Vertigato

THE BRIEF

Vertigato is a Unity VR experience my team built for a Saxion CMGT open-day function. The goal was to give incoming students (many of them with no prior VR experience) a hands-on first taste of our programme's work in around [N MINUTES] of playtime.

[ Image placeholder ] A screenshot of the Vertigato VR scene, or a photo of someone playing it on the open-day floor. assets/blog/vertigato-scene.jpg

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THE APPROACH

VR audio behaves differently from flat-screen audio: players turn their heads, look around, and rely on sound to orient themselves in a world they're physically inside. For first-time VR users this matters even more: ambience needs to anchor, not overwhelm. I aimed for [TONE: calming and grounding / energetic and exciting] depending on the section of the experience.

SPATIAL AUDIO DESIGN

Every meaningful sound in the scene was placed in 3D space using FMOD's spatializer. I tuned distance attenuation so [BEHAVIOUR: close objects feel intimate, distant ones still readable], and used reverb zones to give different parts of the world their own acoustic identity. The result is that players can roughly tell where they are with their eyes closed.

[ FMOD/Unity screenshot ] A Unity scene view with audio emitters visible, or an FMOD event with the spatializer effect. assets/blog/vertigato-spatial.jpg

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DESIGNING FOR FIRST-TIME VR USERS

Designing for someone trying VR for the first time meant pulling back. I [LIMITED SIMULTANEOUS SOUNDS / KEPT AMBIENCE LOW / AVOIDED HEAD-SPACE STARTLES] so newcomers wouldn't get overwhelmed. The audio acts as a soft handhold rather than a stimulation source.

IMPLEMENTATION: FMOD + UNITY

Audio is triggered through [METHOD: Unity collider triggers, gaze events, controller interactions], with FMOD events fired from C#. [SPECIFIC TECHNICAL CHALLENGE: e.g. handling occlusion when the player walks behind objects, or tying ambience to scene transitions].