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The Exchange​

The Exchange: Text
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With hand-tracking and passthrough incorporated using Quest 2’s on-device cameras, embrace this mixed-reality event that happens in conjunction with your life. By navigating an AI avatar using intuitive hand gestures, you as an NSA engineer attempt to uncover the mysteries of the arrival of an alien spaceship from an unfamiliar time and space. On board, you will witness their sophisticatedly designed interactive cinematics, they present you with something, somehow familiar...

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Present to you by

​​Alex Wang: Visual Director | Technical Artist | Mechanism & UX Designer | Programmer | Level Generalist

Cecil Boey: Narrative Director | VR Interaction Designer & Programmer | Technical Artist | Level Generalist

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TheExchange - Trailer

TheExchange - Trailer

The Exchange: Videos

Full Game Experiences

"Approximately 20 mins operation time for a trained NSA engineer"

You will experience this real-time event as if you are an NSA (National Space Agency) senior avatar operator.  During your routine scouting dispatch, you discovered a gigantic lost alien spaceship called 'GEMSIC' around Saturn. Loneliness and oppression aside, it ships their last beacon of hope: a piece of Mayday signals waiting to be uncovered by other civilizations. It's content has been encoded in an universal language: Visual Expressions. Driven by your innate explorative nature, you stepped on board.

Inside their memory capsules, placed at the very center of 'GEMSIC', you are emersed in an seemingly virtual simulation designed by the alien. It is later on understood that it creates a bi-directional neural link. Surrounded by floating geometrical debris, you could interact with them to restore their original shapes. The reconstructed scenery unveils their world, a disintegrated world due to the second law of thermodynamics. Proceeding in the abstractness weaved by their amateur yet effortful visual interpolation inspired from your life experiences, things start to become recognizable. From a solar system made out of chaotic asteroids, to the district you have spent your childhood... You have witness the construction step by step; you have restored order piece by piece, but what if everything just went backward? You may wish what you have done in the simulation is real, so that you can break the law of physics to offer some help. 

And the truth is...

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The Exchange: Pro Gallery

Aesthetics & Engineering

An overview of the Balance between Beauty & Efficiency

  • A customized Toon + Outline Shader is used to achieve this visual theme. Credit to Nam Makes Game for the technical knowledge.

It is presented in the Unity URP Shader Graphs with Depth + Normal texture enabled in the pre-passing stage.

Toon shaders takes Unity Main Light + Additional Lights and map their attenuation value to a color gradient. 

It could blend with PBR renderings to pump some realistic vibes.

Local and global variables are exposed to scripts to display visual ornaments on a per-renderer basis.

Outline shader is achieved by Sobel Outline Detection Algorithm. 

Tuning values on alpha clipping could enable a holographic hull effect.

To Demo Source File Session

  • Hard-surface modelings are made in Maya. Procedural modeling and populating them in the scene are made possible using Houdini.

IK rig is prebuilt in Maya then used by Unity rigging system to achieve Procedural Animations. Learn more on Cecil's page.

Trivial Procedural scattering is done by C# scripting. 

Large Procedural scenery construction is made using Houdini real time session sync (.HESS) paired with Unity Plugins.

To Houdini Application Session

  • The Real-time swarm animation system is connected with a highly modular event system programmed in C#.

Multi-Threading optimization is made with Unity Job System.

To C# Optimization Session

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The Exchange: Pro Gallery

This project is the crystallization of a vision of the future shared between me and Cecil Boey.

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