In the spirit of Halloween, Logan set out to create a spooky Magic Leap demo for Troubadore. By accident, it turned into a bit of hide and seek fun.
I love halloween. Parties, dress up, spooky, carving pumpkins because they are an ephemeral art form with a silly overtone. Means I can't fret about doing it "right" so I get to just make.
Halloween is a hidden world, the idea that there is this hidden world within our own that emerges during the spooky season. Invisible ghosts, vampires among us. The world of the dead coexisting with the world of the living.
The idea of this spooky worlds all around us but invisible really speaks to human paranoia in a delightfully creepy way.
My first explicit exposure to this idea was as a kid playing Silent Hill where the regular world transitions to this parallel "Otherworld". A little bit like the upside down in Stranger things. Well Augmented Reality manifests this idea of the world overlay. We see the world, but then peak into the hidden layers. At work it's about overlying construction documents or GIS data. At home I get to make the mythical spooky overlay a little more real. I wanted to share this idea of spooky overlay with Troubadore. While I was tempted to make the walls bleed and open up some hell portals. You know, and really creepy up my house in AR, I didn't think Troubadore was quite ready for that. Plus, that loses the spooky mystery of it. So I decided to play with spatialized audio to let the user hunt for the spooky thing by listening for it. When you find the spot where they are hiding, the spooks a revealed and run away with ridiculous ghost noises. I liked making it because: hand tracking, spatialized audio, controller input, multi player in a funny way. And an exploration of using an AR device in a primarily non-visual way. Troubadore liked it because everytime he found the ghosties hiding place, he was uncovering a magical secret, glimpsing into a previously in accessible world.