After the ETC Soft Opening, we decided to drop the third experience we had planned to create, the Morning Glory Pool experience. We decided to do so because we wanted to spend the whole week polishing the current 2 experiences, the geyser and the bison experiences, based on the critiques we received from the Soft Opening. We believe it is better to present two well-polished experiences than to stretch our resources across three that are only average.

Development

Based on the feedback from the Soft Opening, there were 2 issues we wanted to address first. The first issue was the educational content in the geyser experience. Our goal was to develop an interesting and interactive in-car edutainment experience before arriving at the destination. However, the educational part in the geyser experience was only in the voice-over, without many visual illustrations. A comment we got from the Soft Opening and the Playtest Day was that the geyser sandbox in the experience was too small to capture the magnificence of the geyser eruption. Meanwhile, there was no height reference on the sandbox to illustrate how high the eruption could go. Therefore, our solution was to add a height reference to the scene, so that the geyser eruption height could be visually examined and compared. We added the Tower of Pisa to the scene. Once the geyser has been set off, the Tower of Pisa will appear, and players will be able to see how high the eruption can go, as high as the Tower of Pisa.

The second issue was that tapping fingers to set off the geyser was not the right trigger. It made the geyser eruption seem so easy to trigger without any effort or tension. Therefore, we changed the action from tapping fingers to clapping hands. Players would need to clap their hands to increase heat and pressure. Once both the heat and pressure reach the full level, the geyser will erupt.

Here is a video showing how it works.

Besides these 2 main changes, we also added an occlusion material at the car seat, so that players would be able to see each other clearly through, without blurriness or fadeness. This is how it looks in Apple Vision Pro.

Not only did we have updates in the geyser experience, but we also optimized the interactions in the bison experience. There was an issue in the bison experience that it was very difficult to grab the food and reach the bison’s mouth. We facilitated this interaction by detecting if the food was at the car door. If so, the food would automatically be sent to the bison’s mouth.

Here is a video showing this easier feeding interaction.

Demo Video Filming

While we were polishing our experience demo, we also filmed the footage for our final demo video with our ETC professor, Dave Culyba, and his daughter, Hazel Culyba. They both gave wonderful performances and brought great energy to the acting. After filming wrapped, we moved into post-production to edit the footage and assemble the final video.

Plan for next week

Our clients, Honda 99P Labs, will be visiting us on Wednesday, April 25th, and Honda Research Institute will be visiting us on Friday, April 27th. We plan to make both the experience demo and the final demo video ready by their visit. At the same time, we start preparing our final presentation to discuss the journey and learnings from this project.