During my work on the Virtual Reality project, I have really come to enjoy working in Unity. For starters, it is fun and exciting to create a virtual world. Additionally, I enjoyed the process of creating a world – which, in our group included coding a collider and animating some objects (no spoilers)! The other day, after most of the group had gone, I was finishing saving the files when I had the urge to run through the VR world by myself. I wanted to see how my perception of it would change with no one around. I found that when I entered our virtual forest area, there was a lot to explore. Even though our project is meant to end at the culmination of the transition between scenes, I found myself virtually walking through the forest, jumping around cliffs and exploring. It felt a little bit like traversing the forests and hills of Fortnite, except with no other players.

What I didn’t expect to happen was how heavily immersed I would become. With no one else in the lab, I felt comfortable continuing my exploration – all the way to the end of the map. At the end of the forest the world drops off into a limitless ruddy abyss. Earlier in our project after we accidentally deleted a few floors, we virtually fell into the abyss, and this created a very strange sensation of falling while watching the world disappear thousands of feet above. Oddly enough, when I had fallen before with my group around, I never felt scared. But suddenly as I explore on my own, I felt more afraid of the cliff. It almost felt…real. I wasn’t completely stoked about this either and I quickly pulled the headset off to experience my reality. Or is it?