Hi, I’m Keana Almario! I’m a game designer from the Philippines, and I also specialize in illustration and 2D art. This year, I’ll be the Lead Artist of Hexabyte Games.
In this post, I’ll be describing the details of the sponsored project, the technology we’re using, and the design challenge we decided to pursue.
Details of the Sponsored Project
For capstone, our team is working on a sponsored project from Shadow Factory, whose challenge for us was:
“What would be cool in terms of game play in Virtual Reality (VR) that allows players to move around spaces, buildings, in other words, without the restrictions of cables?”
The “without the restrictions of cables” part is really important, because we will be using the HP Z VR Backpacks provided by Sheridan and HP!
📷The HP Z VR Backpack G1 and its accessories. Image from the HP Official Store website.
📷The HP Z VR Backpack, when worn. Image from the HP Official Store website.
The HP Z VR PC itself is like a light and portable computer tower. You can attach it to the harness and wear it like a normal backpack. There are also small batteries on the sides of the harness that you can switch out and charge. It’s really refreshing because you don’t have to worry about tripping over cables when facing in different directions. The backpack is surprisingly light, too!
Here’s another cool thing — by adding the mountable Zed M Camera, we can turn Virtual Reality (VR) into Mixed Reality (MR)! Seeing virtual objects in the real world through a VR headset is something that we think would work really well with the VR backpack.
📷The Zed Mini Camera, by Stereolabs. Image from Engadget.
Because our team is dealing with this new and innovative technology, we’ll be spending more time than usual to test it, play with it, and design for it. Our priority for this project is to design a game that fully utilizes this mobile VR/MR technology.
A Design Challenge to Push Us Forward
In addition to Shadow Factory’s design challenge, we wanted to think of another aspect to really push our design thinking. We didn’t just want to do any MR game – we wanted to jump into something new while we were still in school. In the end, we decided our design challenge would be:
“How do we create asymmetrical multiplayer gameplay in which only one player is in Mixed Reality?”
We chose this challenge because we thought it’d be a really interesting one to tackle. Most of us in the team had done asymmetrical multiplayer games before, but never in MR. We feel that the MR aspect is bound to change our whole way of thinking (since we need to design for the capabilities of MR).
Looking back, this is the first time in the whole 4 years of the program that I’ve willingly pushed myself in a weird design direction. I think this is also because I’m with a team that’s willing to try new and strange things, which I’m really glad for. I’m looking forward to this year, and how our project will unfold!
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