'Living Landscapes' consists of three games and five massive digital projection screens installed along the length of the 150 ft hallway, with each screen measuring 11 ft high by 25 ft wide. Groups of 50 people form in front of the screens, collaborating and competing in three interactive games that last about 25 minutes in total.
The new installation uses the PlayMotion Vision Engine technology which detects various individual gestures, as well as overall crowd motion dynamics, and translates that data into input signals for the game. The Living Landscapes games include:
- 'Pop the Blobs'- positions paint blobs on the screen and participants must make contact with and pop the blobs, and once the blobs have been "popped" they explode, exposing a hidden underlying image of the park. Once the photo is fully exposed, the crowd is given an audio reward and advance to the next image in the series. The experience is designed to coach guests in the basics of human motion input before moving on to something a little harder.
- 'Create' - particiapnts in front of all five screens are presented with a nebulous landscape and sky. Participants must work in collaboration to both elevate and depress the terraformed landscape by using gestures to "grab" virtual handles, effectively forming mountains and valleys with their gestures. Once the landscape is fully sculpted, the camera zooms in, and guests can see seeds appearing on the land, which they are able to germinate by raising their arms in a "glory" fashion. Participants watch as algorithmically generated trees, flowers, grass and bushes start to grow and, as time progresses, the crowd creates an entire plant ecosystem of their own unique creation.
- 'Air Race' - in this game, each group of 50 guests guides their own bird through a complex obstacle course of forests and canyons by leaning either to the left or the right. All five birds are visible on all screens at once, so the cheers are loud as one bird pulls ahead, and the screams are wild as birds accidentally collide into the obstacles along the course. Four complete environments were built for the gamespace (arctic, desert, forest, and nighttime) to give each run through the queue line a fresh feel.
According to surveys carried our by Walt Disney World, before Living Landscapes was installed Soarin was incredibly popular with 65% of guests rating it 10 out of 10. However, since Walt Disney World tested the innovative PlayMotion technology a massive 81% of guests rated Soarin (which was in no way in itself modified) 10 out of 10.
If you would like to see how Living Landscapes work, here is a video sourced from the PlayMotion Youtube channel:
News via the DNA Association.
