Building Virtual Worlds was the course i took in my first semester at Carnegie Mellon. Here we formed teams and made prototypes (Games,interactive experiences) over a span of two weeks.
The following are the prototypes we created throughout the entire semester. Each prototype took 2 weeks to build. The lightning round prototype was built in a week and the final prototype being 3 weeks with two weeks polish. We used the Unity game engine to develop these prototypes.
Old Bateman House
This prototype involved the use of the Kinect sensor. The player plays the role of a ghost and the objective is to scare the NPC timmy away from obstacles etc. The way the player would scare Timmy is by using his arms.
Taichi
The next round of prototyping involved Naive guests i.e playtesters from outside. These playtesters had no idea on what interfaces we used and how to use them. Thus the prototypes needed to be simple and possibly have inbuilt tutorial elements. The protoype we made simulated Taichi with the HMD and hand sensors. The player would control two virtual hands and the game would lead them to perform taichi patterns. The guest fully understood the clues in the prototype and it was a really serene experience.
Music Battle
This prototype was part of the lightning round, here we made a two player prototype where the players use Wii-motes to hit notes coming at them from 4 directions. It was a lot of fun and it became quite tough to hit the notes towards the end resulting in the players making frantic gestures to try to hit them optimally.
Nuts
In this prototype, the player controlled a squirrel in his quest to retrieve his acorn stolen by another squirrel. This also used the Wii-mote to control the direction of the squirrel motion.
Naive Clef
In this prototype, the player would use the kinect to make gestures to make music as the background scenes changed. The players could make music in anyway they liked and the music they made would add to the richness of the world.