The Big Year The Big Year is a cooperative interactive experience built for “The Cave”, a room which includes a moving platform and three projected displays. This experience has the guests sent on a hot air balloon bird-watching adventure throughout multiple environments.

The project was conceived and developed in a two week time period during “Building Virtual Worlds”, a class from CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center. We brainstormed several projects, unsure of what direction to take, until eventually combining Caiyu’s hot air balloon concept with my preference for The Cave as a platform. With this, we came up with several ideas until the bird photography idea stuck. I worked as an artist and designer on the project, creating some of the bird models, graphic design, and animations. I also wrote the script that I performed as the live actor.

Escape Room

As a team, we wanted to step away from the VR space. So we were originally planning to create an escape room-like experience. This was not feasible in the time we had avaliable for the project. Model created by Caiyu Zhang.

Hot Air Balloon Battles

The original hot air balloon ideas included guests teaming up to defeat other balloons in combat. The idea of a co-op Cave experience would then be pulled into the final project.

Air Combat

We wanted to emphasize the idea of cooporative play in these balloons, where players all had equivalent roles and would have to work around the small space of the motion platform to complete their tasks.

Planning

Here are rough plans on how the navigation of the game would work. The original plan included using sensors to detect if the flame of the balloon was being fueled, though this was scrapped due to time constraints.

Flying the Balloon

Using technology was out of scope for our project. So, in the basket we constructed, we had two poles at the front that guests would pull down. The operator at the computer would then input the movement of the basket.

Photography

While one guest controls the height of the balloon, the other takes photographs of the rare birds seen in the area. The box is held like a sandwhich, with the trigger of the Vive controller poking out, to emulate the feeling of holding a camera.

Original Big Year

Here is the trailer for the experience.

Big Year for ETC Festival 2022

The updated version for the festival included a stronger basket, more birds, and a new environment for guests to travel through.