Shiva Kannan
Anna : A Virtual Escape Room
HTC Vive VR Experience
Team :
Programmers : Shiva Kannan, Sherry Zhang
Artists : Rosy Fu, Namrakant Tamrakar
Producer : Lawrence Plofker
Design challenge :
Anna was an escape room experience designed for the Naive Guest round for our Building Virtual Worlds class.
We had to address two important questions :
1. How can you make the guest play the experience purely through “Indirect Control” ; ie making the world evolve and playable by itself without a set of instructions.
2. How can you give the guest the feeling of freedom inside the virtual world and at the same time make sure he finishes all the task that you want him to.
We made some important design decisions and used a lot of Visual and Audio cues which helped us simply the escape room like puzzle world easily. The guest was put in this grayscale world only the important and useful object were in color. This helped direct attention of the guest to those object very easily.
Every time a letter came in there was an Audio cue that immediately caught the attention of the guest in an otherwise relatively quiet world. 90% of our guests were able to figure out and solve the escape room without having us to intervene during the experience.
Contributions:
Gameplay programming : Implemented the entire sequence timeline events and triggers and spatial audio setup.
Interactions : Handled the interaction of the feet using VIVE trackers. Setup the world for room size for the VIVE room.
Unity : Particles effects for the small paper planes flying out.
Contributed to the interaction and system design of the experience.
Anna was an escape room experience designed for the Naive Guest round for our Building Virtual Worlds class.
We had to address two important questions :
1. How can you make the guest play the experience purely through “Indirect Control” ; ie making the world evolve and playable by itself without a set of instructions.
2. How can you give the guest the feeling of freedom inside the virtual world and at the same time make sure he finishes all the task that you want him to.
We made some important design decisions and used a lot of Visual and Audio cues which helped us simply the escape room like puzzle world easily. The guest was put in this grayscale world only the important and useful object were in color. This helped direct attention of the guest to those object very easily.
Every time a letter came in there was an Audio cue that immediately caught the attention of the guest in an otherwise relatively quiet world. 90% of our guests were able to figure out and solve the escape room without having us to intervene during the experience.
Contributions:
Gameplay programming : Implemented the entire sequence timeline events and triggers and spatial audio setup.
Interactions : Handled the interaction of the feet using VIVE trackers. Setup the world for room size for the VIVE room.
Unity : Particles effects for the small paper planes flying out.
Contributed to the interaction and system design of the experience.