My scene transports you to the the Aral Sea: a once huge lake which has became a dry, sandy desert due to human intervention.

Knowing my skills would be limited at first, I set out to build a simple scene which would have impact due to its starkness.  I'm a big fan of documentaries, and the images from the Aral Sea, where huge fishing boats are now beached and rusting in the middle of a vast desert, have stuck with me.  I thought it would be eerie to walk among the dunes in the stillness of this man-made desert, and catch glimpses of a modern-day "lost civilization".

Overall I was fairly happy with how this first attempt turned out.  I decided that it would be good to add narration, to give the viewer a sense of reality, background and impact.  (I attempted my best David Attenborough vocal for the voice-over, but I fear I may have fallen short of his mark.)  I like the way the voice-over weaves together with the wind noise , but I don't like the fact that the audio begins right from the first second of the scene, and I really hate how distracting the footsteps are (the audio from the screen recording is also low-quality).

Now I want to experiment with triggering the audio when the user approaches the central cluster of boats.  I think I can achieve a much more natural result by setting an audio trigger with a fixed boundary on some of the objects.

The boats are a grievance as well, because I'd love to include the huge, decaying boats that have become synonymous with the area:

I think the sense of scale would make users stop and reflect on how quickly we can destroy our natural environment, if our ambitions are unchecked.  I guess I'll have to dig harder for rusting ship assets, or make friends with a Maya expert.

One error I ran into was the double camera dilemma: my scripts crashed as there were two audio listening devices.  *TOP TIP* - delete the camera asset which Unity automatically adds.

Another error I caused was by trying to take out the footstep noise - I altered a number, which caused a crash, which had me chasing my tail, so I just deleted the FPS camera and brought in a new one.

I later found the best way to remove the footsteps is to: select the FPS camera asset, use inspector to get to footsteps, select the footstep audio source, switch it to "none".

Despite the limitations of this first project, I think the format has a lot of potential for documentary, where the user can move through at their own pace, triggering more narration as they enter new areas, or interact with new objects.  By using an object, the user could alter the time of day, or the weather to see how this environment looks and acts at different times and under different conditions.  The ability to walk around and explore virtually can give a great sense of connection to a place and a culture.

By way of example, in this scene the user could find a sink half buried in the sand.  If they turn the faucet, the area floods with water, transporting them back to a time when the Aralkum Desert was the Aral Sea, and fishermen plied their trade on the lake.