aaron vanderbeek

The Hallway was created as part of the Building Virtual Worlds class at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. We were assigned the Head Mounted Display (HMD) as a platform with the design constraint that our experience had to embody the idea of 'you help character A, who is afraid of character B'.

Interaction: The guest would be sitting in an actual wheelchair (propped up so that it would not move) while hooked into the Head Mounted Display, with a tracker attached to each hand. Moving the wheelchair wheels in the real world will move you forward in the wheelchair in the virtual world.

Story: The father, played by the guest, must protect his son from an evil being as he navigates through the dark halls of a strange abandoned hospital. At the end the child survives, the journey being a metaphor for the father giving his life for his son.

To create the wheelchair interaction we used a calibration to place an invisible collision plane in the world that whenever the virtual hands (which were controlled with sensors on each hand) crossed the plane in the correct direction the wheelchair would move forward. With our setup the player was able to tilt slightly left and right while moving forward down the hallway but was unable to move backward. It was designed in this way to emphasize that you were being chased in this world, that you didn't have time to explore.

To set the stage for the experience we used audio alone over a black screen. The black screen allowed us the use of darkness to create anxiety and forced people to listen to the introduction of sounds which depicted a car crash involving a child during a thunderstorm followed by an ambulence.

We did not ever show the evil being that chases the father in the experience for a couple reasons: we felt that a mysterious, unseen presence would be a better metaphorical representation of death than a modeled character that filled physical space; and we wanted our world to be grounded in reality in which a visual depiction of 'death' may have been cheesy or absurd enough to take away from that reality. We conveyed the idea that death was chasing you through the dialogue of the child, and subtle sound cue when the lights turn off.

The final area of the hallway serves to increase the intensity of the chase in such a way to create the feelings of anxiety, fear, and hope as you speed down this mysterious space not knowing where you are going but running nonetheless. We accomplished this using a transition into a gorier, bloodier hallway and layering sound effects that gradually become more rapid. The experience culminates by bursting through an exit door in which you see the father and son on operating tables, dressed in such a way to indicate who survived the experience in the world. This image combined with the lighting and the point of view that slowly ascends was to indicate that you, the father, did not survive the journey but were able to save your child.

Designer: Participated in discussions pertaining to story, design of the interaction, art style, layout of architecture, costuming, and live action performance.

Producer: Scheduled meetings, managed assets and props, presented the world in class, catalogued minutes from meetings and discussions, and ordered pizza :)

Sound Designer: Composed, found, edited, and/or recorded all of the sound effects in the world.

This world was chosen to be shown at the end of the semester Building Virtual Worlds show, which is a showcase of some of the most entertaining worlds that were created during the semester.