Scene changes in Titanic VR Story.

As my Titanic VR experience consists of three scenes (three actual separate scenes built in Unity within one project; plus, a draft of scene four) a system of scenes change was needed. There are two major aspects of that action, the first one being technical one, from a developer point of view, and the second one being the way it would work for a player within an immersive environment. 

A pop-up book is a common element of all three scenes, and the centre point of the whole VR experience. Therefore, I decided to place a trigger point (box collider) within the book, on the right bottom corner of the book, to be précised, so in the spot where a reader would normally touch the book to turn over the page.  

Thanks to that, the player would need to interact with the VR environment, which translates to deeper engagement and immersion within the VR world. Tapping or touching the corner of the pop-up book would instantly take the player to the next scene, so respectively from the Opening Scene to the Story Scene, and from the Story Scene to the Jigsaw Puzzle Scene. 

In each scene, player would land in an environment with an enormous table with a pop-up book in front of one (in the Opening Scene the pop-up book would have to be activated by the player).  

The code implemented behind the scenes changes is based on scene load on trigger command. If the game object with the “player” tag enters the collider (the corner of the book has an invisible collider), a specific scene will load. It was crucial to add all three scenes to the build settings in Unity, as well as to name the scenes to be loaded and to add a “player” tag to the XR Rig.

A short video presenting how the described above scene change mechanism works in VR (from the Opening Scene to the Story Scene) is available here.