Divine Paper · 仙纸

UBC / Centre for Digital Media · Master's Project · 2019

Immersive VR interactive story set in a Chinese ink-style world. The player, cast as a god, translates written characters into their real-world counterparts.

Role

Interaction Developer

Team

Master's project · UBC / Centre for Digital Media

Technical Stack

Unity · Oculus SDK · VRToolkit · Google Cloud Vision · Text Mesh Pro

Released

2019 · Master's project

What I did

Integrated VRToolkit for controls, movement, and paper/pen mechanics inside VR.
Animated scene objects along the narrative and paced them against the dialogue system.
Built a dynamic character-recognition feature that read the user's drawing.
Designed the narrative accounting for the camera freedom players have in VR.

Design challenges

Chinese character recognition that respected stroke order and direction, not just correctness.
Consistent pacing across all animations so the experience read as one story.
Dialogue system supporting pauses, callbacks, and smooth transitions between lines.
Realistic rice paper and brush behaviour with limited ink and multiple brush sizes reacting to distance.
Sound, movement, and perspective as guidance tools, compensating for VR camera freedom.

What was built

Immersive VR app that teaches common Chinese characters through practice, not drills.
Real-time texture editing simulating ink painting on the rice paper.
Free-drawing mechanic built on the Oculus SDK.
Google Cloud Vision integration for the recognition backend.
Custom dialogue system on Unity Text Mesh Pro using Rich Text tags to surface game cues.