Curiouser VR

Alice in Wonderland as a VR locomotion puzzle game.

Curiouser VR is an Oculus game that takes an innovate approach to VR locomotion. Grow and shrink yourself to scale the size of your steps, enabling full environment navigation within a confined playspace (think of a leapfrog strategy).

I worked on this for the MIT Reality Hack 2020 as part of an interdisciplinary team of developers, artists, and audio engineers.

My contrubutions included:

• Growing and shrinking of the VR player
• Food consumption detection
• Door/key interaction and animation
• Out of bounds screen overlay (anti-cheating)
• End game (win conditions, win screen overlay)
• Editing the video
• Handling all the scary Git stuff

We used the Oculus Integration tools for the VR game mechanics, and developed on an Oculus Rift. I later built the game for Oculus Quest.

It was not so trivial to implement the growing/shrinking effect, because the OVRCameraRig does not follow the player as they move through their playspace, so scaling the entire camera rig would cause the player to slide around as they shrink towards some point in their playspace. Instead, I used some math to scale the rig around a point at a height of zero, directy underneath the CenterEyeAnchor (which does follow the headset through the playspace).

For fun, when the player tries to poke their head through the walls, the screen fades to black and says “Too curious…” :)