The Roosevelt is my latest VR experience. In the spirit of “sharing the journey” here’s an early design document that provides a general overview.
The Roosevelt: A VR Experience
Experience “The Roosevelt”, a cinematic virtual reality experience. It’s not a story or a film, it’s a personal experience tailored for you. Experience the grounds, make friends and live the eclectic experience tailored for you. Love it or leave it, it’s up to you…. come early and stay late at The Roosevelt.
Vision: The Roosevelt is a cinematic emergent narrative VR experience where the participant witnesses a crime while staying at the hotel. This emergent narrative comes alive right before your eyes as the choices you make determine the story by how you choose to interact with other guests and staff at the hotel. Amongst your choices are to:
- Participate in solving the crime
- Become a passive observer while the investigation takes place
- Get the heck out of there
Ultimately the myriad of choices provide eight completely different endings that you choose simply by participating in the experience. At no point are you aware of how your choices will impact the story.
Software Development: The Roosevelt will be developed in unity for the oculus rift. Interaction will be achieved utilizing voice and the touch controllers. Game management will be provided by narrative artificial intelligence utilizing Watson for its natural language processing, speech to text and conversation api. Nodal branching, NPC motivations and Narrative AI machine learning will be written in C#. NPC photogrammetry will be done at 8i or ict and building interior and exterior photogrammetry will be done on location.
Narrative Artificial Intelligence: At the heart of the this experience is the concept of narrative artificial intelligence which employs machine learning to achieve optimal nodal branching for each unique participant. The goal of narrative AI is to achieve an Aristotelian story customized for each user using their unique interactions at different story points. The algorithm is tuned as more and more trials are performed by users experiencing the simulation.
And there you have it! More updates to come as we continue down this journey.
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