v r 5
Shadows! Flickering shadows! With hard edges! Or soft! Baked or realtime! Moving with the sun! Growing in intensity! Gold gleaming in their darkness!
v r 5 is an “art island” where you can explore the Unity game engine’s implementation of shadows. In a series of 26 rooms, 11 sculptures, and 3 interactive platforms the island shows you the different ways shadows can appear, from the naturalistic to the janky, from making a gold vase gleam in darkness to disappearing altogether.
v r 5 was created in Unity (2022.3.7f1). The island topography and textures are derived from an island in Free Island Collection. The water is the (discontinued!) ProWater from Unity’s old Standard Assets. The character controller in the game is Gold Player by hertzole.
Download
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
In Praise Of Ideological Shadows: A Critique
To paraphrase: "Videogames are generated via Capitalist technology, which has many settings that change the ways it's ideology is cast (specifically, not seen to be cast) by dead objects in its dying world. These shadows can extreme or subtle, realistic or surprising, even beautiful. But they're almost always entire banal, and entirely devoid of human meaning. Dessicated Ludonauts stroll alone and say in cool, dry tones "Look at them; marvel at their hyperreality - and by extension our Capitalistic cleverness. PS. EVERYTHING IS GOING FINE."
---
[..] in which such official, formally informal ex-cathedra presentations teach one about, eg. 'shadows', only to the degree one's brain is able to entirely forgo all notions of socio-political context (say the global AAAA Videogarme industry) and the toxic, terrifyingly dull condition known as Labor(TM) which sustain them. In short, it sure helps if one is suffering from a mild case of terminal Neoliberal Brain Worms.
Note how nobody ever leaves any comments on little neat-but-soulless 'art-garme.. whatevers' like this? Well volks, that's because of the inherent embarrassment, alienation and estrangement they feel concerning the entire bizarre, esoteric, self-congratulatory Academic(TM) process which spawns them.
Consider the notion that it's somehow merely enough that this shadowy.. product, exists in the world - ala 'academic digital arts for it's own sake'. (Now that, as poet once put it, is pure deodorized BS.) If it was somehow the case, then why do we still feel no less goddamn BORED with our lives in the midst of all this (conveniently context-less, spectral, faintly self-congratulatory) techno-artistic wonder?
One could of W/Ritten this critique against shadows in the neato form of 'a clever little interactive browser garme-object-d'art, spinning inside a cool modern engine made by some evil cyberpunk hypercorporation, which makes you think (kinda) about all kinds of carelessly interesting um.. stuff' - but alas, one only has access to Plain Text..
Not that everything anyone does in this odd sphere has to arrive with a signed picture of Karl Baudrillard under their arm, but Jebus, we need *something* more than smoke, mirrors and shadows!
BTW fcuk Unity.
Signed, Robert What (Hi, Pippin!)
Hey buddy!