The Wait, BVW Story Round
The Wait is a mixed reality experience developed for Microsoft Hololens. The Player assumes the role of an anxious mother, as she waits in a hospital room while her daughter is receiving surgery. The player may interact with objects in the room. Touching each object in the room triggers a memory connected to the object in the form of holograms. The story unfolds through the holograms in a particular order. The player is guided by particle effects which point to the object to interact with and trail lights that direct the view of the player in the direction where the hologram appears.
Role : Producer
The most interesting learning from this project is the extent to which an emotional experience such as this could impact the player. I primarily focussed on the Experience Design by acting as the lead Scriptwriter.
Being all under 20 years of age, we as team did not understand the strong negative emotions that this story would evoke on Parents as it is about a little girl with a chronic disease. We toned down the story in the following ways :
1. Decided to not show visuals of the girl suffering from pain but rather only complaint of pain via dialogue
2. Gave the story a positive ending by making the surgery a success
3. Include some happy moments between the player and the girl like drawing a picture
It was a challenging project from the sound perspective too as a lot of dialogues had to be recorded in the right tone and emotion and mixed together with a slow music in the background. Timing the silences meant a lot.
I also contributed to the HandTracking module of the project with help from Microsoft’s open source HoloToolKit for Unity and a script by Microsoft software engineer Ritchie Lozada.