Perspective takes the original the ScareCo office from (Don't) Fear the Reaper and shines a new light on it. In this project, you can view the original room and interact with it as you normally would (check out the original ScareCo office here!), but now you can enter the world as if you were an ant or stay at normal height but rotate the room as you please or even rearrange the space as if it were a Mego playset! You can easily jump between worlds with the menu attached to your left wrist.

If you're ready to experience ScareCo in a new way, head over to the installation instructions below!

Dramatic lighting that the user can grab and move as needed

Ladders on every table and machine

Wrist mounted menu system

Wrist mounted menu system and rotations

Interacting with the ScareCo office in these different ways allows the user to gain a fuller perspective of the space created. As one of the designers of the space, using the Mego Playset mode helps me to rearrange the space quickly in VR and see how I like it, and I can quickly check what it looks like to players by switching to the original room with the menu system. In my own personal life, I have employed something similar to Mego Playset mode. I created a life-sized scale of my living room and a miniaturized version as well in order to rearrange the space easily and observe the amount of space in and the bird’s eye composition of the room.

In the Land of Giants mode, I can scurry around the floor and add more interaction with the floor. In many games, we do not consider the floor and only view it as a way to keep ourselves from falling into oblivion. Moving around as an ant in the mode gives me inspiration to add fun mini goals close to the ground or hidden items in corners and crevices. Additionally, taking an ant’s eye view can emphasize the composition of the room, and Chris and I as designers can complicate or simplify the room composition, either for artistic reasons or practical reasons that affect gameplay. In game, walking around as an ant puts a bit of fear in my mind: will I be stepped on? Would I be able to carry the coins that I find? It is certainly a fun way of navigating through the room.

Dancing on the Ceiling is an interesting mode to be in as there is no immediate real world use that is observable. However, when looking at this mode in comparison to the others, I notice different things about the room. In the standard mode, I get used to how it looks, and I inevitably ignore certain details. Rotating the room, while a bit dizzying, inspires other ideas about transportation. Chris and I could install monkey bars to the walls and floors that the user can grab and prevent from being thrown around the room. Or when the room is flipped, we can add rings for the user to swing or jump through. It is a bit of a surreal experience since there is not anything available that flips around a room so violently (at least that is widely available). One way to use it is to flip the room so that the player can hang things on the ceiling or high on the walls. When the room is returned to normal, sure everything else is in disarray, but you can see how nice the potted plants look on the ceiling or how that painting looks in that spot you couldn’t reach. This type of accessibility is not something that is available in either of the other two modes. The Land of Giants mode, you are far too small, and in the Mego Playset mode, you are far too large and the ceiling blocks your view.

Overall, each mode offers their own advantages and disadvantages. For me, I enjoy seeing how each view can help me modify the room and conceptualize new games and interactions for players.

In this application, we’ve designed it such that the user has the ability to experience an existing world in a few different ways on top of the traditional, user height first person view. These views are Mego Playset, Land of Giants, and Dancing on the Ceiling.

In the Mego Playset view, the user takes on the perspective of a god game. The world the user was previously in is now open and exposed to manipulation from the user. This view would be very conducive to making Tycoon games, where the user has to build some series of systems from an omnipresent view. Alternatively in games both VR and flatscreen, this view could be productive for creating level editors for users or also enabled as design tools for the team responsible for games levels. Hand placing props, debris, and other objects with a toolkit in one hand and tools in the other much like the 3D art applications for VR (such as Tilt Brush) or element physics simulators like Powder Game (but in VR). Likewise, this view could be utilized for cooperative design applications like interior design, exterior design, organizing utility placement within a space.

The Land of Giants view significantly decreases the user’s relative volume within the game’s world. This could be applied to the concept of “walking a mile in someone else’s shoes,” in both decreasing volume and increasing volume. If photogrammetry becomes easier and more accessible to the masses, this view could be used to simulate different sized people in spaces to gauge comfort for home seekers by realtors. As a person at 6’4, many rooms (especially in older buildings) can be physically or mentally uncomfortable if I’m not left with enough of a vertical buffer between myself and a ceiling or ceiling fan. This could also be used for guiding narrative experiences from perspectives other than one’s own.

Dancing on the Ceiling, the final view, could be used greatly for 3D puzzles and narrative experiences. There are many games and Sci-Fi movies that mess with gravity to a great extent with shifting perspectives that could be translated to VR in this way, with or without explicit intervention of the user (like our menu). In terms of puzzles, if one were to make M.C. Escher-esque worlds or other sorts of warping and recursive structures, being able to traverse them while modifying the gravity characteristics would be potentially cathartic and would possibly allow for a deeper understanding and introspection over the pieces of art.

In terms of collectively applying the principles demonstrated in this application, the most obvious real world application in allowing such a user’s manipulation would be to create a game or simulation using Marvel’s Ant-Man or similar IP as a VR title. Allowing real time volume and gravity changes paired with the physics implications could lead to an experience with an enriching and high skill ceiling.