"In the Fold of Time" Virtual Reality
It is an experience in Virtual Reality developed for the MUSEHUM - Museum of Communications and Humanities of Oi Futuro. I worked as an Experience Designer, from the conceptualization of the idea, research and selection of contents from the Oi Futuro collection, and creation of the script, to follow the voice recordings and edit the audios, and make adjustments in the Unreal Engine.
Dive into Oi's collection, browse unbelievable headlines, devour 4 seasons of "Cable Girls" and carefully explore the script for the play "Número, faz favor?" ("Number, please?") they were just parts of immersing themselves in the lovely work of the operator. Translating this important part of the story into small dialogues and immersive sounds made each speech recorded in me. Being able to share these moments with each of the visitors is very special. The Virtual Reality experience "Na Dobra do Tempo" has 10 real stories, taken from the magazine Sino Azul, which came to life in the Telephone Exchange, recreated in 3D from historical photographs of the building where the Musehum is located.
Project developed by AKOM Studio and Cactus for Oi Futuro.
Development
The objective of the project was to create a time travel starting from the present, in the Oi Futuro building, and to take the visitor of the Museum to the Beira-Mar Telephone Exchange, which operated in the same building years ago. With some historical photos from the Oi collection in hand and after trying different content in Virtual Reality, I started to plan the space and the order of events. At first it would be a more contemplative experience in which visual and sound stimulus would involve the observer, presenting the environment that would gradually come to life.
Photograph of Beira-Mar Station, from the Oi Futuro collection
Sketch of points of interest taken from photographs and markup on the floor plan designed to suggest interactions at points of interest
With this photograph and some others that showed the environment of the Telephone Exchange, I faced the main challenge of creating Virtual Reality: in such a real and free environment, how to draw the attention of the observer without forcing his vision to a specific point?
Inspired by the feeling of freedom, relaxation and exploration of the Flower game, the "Guiding Light" (as we referred to it throughout the project) emerged. Its concept was inspired by the petals blown by the wind in Flower, a magical light in the movie "Barbie in The Nutcracker" and finally in the mysterious luminescent particle of the game Everybody is Gone to the Rapture.
Flower (ThatGameCompany)
Everybody is Gone to the Rapture (The Chinese Room)
During the conceptualization, the idea of inserting a text about the importance of human communication arose and while the team began modeling and programming, I did my studies on the Telephone Exchanges and the telephone operators. Among newspaper and internet articles, studying the script for the play "Número, faz favor?" ("Number, please?"), reading protocols on how to answer calls and marathon 4 seasons of "Cable Girls", I quickly learned as much as I could about the topic and started writing. The text went through several different approaches and even different genres such as poetry, short chronicles until they invited me to personally visit the Oi Futuro collection.
In addition to all the historical devices used for communication that were stored in the collection (some of them are now in Musehum), there is also a digitized collection of magazines from Companhia Telefônica Brasileira (CTB). I read several stories about unbelievable and impressive events that happened to telephone operators or at Telephone Exchange that were worth to be retold. When the museologist Bruna Cruz realized my interest in telephone operators, she taught me to use the collection system to look for more stories and I noticed how in her voice the affection for those workers overflowed. I decided to transform the text of the experience into small telephone conversations about real events and the client agreed with the idea. The team decided to add clippings from the magazines to arouse the curiosity of the Museum's visitor and thus the user's immersion in the environment grew more and more.
Example of an article from CTB's Sino Azul magazine, used in the experiment. It talks about a telephone oriented surgery.
The "Telephone call 8" was created from the article "Telephone Oriented Surgery"
Curious stories like that of "Telephone Oriented Surgery" were included in the experience script, and the operators came to life commenting on these facts unknown to outsiders.
After the dialogues were approved, I brought together some people from AKOM Studio who were on other projects to record the lines and started to select sound effects that matched the stories.
Part of the script for one of the connections created in the experiment
The editing and insertion of the sample sound effects was done in each of the phone calls in Audacity
Since the first version of the Virtual Reality experience did not yet have an executable file to send to Sound Designer, he could use the calls I edited as an example to research the sound effects. In the meantime, we were leaving for the recording studio with the voice actors. On the way back, they sent me all the material so I could select the takes that best fit the script and I sent the cuts to Sound Designer. The tight deadline made us all try to facilitate and advance as much as we could, so I started making adjustments to the project on Unreal Engine, in order to make the environment as immersive as possible.
I made some adjustments to the natural and artificial lighting of the environment so that the Telephone Exchange could be illuminated at the moment and in the intensity we wanted in our planning.
On January 21, 2020, the Musehum opened, the Virtual Reality experience "Na Dobra do Tempo" was available to the public, but the work was not yet finished. We needed to record the experience to be shown on the RJTV story, on TV Globo.
Here they are, right below: The news story about the Musehum at TV Globo (the first one is a link to the video and the second is the picture of the newspaper: "Where Virtual Reality and 19th century phones meet").
