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Home · Insights · Have you ever seen a dragon? Part 1
Date posted
16 May 2019
Reading time
24 Minutes
Jake Young
Have you ever seen a dragon? Part 1
I've seen three (No, not in Game of Thrones).
In fact, more than 100 people in Northern Ireland have.
Right here.
There isn't anything there.
But there is. Yet, you can't witness these marvels with only your eyes. What you need is a magical helmet, which will allow you to venture through a mysterious fantasy world aligning with our own. A helmet that won't power itself, but will need armour that is powerful enough to sustain it on your journey.
After our initial meeting with PJ, he showed a lot of interest in experimenting with the potential of immersive technology, and the possibilities that these tools opened up to him and other creatives.
Kainos and Digital Catapult have access to the state of the art, which gave us the potential to deliver on the future. We wanted to push the accepted bounds of the current state of Virtual Reality. So, we created an experience that engulfed a large space which made the potential of immersive technology feel limitless. All the while, opening these technologies to the public in and around Belfast. Before, we have had small and narrow experiences available to us, but nothing on the scale of DragonSlumber.
An event like this, allowed us to appreciate what the word immersive will stand for in years to come. An experience that transported people to another world with fewer limits than the initial wave of Virtual Reality gave us.
In Kainos, we believe it is important to make the most of our opportunities to inspire those younger than us to get involved and find an interest within STEM. We thought this would be a great platform to do so, which supported our decision to target a younger audience.
Our First Steps.
PJ is a digital artist keen to experiment with virtual reality. He also has experience in the software industry, and someone who is the incarnate of enthusiasm. PJ was exactly the artist we were looking for.
We came together to build what we were calling a 'VR Safari'. A larger world that goes beyond the accepted spaces we find ourselves in Virtual Reality. A space that would house many pieces created by various artists and would all fit together as one, to create a larger world.
With the addition of PJ, came the swift manoeuver to an experience which would be one whole piece. This made sense for many reasons; introducing more minds to the project created noise and there would be more risk to worry about.
PJ had many great ideas on how to fill the space before we told him the size of it. 15m x 12m was the measurement, to which he responded on a scale that we hadn't been thinking of before. Dragons; in the space, PJ wanted to lay a sleeping dragon down for people to walk around. Something of that scale would have been very expensive to create without Virtual Reality.
The initial concept looked like this;
It is hard to determine the size of the space from the photo at the top and the above concept drawing, but the space is almost equal to that of a tennis court. Compared to the average space available for most people - that's big.
Testing.
As soon as we got into the space, we had a plan for what we wanted to test. We have had previous experience with larger scale experiences, but not with inside-out tracking, so we had an idea of what to look out for.
We needed something that we could use that was pick up and play, allowing us to test quick. Looking into our options, applications such as Google Blocks, Tilt Brush, Oculus Quill, Medium, Microsoft Maquette and Gravity Sketch came up. After testing in the limited space of our office, we decided on Tilt Brush. It was the app that played the nicest with us walking beyond the bounds of our chaperone. What we didn't think of at the time was how useful it would become for prototyping and recording the space the event would take place in.