ARES A Room-scale VR Thriller
ARES begins with the user being told that they have just won their own reality TV show in space. Due to funding cutbacks at NASA, Hollywood has become the only way to explore space. The user steps into a space pod with the cameras rolling while the audience back home watches. The scene fades out as the user blasts off. Within moments, there is an explosion and the craft plunges through the atmosphere of an unknown planet into an underground cave. With the help of the emergency drone TINK, the user must navigate the sinuous underground caverns to get back to the surface of the planet. After making it to the final cavern, the user climbs a wall to the surface to discover s/he is on Mars. Billboards for future products float in the distance as the atmosphere teems with interplanetary travelers.
General Information
Project Role
Game Designer, Developer, and VR UX Designer
Downloads Views
Closed Study
Tech Stack
Unity, C#, SteamVR
Affiliated Research Lab
Prototyping eNarrative Lab, Georgia Institute of Technology
Publications and Presentations
VSMM 2017, CHI 2017, IEEE VR 2017
Still Available
Upon Request
Demo Video
Process
Wireframing the Virtual Environment
The Rendered VE
Natural movement is not a catch-all solution for establishing presence in a Virtual Environment (VE). However, movement is a ubiquitous interaction across VEs. Consequentlly, when movement can be used contextually within an experience, it is conducive to both dramatic agency and presence. In agreement with Suma, natural-walking, achieved through the subtle application of continuous repositioning techniques and is a preferred method to achieve those aforementioned ends. To those ends, the VE was constructed as overlapping sections that could reposition and reorient the user to achieve a natural movement affordance.
Version 1 of ARES VE
Associated Publications
- Fisher, Joshua A., Amit P. Garg, Wesley Wang, Karan Pratap Singh. "Bauhaus Scenography for Virtual Environments." 23rd International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia (VSMM). IEEE, 2017.
- Fisher, Joshua A., Amit P. Garg, Karan Pratap Singh, Wesley Wang. 2017. "ARES: An Application of Impossible Spaces for Natural Locomotion in VR" 2017 CHI Student Game Competition. Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA
- Fisher, Joshua A., Amit P. Garg, Karan Pratap Singh, Wesley Wang. “Designing Intentional Impossible Spaces to Increase Presence in Virtual Reality Narratives” 2017 IEEE Virtual Reality (VR), Las Vegas, NV, 2017
