Project Amelio is a Mixed Reality experience using a CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment), where a group of people are put in a room to see how well they work together. This serious game project was a collaboration between Breda University of Applied Sciences (formerly known as NHTV University of Applied Sciences), Tilburg University and TIAS Business School.
When the group start in the game, they find themselves as a rescue team at a damaged base on a planet far from home. By solving puzzles they have to get the base opperative again and search for possible survivors before time runs out. Instead of using the stereoscopic view that the CAVE give for 3D, the game divides the group of players into two groups: one group only gets to see the left eye view to both eyes, the other one gets to see the right eye view. By doing this, the game can show different images between the groups, which encouraged collaboration even further.
The CAVE itself is a closed room where the game gets projected on each wall by several projectors. This makes it possible to have multiple people together surrounded by the Virtual World opposing VR-Headsets, which useally is a solo experience.
My contributions
During this project I have taken upon several tasks which were not always art related, but I mainly stuck to modelling and UI. As I was in the project from the start, I have seen it grown from a concept to a playable demo in the course of one year.
At one point I got asked if I could create a little robot model which could give hints in the game. This was the first time I have done something in the direction of character modelling, but being inspired by Wheatley from Portal 2 it turned out to a simple character the clients were satisfied with. It taught me some basic understanding of the animation rules as well.
Beside the little side project of creating a character, I was working a lot with creating the scene around all the puzzels together with another artist. At one point our client invested in some asset packs, which we had to combine with our own assets to dress up the scene properly. This was at first a bit of a challenge, since those assets were made quite different then our own, but after some trial and error we have been able to combine them.
Additional Project Info
Engine: Unity 3D
Platform: CAVE
Software used: Unity 5.3.5f1, Maya 2015, Photoshop CS6
Development time: 10 months
