects, china objects, and some electronic objects.)

Room 1 demo

Seasonal items
We are offering a big Christmas tree in the room! Featuring breakable gifts with Christmas gifts inside.
Due to performance concerns, we have to remove the collision of the lights and emissions of the decorations, which unfortunately users are unable to hit the tree at the moment.

Room 2
The 2nd room, limitless haven, has a more meditative and ethereal feel, and really brings out a different side of our “therapy”. We wanted to not only contrast with the first room but also surprise the users with a different gameplay experience. We were really inspired by the movie the Truman show, with the last scene being a perfect example of the dream core, liminal space aesthetic.

The room that you see right now is still not finished, it’s more like a visual prototype. If we have more time, we planned to have more experimental stuff happening in this room including zero-gravity, soft, or squishy objects(in contrast to the first room). This room could also be somewhere that the user might want to come to just relax and chill after the intense rage session in room 1.

Room 2 demo

Built-in Menu

With the built-in menu of the UE4 VR template, we also develop a menu featuring:
Play - level choice, user can choose between each room at any time.
Restart - When the user finishes breaking everything in the room and want more, they can restart.
Help - Instruction on the controller interaction.
Settings - General settings such as volume, language.. etc. And also accessbility settings such as color contrast adjust, haptics, and text size.
Credit - Credit to our team!

User Testing
We did some user testing with our fella students and gain valuable feedback:

Weapons tend to drop, and it is hard for users to bend down and pick it up
People don't read instructions from the build menu, it's hard for them to understand interaction if they are new to VR.

Solutions

Disable the gravity of all weapons. If the user drops it by accident, it will just flow in the sky and the user can easily pick them up again.
Create a training sector at the beginning of the game with huge banners of instruction. Also features some weapons and destructible objects for user to get familiar with the interaction.

Demo of Training Sector

Project Display

Reference

UE Asset Store:

Tutorials:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elUJCEC06r8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Fx-uo-ZQQU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS8-vJd3YrM&list=WL&index=24&ab_channel=GDXR

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2D-y4OlN-1g&t=1311s&ab_channel=GDXR

Sounds:

www.audiodown.com

https://sc.chinaz.com/yinxiao/

AI art:

https://colab.research.google.com/github/alembics/disco-diffusion/blob/main/Disco_Diffusion.ipynb

simulating real-life environments and physics

​

Rage Room on Oculus Rift

simulating fps combat, real-life physics

​

Smash Party VR on Steam

cartoon art style, still aiming to simulate base reality

​

Seasonal items We are offering a big Christmas tree in the room! Featuring breakable gifts with Christmas gifts inside. Due to performance concerns, we have to remove the collision of the lights and emissions of the decorations, which unfortunately users are unable to hit the tree at the moment.

Built-in Menu

​

With the built-in menu of the UE4 VR template, we also develop a menu featuring:

Play - level choice, user can choose between each room at any time.

Restart - When the user finishes breaking everything in the room and want more, they can restart.

Help - Instruction on the controller interaction.

Settings - General settings such as volume, language.. etc. And also accessbility settings such as color contrast adjust, haptics, and text size.

Credit - Credit to our team!

User Testing​ ​We did some user testing with our fella students and gain valuable feedback:

Weapons tend to drop, and it is hard for users to bend down and pick it up

People don't read instructions from the build menu, it's hard for them to understand interaction if they are new to VR.

Solutions

​​

Disable the gravity of all weapons. If the user drops it by accident, it will just flow in the sky and the user can easily pick them up again.

Create a training sector at the beginning of the game with huge banners of instruction. Also features some weapons and destructible objects for user to get familiar with the interaction.

Demo of Training Sector

Project Display

Reference UE Asset Store:

Tutorials:

Our project on the IDM Showcase

Seasonal items
We are offering a big Christmas tree in the room! Featuring breakable gifts with Christmas gifts inside.
Due to performance concerns, we have to remove the collision of the lights and emissions of the decorations, which unfortunately users are unable to hit the tree at the moment.

User Testing
We did some user testing with our fella students and gain valuable feedback:

Reference

UE Asset Store: