This week, we hit the ground running. Coming back from break, we had no time to ease in—within hours, we had discovered a perfectly fitting conference opportunity and had only two days to put together a full submission. At the same time, we needed to process faculty feedback from halves, refining our long-term plans and thinking beyond just delivering the toolkit. With South Fayette’s March 25 showcase fast approaching, we also had to push an update to ensure everything was fully functional on their CAVERN setup.
24 hours for a SIGGRAPH submission
On Monday afternoon, we stumbled upon SIGGRAPH’s Spatial Storytelling track, a session that doesn’t just showcase immersive experiences, but emphasizes how they are built. This was exactly what we had been working on for months, but we had only two days before the submission deadline. After a quick discussion, we committed: we were doing this.
What followed was a full-on sprint to put together a polished, professional submission in an incredibly short timeframe. We wrote a detailed extended abstract, articulating the technical innovations of Spelunx—from our stereoscopic rendering to our motion-tracking and spatial audio integration. We refined a shorter synopsis to capture our work succinctly, balancing technical depth with accessibility. And finally, we produced a video with a full voiceover and subtitles, demonstrating Spelunx in action and clearly explaining its impact.
Despite the chaotic timeline, we didn’t cut corners. Faculty provided feedback on our content, ensuring our explanations were both technically precise and engaging for a broader audience. Whether or not we get accepted, the process itself was a huge moment of consolidation—forcing us to step back and clearly define what Spelunx is, what problems it solves, and how it fits into the larger immersive technology landscape.
Planning for the second half of the semester
With halves presentations behind us, we had the chance to sit down to reflect and assess where we stood. The response from faculty was overwhelmingly positive—faculty not only understood our project, but saw it as something that was well-structured, impactful, and exceeding expectations.
This clarity of purpose was a major milestone. One of the challenges of a technical project is effectively communicating its value, especially to an audience that includes designers, educators, and developers with different levels of familiarity with the technology. Faculty encouraged us to keep refining how we frame Spelunx for different user groups—whether it’s an educator looking for an easy way to onboard students, or a developer wanting to extend the toolkit’s functionality.
Beyond immediate validation, this feedback pushed us to think beyond the semester. The question wasn’t just, “What do we need to finish?” but “How does this toolkit remain useful after we leave?” Maintaining Spelunx as a living, growing platform meant reinforcing documentation, modularity, and ease of access. This led to deeper discussions about long-term sustainability—who maintains the toolkit, where it will be hosted, and how future teams can continue building on it.
Pushing the Next Update: Getting South Fayette Ready
By the end of the week, we shifted focus to toolkit updates, ensuring South Fayette could fully utilize Spelunx for their upcoming March 25 Digital Promise conference. Their setup differs from ours in multiple ways, meaning that toolkit functionality needed to be flexible and adaptable to different environments.
Perhaps the most important refinement was ensuring Spelunx could support multiple CAVERN configurations. South Fayette’s CAVERN is 22 feet in diameter, larger than the ETC’s setup. This meant that scaling the CAVERN space, motion tracking zones, and spatialized interactions dynamically had to be part of the toolkit. The update we pushed this week introduced a profile system that allows Spelunx to adapt to different CAVERN sizes, making it far more flexible for future applications.
Each visit to South Fayette is a reminder that development environments are never one-size-fits-all. The better we can design Spelunx to handle different setups with minimal friction, the more accessible it becomes for a wider audience.
Looking Ahead: From Expansion to Refinement
With SIGGRAPH behind us and faculty confident in our direction, we’re now entering a new phase of development. We have more features to add, more documentations, more user testing, and all will be showcased and demonstrated in various demoing opportunities and cavern jam 2.
