Roles: Programmer, Designer
Team: 6 people
Dev Time: 7 weeks, ongoing
• Communicating safe and feasible mixed reality minigames to our client, Dragon’s Den, a local ropes course that hosts an afterschool program for underprivileged children.
• Implementing Quest 3 passthrough mechanics such as virtual windows to achieve a compelling blend of the historic architecture of the physical space and an educational virtual environment.
Dragon’s Den is a local Pittsburgh ropes course venue inside a historic church building, created to educate and inspire underprivileged youth in an adventure therapy-based space. Our client, Giulia Lozza Petrucci, the founder of Dragon’s Den, wants our team to apply mixed reality to the ropes course in order to teach and entertain the children who participate in her afterschool program.
To kick off our project, we climbed the ropes course ourselves and began rigorously inspecting potential spaces in the venue that we could base our mixed reality prototypes on. The first space we identified, the choir loft where guests queue for the zipline, was one of the safest spaces on the ropes course, with flat ground that could be detected by the Quest 3 headset. It also was a section of the ropes course that could benefit from entertainment, as boredom while waiting for the zipline had caused dangerous incidents in the past. Thus we began to think of intuitive mechanics that could smoothly integrate reality and virtuality, which would fit the overall story of Dragon’s Den while remaining safe to perform on the ropes course.
Currently, iterated over five weeks using Unity and the Quest 3 and tested with youth ages 10-13, we have a prototype that involves using a slingshot to launch fruit from a stationary position. The goal is to feed a baby dragon, the fantastical friend and protector of the children at Dragon’s Den. As an experienced designer in mixed reality, I help guide the team towards interactions and features that work well with the medium. I also implemented passthrough shaders to create the illusion of virtual windows into a rainforest environment that appears “outside the windows of Dragon’s Den”. The rainforest is intended to be an interesting foreign space to children, who can then learn about the ecology of real rainforests through their educators at Dragon’s Den.
As we continue developing prototypes with the Quest 3 and testing more XR devices that are safer to use on the ropes course obstacles, we hope to learn more!