Roles: Game Designer, Speaker at the Games for Change Festival
Team: 7 people
Dev Time: 48 hours
XR Horse Carriage Ride is an asymmetrical multiplayer simulation of the horse carriage rides in NYC, meant to convey the stark contrast between a NYC tourist’s exciting experience on the ride and the abused carriage horse’s stressful version of the same events. It was created in 48 hours for the XR Brain Jam at the 2023 Games for Change Festival. We won the Audience Favorite award, so I gave a talk about it at the conference, and we ran our demo at the Festival arcade.
The Tourist plays on the Tilt Five AR platform, which consists of a large mat, AR glasses, and a wand controller. When wearing the glasses, the player can see a 3D world within the bounds of the mat, as if it’s a window to another world. The Tourist holds an apple at the end of the wand, which is used to lead the horse carriage around the vibrant streets of NYC.
The Horse player wears the Vive Elite headset and is placed in the perspective of the horse that is pulling the Tourist’s carriage. Carriage horses are often mistreated, and we conveyed this through more abrasive sights and sounds in the VR headset, the absence of any input or control, and a vignette post-processing effect to limit the field of view as horse blinders do. We also wrote a shader to replicate the horse’s visible color range, which is much more limited than humans’.