About Us

VESP [Virtual Extended Sensory Palette] is a student pitch project for the Spring 2021 semester at CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center.

We are a multidiscipline team working on an edutainment experience that brings  animal senses to middle schoolers through virtual reality. We hope guests will emerge from our experience with stronger insight how the natural world operates outside of the human palette, and an interest in learning more about the animal kingdom by connecting with local spaces such as museums, zoos, and aquariums. 

We will be spending the first half of our semester building a series of rapid gameplay prototypes in Unity exploring how an animal uses their unique sense to fulfill a fundamental need. In the second half of our semester, we will culminate our learnings and developments into a polished experience and PR package that we can then pitch to potential clients such as the Pittsburgh Zoo and the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum. 

The VR experience will give you – the player – a deeper understanding of how some animal senses work, and a greater sense of empathy with these animals. You will be transported to exotic places, where you need to help three animal spirits with their problems, and will need their unique senses to do so. You will be able to utilize the senses which these animals use that humans cannot perceive – through the use of VR and create interpretation – to experience a whole new dimension and achieve things that normally wouldn’t be possible by humans.