Jeager Li's VR Blog
Wenzheng Li myblog.arts site

Month: April 2023

Categories
Virtual Spaces

Week 22

Plot and characters

Plot Outline

The plot of this anime is set in a futuristic time, a time when humans are already familiar with and use robots and artificial intelligence with great intensity. Many jobs that are fraught with danger and far from human society have been replaced by different kinds of robots. The animation shows a large robot replacing a lighthouse and lighthouse keeper’s job because of the danger and loneliness of the job, and shows a dormant old lighthouse robot sitting on an island far from the city and blending in with its surroundings. It is not until one night when the stormy conditions in the nearby waters deteriorate and the waves start to affect a nearby ship. The ship’s alarm is detected by the lighthouse and it is activated once again. The giant robot slowly rises from the island and starts to slowly and heavily turn around and start walking in the direction of the ship in order to save and help the nearby ships.

Characterization

A giant lighthouse robot, basically 10-15m high. Not only its old model but also because of its huge size, its movements look slow and heavy. The column on its head is actually a light-emitting part, similar to the principle of a lighthouse, which guides and warns of approaching ships and can be used to receive distress signals. The robot is painted in orange and black stripes to make it more visible in the sea, but due to long periods of inactivity and lack of maintenance, much of it has been corroded to reveal its original metallic colours and rust, especially on the lower part, which has been immersed in the sea for years. To power its huge body and engines, two heat sinks on its shoulders emit a black puff of smoke when activated.

Plot script

The camera starts with a blur, which only captures the front of the robot’s head and the part of the lighthouse that is not working (the area around the head is covered with plants and vines, creating a sense of disuse that has not been used for a long time). The camera then gradually moves backwards and pulls up higher at the same time, gradually zooming in to capture the entire island. The entire robot can be seen collapsed on the island, with its back against the only hill on the island, the upper half of its body leaning on the hill while the lower half is submerged in water near its feet. Bright sunlight shines on the lifeless robot (Fig. 1, the white and middle jar part serves as the island and the hill, the silver is the ocean that surrounds the island). The small island is surrounded by blue-green water, around which nothing but seawater can be seen. The whole scene mainly presents a kind of oceanic island deserted in the daytime sun, but full of natural life. (The whole scene lasts 6-8 seconds)

Act II, (Same position as the final shot of Act I.) A loud thunderclap and the scene changes to a dark night, with a huge storm at sea and lightning sweeping through the surrounding waters. (The scene lasts 6-8 seconds) until a ship appears in the distance, hidden by an island, and slowly moves between the waves until a loud ship’s whistle sounds. This whistle sounds like an alarm triggering the robot to run and (the camera starts to follow the robot) its lighthouse and eye parts start to glow orange. As if activated, the robot slowly starts to stand up, first by slowly tightening its legs in preparation for supporting itself, first by favoring the left leg part, and then by slowly organizing the rest of itself to stand up (the whole movement is much slower than normal in order to convey the mechanical feel and the sheer size of the robot) (the camera slowly rises with the robot’s movements and holds it in place once it is fully standing) 

After standing fully the robot turns to look in the direction of the ship, (the silver screw represents the cargo ship) and after confirming its target turns and starts walking towards the ship, the sea water flooding its lower limbs more and more with each step it takes. (The robot walks towards the ship with its back to the camera) Ending the shot after four or five steps.

Categories
Contextual & Theoretical Studies 1

Week 22

Based on the information from this project and the knowledge from the class, I realised that immersion and reality can affect people in different ways, for example, when people feel fully immersed, people can confuse the gap between reality and virtual and thus be affected by the virtual. Based on this knowledge and understanding, if I could change the existing VR experience, I would want to make the virtual environment more realistic to enhance immersion and thus move towards the possible idea of VR mental health therapy. I believe that better immersion and virtual environments would make it easier for people to relax, thus making psychotherapy more effective. With this in mind, I began an initial search for information and concrete examples of psychotherapy and virtual reality. Interestingly enough, people are already experimenting with virtual reality technology to treat different psychological disorders as an alternative to some real-life treatments.

At the very beginning, after the initial reading and understanding of this material, two issues came to mind that I was particularly concerned about and wanted to expand on. The first issue was how to use and how to improve the use of exposure therapy in virtual reality. This issue focuses on different treatments for phobias that allow the user to directly confront the thing or environment they are afraid of. This requires a great deal of immersion and realism in the virtual environment, an issue that has been tried and tested in the medical world and examples have been reported. But then I developed another idea, which was to use virtual reality to help restore and learn some of the social dysfunction of people with mental illness, allowing the user to slowly accept and learn some basic behaviours or problems so that they can be treated differently. However, as there are many different types of mental illness and different behaviours between patients, this remains a matter of discussion and theory. Based on the question of whether virtual reality technology is appropriate and how it can be used for work related to the treatment of mental illness and mental disorders, I began to look for further information and confirm my direction.

After a certain amount of information seeking and understanding, I began to confirm the direction of this thesis. I wanted to further discuss how virtual reality can help people with mental illness to recover and learn from some of their social dysfunctions, and to do so more in terms of the immersion in reality that virtual reality creates. Among the many psychiatric problems I have inquired about is probably the most vulnerable to virtual reality, a psychiatric problem known as Maladaptive Daydreaming, a mental health problem in which a person daydreams or fantasises excessively. It is a psychologically unhealthy or negative attempt to cope or adapt to a real problem. People who do this often gradually lose their ability to recognise in extremely vivid and detailed daydreams. Many sources also suggest that such daydreaming may be spontaneous and according to these sources that the problem is still mainly caused by anxiety, depression and other mental health conditions resulting from excessive real-life stress. The main problem is that there is not a good treatment plan in place, as it is not yet an official mental illness, so there is no standard treatment. However, many sources suggest that the main treatment for Maladaptive Daydreaming is mental health therapy. Which is called cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is also a common approach to treating anxiety and depression. This approach focuses on allowing the patient to release and relieve some of their stress by communicating or portraying what they are thinking and wanting to do.

From this material I began to wonder if virtual reality could be used in a similar way to help such patients to release their stress. By using drawings, models, or other methods to recreate their fantasy scenes in virtual reality, or by showing them to others, even those who are reluctant or inept at communicating could use VR to perform CBT therapy. This approach is basically risk-free and not more psychologically taxing for the user, and perhaps they can slowly show and present themselves through this act to gradually treat this mental health problem, and in the end this virtual fantasy reality presentation could perhaps be used for other similar mental health problems that use CBT therapy. So my final question might be whether and how virtual reality can be used to treat Maladaptive Daydreaming a similar way to CBT.