During this Spring 2019 semester at the CMU ETC, I took Ruth Comely's Experience Design class that gave us an introduction of working in the interactive and immersive industry. We worked in teams to create small experiences from lighting design and projection mapping experiences to a CAVE experience and working with Phidget sensors to create interactive experiences. In this post I have summarized a few of the experiences we created this semester.

A Tree in Seasons:

This was a projection mapping experience I worked on with 3 other students. The objective of the experience was to develop a purely visual story-telling experience using projection-mapping technology. The concept of the experience is a journey through a tree’s appearance in the four seasons.

I helped design and develop the concept for the “winter“ sequence and transitions between other seasons. I used various open source shaders to create a snow effect on the shapes. I used darker colors to create a more colder vibe. I helped iterate on concepts after playtesting. I programmed using the HeavyM software to create and test the “winter” sequence.

Raiders of the Sunken Keep:

A CAVE experience I worked on with 3 other students. The objective of the assignment was to develop a multi-player experience using a Cave set-up with three projection screens, DMX lighting, and motion floor that promotes communication among the players. The story of the experience was that you are a new recruit to a band of modern day pirates, being sent to the bottom of the ocean in a submarine to recover treasure from a sunken keep. If everything goes to plan you will be rich beyond your wildest dreams, are you up to the challenge? What could really go wrong?

I worked as the lead designer and programmer on this project. I was responsible for designing all the interactions and the trigger maps that the guests would be going through and also implementing the entire level in Unity.

We were given the theme of a sunken keep that we had to use as part of the project and on doing some research I found stories about the sunken cities of the coast of Jamaica that were pirate hot beds and thought it would be a fun idea. I conceptualized the story of bumbling novice pirates being sent on an expedition as that would lend itself nicely to the fact that we would be having naive guests play through the experience.

Using the various pieces that we had, I initially ideated that we would have three phases of the experience; finding the keep, finding the treasure in the keep and; escaping the keep. On initial playtesting, we discovered that the pacing was completely off and the guests were bored as well. We had to continuously tweak the control scheme on the controllers to allow for equal contribution and trimmed the experience down to finding the treasure in the keep and escaping the keep.