Collaborative Virtual Reality Maze
In a time when it’s difficult to get together with friends, collaborative games offer a safe way to interact with others remotely. Although multiplayer video games have been around for nearly as long as video games themselves, new technologies make room for improving immersion and overall experience. Most recently, virtual reality has offered players the opportunity to enter the world of a game like never before, opening new options for developers to tell stories and entertain their audience. Asymmetrical multiplayer VR games, those that involve only a portion of the players in VR, show promise as a method for allowing people to come together remotely without feeling the distance. Adding custom, microcontroller based peripherals furthers the immersive aspects of the experience, creating the opportunity for exciting collaboration over long distances.
Our game is developed for a team of two or more players, and challenges the team to work together in order to escape from a randomly generated maze. One player wears a VR headset and is charged with exploring the maze. The remaining players use a custom, microcontroller based peripheral to view a map of the maze’s layout. However, the player exploring the maze has no knowledge of its layout and the players viewing the maze have no knowledge of the explorer’s position or heading. By exploring the maze and communicating the explorer’s findings, the team can gather enough information to determine the explorer’s location and guide them to the exit.