Physical Salary VR by jpecoraro342

Video Demo

YouTube Video

Project Description & Motivation

Our scene is a VR experience built to portray and (literally) materialize the difference in daily earnings by different levels of income. This concept and the motivation behind our project comes from the following XKCD article titled Physical Salary: https://what-if.xkcd.com/118/. The article imagines a scenario in which the earnings by a certain worker is spawned physically into the room every second throughout the length of a work day. The sheer difference in earnings per second, minute, hour or day earned by different workers is easily analyzed using this method.

We used this method in our project to display the difference in earnings by income level. The level is split into two sections, the main hall and the comparator room.

The main hall has three sections, separated by income level: low, medium and high. Each income section has three glass rooms in which a different kind of worker, such as a janitor or teacher, and have been assigned an income dispenser set to the average earnings of their profession. When the user toggles the panel in front of a room, money (coins or other) will be spawned at an equivalent rate to how much that worker would earn per second on the job.

The comparator room allows the user to spawn in two different rooms from the main area and observe them side-by-side. There are two glass rooms here, with a panel in front allowing the user to select which worker they would like to see.