Creating the Unreal    

Creating the Unreal    

 "It’s called lenticular," Graham Beaumont says, handing me an A4 image of a long dark corridor at the UniSC campus. Polished concrete floors, thick columns, everything smooth and new and familiar.  

I tilt the card in my hand, and the pristine walls cloud over with soot. Graffiti smears itself up the columns. Fires burn in 44-gallon drums that shimmer into the picture, casting a hellish glow around them.   

"I love being drawn into a different place," Graham grins. "When we were still on dial-up, I was one of the first people to play MMOs (massive multiplayer online games). I really got hooked on switching off from the real world and having a different persona and a different life in a virtual space."  

I examine another of Graham’s lenticular images and watch armour-clad, robotic kangaroos appear on the sweeping lawns of UniSC. A Star Wars-esque space fighter hangs above the library, frozen in the act of speeding toward a huge planet looming over the horizon.      

"I love dystopia, I love cyberpunk, and you’ll see a bit of that in my work," he says.   

It was this fascination with another world that eventually lured Graham to where he is now. Already a civil engineer, he initially came to UniSC to study IT. As part of his minor, he took a few classes in game development, and found himself engrossed in creating his own digital assets for game environments. Shortly after, he packed in IT and enrolled in design with a major in animation and visualisation.    

"Game engines are top of the list for me," he says. "Real-time render engines are a place where I like to work. It’s my happy place."  

It is still early stages for Graham, but his keen interest in game-design has already come to fruition. He was lucky enough to complete an internship with Breeder Studio, where he worked on an interactive game version of the popular TV series The Walking Dead.   

"The stories are random," he says, showing me the banner page for The Walking Dead: Pathways. To help create the game’s interactive, user-controlled experience, Graham worked on hundreds of keywords to allow players to verbally make choices that propel them in different directions through the game.   

"Every time you play it, it can be different. It was a huge job, and it was really fun."   

Listening to his excitement, it’s easy to imagine a much younger Graham eagerly submerging himself into fledgling, turn-of-the-century multiplayer worlds.   

Decades later, the adult version of that boy is no less passionate about the virtual environments that initially set him on course. With his final semester underway, he is planning a masters degree in extended reality (XR), and hopes to use it to have a positive impact on his community by bringing virtual environments to those who may not have the means to access them.   

"You could send an experience to Europe of multiple places in Australia and give them that without them having to physically be there."  

He smiles. "I like that idea."  

Writes Mathew Channer.
Photos: Courtesy of the designer.