At the beginning of the project I was given reference material from other Planet Texas 2050, which included an escape room experience based in an off shore weather station. We were also given preview access to the escape room. I took reference photos to capture the overall aesthetic of their project, I believed that their project and ours would both benefit from a since of uniformity and used these photos later when deciding environment art and the narrative of our lab.

To design the main play area, I drew inspiration from near future scientific work places. With a large heavy table top in the middle of the room as the main place of interaction, along with ample counter and cabinet space along the perimeters of the room. The lab was designed to have large windows on two walls of the lab. This was inspired by the escape room where windows let the user see the outside environment during a storm, conveying the ambience of stronger storms in the future as part of the climate change. Later these windows were extended into a full wall that curves around the far corner of the room.

The interconnectedness puzzle is meant to help the player build an understanding of the different factors involved in certain environmental issues and how they relate to each other. The team presented the idea of a pipe puzzle, but simplified to ensure play time was shorter and that more of the player's attention was focused on learning the material as opposed to playing a game.

Each puzzle is accompanied with a voice over and visual clues that help the player build their understanding of the factors involved. They then submit their answer after making the connections they think are involved. Once they submit their answer, the player is given another voice over that explains the answer to the puzzle despite the player's answer. The player is also given visual indications as to what connections were correct, wrong, or missing.

Typically for a puzzle game, the player would have to reattempt the answer until they discover the correct answer. However, for this experience we wanted to ensure that the player would be able to move through the experience in a timely manner. This was a requirement of the experience being presentable at research summits, where users have a limited amount of time before moving on to other exhibits.

Considering that the target audience for this experience is outside of the typical gamer audience, the UI/UX needed to be as intuitive and simplistic as possible. This meant avoiding traditional game pad inputs and clearly describing inputs during the onboarding process. I drew  inspiration from diegetic spatial UI designs in games like Job Simulator, where tactile virtual interfaces are created as intuitive inputs.

The player's watch serves as the main controller of the experience, allowing them to move between segments and submit their answers in the interconnectedness puzzles. The red "Next" button appears and disappears when appropriate for the player, to ensure that they don't accidentally push it during an information segment. The yellow "Help" button is enabled for when the player needs information repeated during the puzzles, incase they need to refresh on the clues or if they missed anything. The timer is to help player's keep track of how long they have been in the experience. In the event that they realize they've spent too long in the experience, they can easily leave by pushing the "Exit" button near the door. 

Player interactions for the puzzle is centered on using the trigger to create links between the different element cubs. Hovering over the element highlights the object, then the player may pull the trigger to begin making a link. Once the player connects another element, the link is created. If the player would like to remove a link, they can hover over the link and pull the trigger again. The trigger was selected for this, because it is one of the more platform agnostic controller inputs among VR devices; ensuring that players would have a trigger despite their platform.

The map utilizes simple sliders to let the player seamlessly transition between datasets. This gives a clean visualization of the data as the player moves through the timeline.