HoloVista: Designing for Immersion: Using a mobile app to simulate an alternate reality

HoloVista is a mixed reality social media simulator game reminiscent of a near-future Instagram. Players experience a week in our protagonist Carmen’s life through the places she goes, the objects she photographs, the thoughts she shares on social media, and her chats with friends. Every time Carmen travels to a new location in the story, players access a virtual camera, which allows them to view the game’s environments in full 360°, finding and photographing significant objects. By taking photos and solving puzzles, players learn a secret that Carmen has been running since childhood. Our goal was to create an immersive mobile XR experience with no peripherals. To achieve this, we relied on interaction design and narrative. Leveraging the phone’s gyroscope and accelerometer, we gave players a sense of presence within a fictional space by letting them use the same motions/gestures to explore it as they would when examining a real-life scene through the game’s camera. In this way, HoloVista engages the proprioception area of the brain, making people feel as though they are physically present in the world we have built. In this document, we explore several of our techniques for player immersion.