Summary

Finding Seattle aims to provide an immersive VR experience to allow people to understand the growth of homelessness in the city of Seattle over the last hundred years, and the daily hardships faced by those that are experiencing homelessness.

 

Project Description

In order to motivate and incite empathy for the growing rate of homelessness Seattle faces, we will start with a birds eye view of Seattle outlining the growing homelessness rates in different areas of the city over time. We will also show some of the largest homeless shelters and food banks in the area, and allow the user to “zoom” to these locations to start their experience. Each location will be a different experience depicting various narratives described by those facing homelessness including building shelter and having to evacuate an area, rationing food supplies, searching for a job, etc.

 

In our daily lives, we’ve noticed situations where police have been called, because of the presence of homeless people in public areas. The homeless people have had to immediately pack up their items and leave the area. We want this to be one of the experiences, where the player must evacuate their current living spaces, but can only take a limited number of personal belongings. In addition many food banks, people are limited to a certain number of items they can choose. This experience would force people to budget with nutritional choices in mind.We plan to contact homeless shelters and the UW Public Service Center to determine what are some of the most consequential and least-known aspects of life that those who are homeless face. We will then try to incorporate these into our different experiences to help create empathy and outline the complexity of this issue that many people may not realize at first.

 

In terms of implementation, we plan on creating all of the buildings and experiences from scratch. The initial birds eye view would most likely require the most work, in terms of design, as Seattle isn’t just a square or circle. Other experiences would require us to just use the built in templates, like cubes and cylinders for the pantry items. For creating the overall Tent City environment, we plan on creating a single tent and then making that a prefab. This would allow us to populate the tent environment very quickly. We want to create all items from scratch, since we want the player to actually interact with the pieces. Using the 3D VR Video would be effective for experiencing an actual homeless encampment, but we felt like it’d be difficult to add the interactive component to it.

 

Hardware Platform / Device

First Choice: Oculus Quest

 

Second Choice: Acer MS Mixed Reality Headset

 

To really convey to the user the hardships faced in homelessness and the congestion in tent cities and other homeless shelters we would like to use VR. Our goal is to emphasize the unique obstacles posed by storing all aspects of one’s life in a cramped and temporary space, so we want to create an experience that takes advantage of the freestanding Oculus Quest and allow the user to feel as though they are actually wandering through encampments stuffed over capacity by Seattle’s homelessness crisis. This would help us create an immersive experience depicting the various narratives described by those facing homelessness.