ECHO OF SANXINGDUI

An immersive Virtual Reality tour to the Sanxingdui site to educate

audiences about Chinese ancient mythology and Shu civilization.

Role

  • Researcher

  • 3D Modeller

  • VR Developer

Responsibility

  • Conduct research on Sanxingdui civilization and Chinese ancient myths

  • Model museum and mythological world

  • Add XR interactions in environment

  • Arrange user test + iteration

Tool

  • Unity

  • Oculus Quest

  • Blender

💠 Motivation

When the Covid swept the globe, museums and galleries have been impacted by the lockdowns. Online museum is one of the most chosen media to shift physical exhibition to virtual. However, online archives and 360° tours cannot feed audiences in such an era of experience.

So what about putting audiences into the exhibition virtually?

💠 Scope

Beyond showcasing exhibits on screens, a VR museum is able to

  1. bring the past to the present

  2. immerse audiences in a virtual world

  3. provide interactable surroundings for exploration

💠 Final Result

💠 Research

💠 Design Process

#1 Ideation

Benefiting from Virtual Reality’s flexibility and openness on world design, a VR tour might be a good choice to renarrate the exhibition and solve the problems.

#2 User Flow

This tour will contain two types of environments:

  1. Real world museum: exhibition scene

  2. Inner World: showcasing mythological scenes related to each relic

#3 Target Audience

As an educational project, this project aims to be open to all-gendered and all-aged audiences. But considering the format’s specialty, audiences with access to VR headsets will be my prime users.

#4 Scene Design

#5 User Testing + Iterations

#1 Culture Study

Sanxingdui is an archaeological site largely discovered in 1986. It represented the Bronze Age culture back to 5000 years ago, in Sichuan Province, China, which was a lost civilization in the Chinese history.

After visiting Sanxingdui Museum, reading related paper and literature books, and watching documentaries, I have learned that the Sanxingdui cultural remains had tight connections with ancient mythologies and ancestors’ nature worship.

#2 Define the Problem

Summarizing from in-person visiting and literature research, the major problems of Sanxingdui Museum exhibitions are:

  1. Lacking visual storytelling of cultural relics and mythologies.

  2. Less communications and interactions between visitors and exhibits.

  3. Unable to visually display the past environment to visitors.

Inner World: Bronze Standing Figure

Exhibition Scene

Sacrifice Ceremony Scene

Inner World: Bronze Sacred Tree

Inner World: Vertical-Eyed Bronze Mask

Start Scene

Inner World: Sun-Shaped Wheel

I invited 3 users to test this VR tour. They all liked this project and felt very excited to teleport between scenes and interact with relics. Based on their feedback, I optimized models and XR interactions to improve user experience.

Problems

  1. Felt dizzy when turning around.

  2. Couldn’t see highlight balls for Sun-shaped Wheel.

  3. Avatar dropped after transiting to other scenes.

  4. Hard to click close buttons.

  5. Way guiding to ceremony was not clear.

Solutions

  1. Changed Continuous Turn to Snap Turn.

  2. Increased contrast between highlight balls and background.

  3. [Still challenging: having problems with Oculus setting.]

  4. Enlarged close buttons.

  5. Added arrows to ceremony portal.

💠 Future

  1. Optimize models and UI to improve visual art and experience.

  2. Fix unstable headset height problem.

  3. Collaborate with scholars and Sanxingdui museum to create professional content.