We Choose Each Other:
The AR Rosenstrasse Experience
A story telling game about the Holocaust in WWII.
Rosenstrasse is an elegiac, immersive historical role-playing game exploring marriages between Jewish and “Aryan” Germans in Berlin between 1933 and 1943, and culminates in the eponymous women-led protests.
We adapted Rosenstrasse into a Multiplayer, Narrative, AR, Themed Environment Experience to explore the future of storytelling.
About
Project MemoiAR
Our team, memoiAR is a five-person team of artists, programmers and designers from Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC). We spent 16 weeks working together to implement AR into a tabletop role-playing experience in pursuit of narrative innovation. We built this experience for the Snap Creative Challenge, in collaboration with OH!Lab of CMU HCI institute.
This project is developed with Unity3D and runs on IOS tablets.
Project Website: https://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/memoiar/
We Choose Each Other
We derived the story from the role play game but made modifications considering the platform and show case environment. Based on that, we designed brand new mechanisms to fit the AR experience while still keeping the core of the original game - communicating with each other.
Myself
I was the only programmer and technical artist in this team. I implement the game play, story telling, networking and visual effects in this experience based on designers’ and artists’ design. Meanwhile, I also took part in the design and made contributions to it.
Handwriting in AR
There were no fixed coordinates related to the player and the world. So, some components based on global space like trail renderer and timeline could not be used. I developed the handwriting mechanism with trail renderer at the very beginning, but when I applied it to the AR scene, it was messed up as shown in the middle.
I rebuilt this functionality in a different way. I ultimately used a particle system to implement the hand-writing mechanism.
Story Telling
The full game experience is about 30 minutes long with three chapters. The characters, Max and Annaliese meet each other, experience the harsh time for Jewish family and take part in the protest. To tell the whole story effectively while keeping players immersive, we designed several different mechanisms to tell the story.
Crowd
To make the situation more vivid but not distract the player, we designed silhouettes in 3D space to show the environment. Since the application existed in the AR space, where the world space was not aligned with the player’s space, I calculated the rotation and position of the silhouettes manually in order to keep them static from the player’s perspective.
Time and weather
Since the game only shows several snapshots of the characters, we used transition between chapters to tell the story in-between the chapters. In these transitions, to show the time passing, I implemented several scenes in different seasons or weathers using particle system, post effects and so on.
Chanting
To actually make the Annaliese’s player chant in the Rosentrasse provost, we combined speech recognition technique and animated UI to prompt the user to actually immerse themselves into the chanting.