Developer, Designer
Team: 6 people
Dev Time: 7 weeks
• Communicated safe and feasible mixed reality minigames to our client, Dragon’s Den, a local ropes course that hosts an afterschool program for underprivileged children.
• Implemented 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, wanted 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.
After iterating across seven weeks using Unity, the Quest 3, and the XREAL Light AR glasses, we tested three prototypes with youth ages 10-13:
1. A stationary Quest 3 dragon-feeding game on the choir loft preceding the zipline
2. A roomscale Quest 3 game on the ground, slingshotting targets in a virtual environment outside the church windows
3. An AR experience on the ropes course, providing positive feedback when reaching checkpoints along the course
As an experienced designer in mixed reality, I helped 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 intriguing foreign space for children who can then learn about the ecology of real rainforests through their educators at Dragon’s Den.
Working with a large, dynamic physical space was challenging and helped me learn a lot about Quest 3 MR development. For example, the platforms players stand on while traversing the ropes course are constantly in motion and are difficult to track without image recognition. Passthrough distances the player from the inherent immersive physicality of climbing, so there must be enough integration between virtual content and the perceived environment to regain the player’s physical connection to their surroundings. By watching children play our games, I discovered that they roleplay with each other and tend to play in small groups of their friends, even if only one person is wearing the headset.
Based on what I learned, I will continue to develop games for Dragon’s Den following the end of this project. I’d like to explore more tactile interactions and movement around the ropes course. Each feature of the games, from mechanics to transitions and UI, must make sense in the context of the player’s fantasy and have roots in both the real and virtual worlds. That’s where the magic happens. I want to make social games will benefit the children and their imagination, taking advantage of their natural propensity for roleplaying. I’ll also sprinkle in a bit of friendly competition, because it will be healthy for them to learn to handle wins and losses.
Thank you to Giulia and Dragon’s Den for this innovative project opportunity!