Robot Recall - Dimension X

While working at Factory42, the goal was to make a multiplayer experience with the Magic Leap. We ended up spending a lot of time, researching into the strengths and weaknesses of the magic leap, its capatabilities and how far we could stretch the technology with various tests. Once we became really comfortable with what we were working with, we began working on a shopping centre experience that would be released on the 8th of March 2020. We explored the idea of being able to customise your robot and allowing players to see their friends mix and match their own robots to their likings. Once 60 seconds were up, players would then begin saving the city based on the robot combination they had setup. I worked primarily on the robot customisation and hazard interaction as well as firing audio events. This project was a lot of fun and would love to work with the magic leap again!

This project was worked on with the national science museum and national history museum as partners. They informed us on what kind of things they would like to represent in the game and in this case, representing the different ways to traverse the environment was important to be accurate, so we moved the jets, drones and air balloon based on how they would traverse realistically.

One of the biggest challenges faced with this project was the calibration. Because the experience was multiplayer, we needed to align everyones experience to the correct position where they would match. To resolve this, we used a calibration image per player where each player would have to scan their image at the beginning of the game. To not take away from the experience, we set the calibration image to be instructions on how to play the game however each calibration image instructions were unique for each player.

There were 2 problems that occured just before we released. The first problem being that the panels around the calibration images were highly reflective. Coincidentally we were releasing this experience in a shopping mall which had large bright lights and a TV panel behind us so all of that was showing on the surface and caused magic leaps calibration to be abit wonky. We resolved this issue by changing the calibration images to be a lot clearer with all the interference.

The second problem was that we pre-built the set two time before the shopping center and everything was aligned correctly however upon arrival to the final set in the shopping center, the builders had placed the images in the wrong order and the images were glued to the table. We couldn't swap them in fear of damaging the calibration images or the table. We resolved this by changign the order of the calibration images in the build.