In a vignette from my hybrid-genre story, 6-foot pine, a virtual reality (VR) room is created in an old storage closet as a gift from one character to another.

In the hope of creating an immersive experience for my readers, I made an initial proof-of-concept “VR room” in Adobe Dimension and “walked through it” via augmented reality using Adobe Aero. Unsatisfied with the depth of the experience, I imported the room into Unity with AR Foundation to more deeply recreate themes from the story, including floating lights and sparrow-balloons. Feeling that the experience had become too sterile, I rerecorded the AR experience outdoors, used Premiere Pro to merge the Unity and Aero experiences together, and added my voiceover of the original text.

Here are some earlier prototypes:

Playing with filming a VR room under AR conditions:

The storage room as initially created in Adobe Dimension:

Here is a rough example with some motion and particle effects added in Unity with AR Foundation. Importing the Dimension file involved a lot of adjustments for materials, textures, camera, and lighting to get something “reasonable.” I then added particle effects and gave motion to the sparrow spheres.