The Lighthouse VR

Role	Platform	Team Size	When
Technical Designer	HTC Vive + Vive Trackers	5	Fall 2018 (3 weeks)

Project

The Lighthouse VR was a student project accepted for display at the 2018 ETC Festival. We challenged ourselves to developed a game using unique hardware, and ended up simulating climbing a spiral staircase. We won that year's Penguin Award, an award for design ambition, often ambition that spectacularly fails. Fortunately, we were the first project ever to be both accepted to Festival and win the Penguin, so it seemed to work well.

We had difficulty brainstorming ideas the first few days of the project, but found ourselves sitting around a round table. One thing led to another, and the idea of climbing a spiral came up. A team member quickly found a research paper about passive haptics and the sense of ascension, and we set out to expand upon and theme an experience around it.

Players ascend a staircase in VR

We constructed the wooden stairs players would climb by angling wooden slats. Players would step on the raised egde of the slat and bring the tip of their foot down the slope to rest fully on it. This caused their ankle to raise, and simulate a sense of ascension. By pairing this with virtual, vertical translation of the camera rig for each step (tracked with Vive trackers on players' feet), it feels like climbing stairs.

We heavily themed the experience to have a well-rounded sense of immersion. A large fan met players when they reached a window about halfway up the staircase, simulating an intense storm. Strobe lights flickered for the waiting guests, matching the lightning players in VR were seeing. Guests in the queue were onboarded with life preservers the same time they were given their safety spiel, before donning a yellow raincoat as they entered the game. Wireless VR made this process relatively painful, although Vive battery life was fairly terrible to work with.

Images