What Is The Econeer?
Every spring at Rochester Institute of Technology, the senior class of New Media Design joins the senior class of New Media Interactive Development to create capstone projects. We then showcase them all at RIT's annual innovation festival, ImagineRIT. This year we were challenged with the prompt "Do good".
We then created a collaborative and immersive virtual reality experience to help showcase the importance of ecological sustainability.
In VR, the user chooses a plot and uses their limited amount or resources to choose what tiles to place. They could do good and think of how their choices affect the earths health as a whole or choose whatever they want with negative effects on the earth.
Target Audience - 10-20 years old
Bringing awareness to these issues creates a rippling effect for future individuals to innovate. Many kids and teens today show improved cognition through interactive and visual presentations and the younger audience is open to learning emerging technologies.
The Building Models
The players choose which building models they want on their tile and then it populates the world. The tiles work together and share resources with nearby tiles. The resources are then calculated with pre-determined metrics to determine the world’s health.
In-Game Interface
The different categories, People, Power and Happiness are color coded to easily differentiate the three. Important statistics are able to be seen at a glance by looking at the controller so the user can make sure the earth is in balance. For many people, using our app is their first time in VR, UI was made to be intuitive.
Imagine RIT Event Showcase
Virtual reality transports the user right into the world they've created, completely immersing them in the experience. It's a tactile and visual tool that's able to reward the user with a more memorable and enjoyable experience. Users had a given amount of time to create their plot.
Marketing
To stand out from all the other exhibits, we user bold and friendly colors for our branding. We put up eye catching posters around campus to generate interest and created a logo to use on assets for the project.
Room Design
Our project was assigned a classroom and to decorate, we created life size low poly trees to match the ones inside our game. We also created a hologram of a rotating globe which was unlike anything created for the other showcases. This generated a ton of interest in our project and people came in just to see it.
Participation
We had great participation and had a continuous line to try our project from the start of the event to the end.
