After a disappointing round four, I was excited for round five as we had been allowed to pick our own team unlike previous rounds and I knew that we were going to create something fun and interesting come what may. This was also the final round of BVW, so a somewhat bittersweet ending to the roller coaster of a semester that was.

Let the Festivities begin

For the final round of BVW, the assignment prompt was to build a fun and memorable experience for the guests with the ETC Festival in mind in a span of two weeks. The ETC Festival is a huge celebration at the end of the semester where a select few experiences from the semester are showcased for friends, family, ETC Alumni and folks in the industry. The Festival was a big deal for all of us, so we were extremely excited to start working on something novel using the Virtuix Omni, Fove and Makey- Makey as our hardware platform for the experience.

I was on a team with another programmer, two artists and a sound designer. My role on the project was that of a Programmer and Interaction Designer. I was responsible for building the maze game in the Fove and Omni and also implementing the soundboard for running the show live. I was able to be up and running with the Fove and Omni SDKs quickly to prototype on the idea of the maze game in the Unity game engine.

We started the design process with the basic idea that we wanted to do something like a game show where multiple guests would be involved in the experience. We came up with the initial idea where multiple people would play multiplayer games on Virtual Reality devices. We also wanted to incorporate participation from the audience of the game show. After a consultation with our instructors, we came to a realization that this idea might be out of scope for the time frame that we had.

We decided to focus on making an experience where there would be a large proportion of theatre elements mixed in with some elements of technology. We wanted to make the experience memorable for the guests and watching someone fumble around in the Omni while wearing a VR headset is something memorable and we chose that to be part of our experience. All of us wanted to make a comedy sketch and that got us thinking on what the whole story should be. We chose to set entire sketch like a 70's game show and theme it in the same way, with the bright colors and the leisure suits.

The final experience, "Out of Your Mind" is an interactive theatrical piece that acts as sort of a meta-comedy playing on the idea of projects being in the festival. The experience begins as a typical game show, where contestants come up and participate to win fabulous prizes. However, as the “show” continues then everything begins to devolve as the final revelation was that this experience was actually a world that did not make it into ETC festival and the group tried to sneak in anyway.

Am I going crazy

In our first iteration of the project, the story involved 2 two person teams taking part in a game show that was set in the 70's. As the winning team progressed to the final round where the must enter the "Mastermind" to win the game, Photon Solenoid, a neural projection from the future arrives and takes control of the game show, claiming that it is a figment of your imagination and we are trapped in a simulation. He zaps the host and his helpers and starts his experience in the Omni and Fove ,which is a maze that will help the players escape the simulation. As the game ends, the host tries to salvage the situation by claiming that it is yet another twist and this was part of the game show all along and as the audience settle back into this reality, all the lights are switched on and the orderly at the asylum is shushing everyone and asking the guests to leave the experience.

After Interim, we received feedback that told us that we were in the right direction but the ending was too obscure and made no sense. People could not relate to it. For our second iteration, we tuned the story to be about a jaded ETC team that had ben snubbed for not being in the festival and as a result, they hijacked their way into the festival, but one of the team members didn't like the game show idea and wanted to do a tech matrix idea and at the end everything was falling apart and the festival organisers were called in to stop the ruckus we were creating. This ending was a lot more meta as it was all about the Festival and we considered that a lot of the jokes might be too insidey but it seemed to work and the faculty liked it.

We had a spinning wheel that we made that had the categories for the game show. We wanted to use the spinning wheel as part of an interaction in the game where the player inside the experience would be responsible for running around the maze and looking around and the player standing outside would have to use the wheel to assist the player in the experience by opening the doors by using the wheel. We attached a Makey-Makey to the back of the wheel to get input from the six different categories. We made the puzzle in the game such that for the first two rooms you needed to match the wheel to the theme of the room and the last puzzle involved you turning multiple wheels like a lock.

I was in charge of creating the soundboard that was responsible for creating all the sound effects and background music live during the performance. I worked with the sound designer and writer for the project to create a repository of all the sounds that would be needed for the soundboard and mapped them to specific keys on the keyboard, using which I would be able to trigger the required sound live during the performance. I also worked with DMX lights to incorporate a flare element to the experience to increase immersion.

Round Complete

Our goal with this project was to make a fun and memorable experience for the guests where they come in thinking they are visiting a secret world at festival only to find out halfway that something is not right and all along the way keep them in splits with the quick witted humor of the host. We had loads of fun working on the gags for this experience and even though we didn't end up getting selected for the festival, it was my most memorable experience from the entire semester.