IMMERSIVE CHILDREN'S THEATER
University of Iowa Stead Family Children's Hospital
Iowa City, IA
From concept to completion Monica Roesner and I played a major part within this project for an interactive theater at the University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital. At any given time, four users can stand within their designated circle on the floor and interact with two games. These are kinect games that are operated using the waving of arms. We needed to make them wheel chair accessible.
The first game is called Story in the Stars; I spent the most time helping to develop this content. I wanted the game to not feel linear, instead children can jump in and out of the story as they please. This game has a constellation look, cycles through three stories; users can interact with hot spots that populate animations and bring the stories to life. I wrote two of the three stories that can be found below. We worked with four voice over actors and I helped direct them; we wanted the content to feel new each time a story was played. I worked with Wes Derstine to storyboard each scene. We all came up with ideas that could populate the hot spots. I modeled, rigged and animated low-poly animations for our hot spots and then exported for Unity.
For Eagles’ Flight we broke down the areas our eagles would fly through and the objects users could collect. We worked with a software developer to bring both concepts to life in Unity.
Children’s blocks are a common theme throughout the University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital. So, I created a projection screen attract loop and kiosk attract loop that incorporated them.
Here are voice overs for two of the three stories that I wrote; they play during Story in the Stars.
