Emma: Rift Ride

I was awarded the Oculus Rift DK1 and decided to enter their first game jam. Over the course of two and a half weeks I designed, programmed, integrated, and did the visual assets for Emma. David Gates recorded my voice for the messages and created all of the music. He also laid out many of the levels.

Goals:

• immersion via the use of head gestures only for all controls
• fun with perceived movement and kinesthesia as you race through the light tunnels
• exciting and balanced upgrades such as fog and audio cues

While I never published the game outside of the public online Oculus Jam forum, I am truly proud of my accomplishments given the time constraints, my ambitious scope, and the novelty of the hardware at the time. But most importantly, it is this Jam and title I created for it, that launched an ongoing interest in Virtual, Augmented, and eXtended Realities for me, AND led me to experiment with “jams” as an effective and compelling approach to learning, comprehension, and effective application in higher education.