On their journey, they come across various stories—each seen from the window of an apartment in Amsterdam.
Timeline
3 months (April–June 2021)
Disciplines
Interaction Design
Creative Development
Technologies
Unity WebGL, NuxtJS, MongoDB, Amazon S3
Team
Manojna Acharya (Maze Design)
Deepti Rao (Filmmaking)
Arimit Bhattacharya (Interaction Design & Development)
At the start of 2021, I was approached by Manojna Acharya (an architectural designer) and Deepti Rao (a filmmaker) to create an interesting way of presenting a set of short films about the experience of social isolation during the pandemic. This led to the creation of Catch the White Dot, an online installation (dare I say…game?) about stories of isolation.
Visitors find their way through a spiralling maze. It feels organic like a cave, but the furniture is reminiscent of any ordinary house.
A note on ambient sound
White noise combines every sound frequency to create an ocean-like effect. Brown noise, on the other hand, creates a more bass-heavy sound by emphasising the lower frequencies.
In practice, this resembles the deep sound of your own blood stream when you cover your ears. I used brown noise extensively throughout the maze to enhance the feeling of being inside your own head.
The white dot plays a different character in each story—a friend, a stranger, a pet, or maybe something entirely different.
Surprise surprise—the white dot occasionally appears in the maze itself, but mysteriously dashes into a corner as soon as it’s spotted. Trying to follow it might help reach the end of the maze ¯(ツ)/¯
A note on guidance
Through early stage testing, we realised that we would need some form of a guidance mechanism to help the players. Solving a maze from a first-person perspective is simply too difficult. The appearance and movement of the dot not only helped solve this issue, but also added an air of mystery to the character itself.
There was a lot of user testing involved with tuning how long the dot is visible before dashing away. Players had to be able to notice the dot momentarily, but not for long enough to actually catch it. (Evil is a relative term 😈)
This is also when we started coming up with ideas for the name!
Tape recorders spread throughout the maze play the voices of those who came before. Anyone can record their thoughts into them—be it a hint, praise, critique, or just about anything else.
A note on togetherness
One of our goals was to avoid the overwhelming sense of morbidity we felt in a number of pandemic-based installations. These tape recorders acted as a way of making the visitor feel like they’re alone, together. The space started feeling livelier as the first few recordings came in, cutting through the silence.
I wanted to implement this recorder functionality without completely resorting to a context-switch between the immersive, cursor-less 3D environment and a traditional website interface. The middle ground which worked fairly well was implementing the recorder via keyboard shortcuts. I created a user flow chart to map out how someone could record and upload something seamlessly, while also giving them some quality-of-life functionalities such as playback, deletion, and re-recording.
Each recorder’s audible radius had to be adjusted so that people weren’t overwhelmed by the sound of multiple recorders (plus the sound coming from the windows) playing simultaneously.
Early testing with the recorders revealed that people had a hard time discovering them in the first place. We went through several iterations of the recorder model to make it more prominent. We also adjusted the trigger radius of the UI prompt to better “catch” visitors as they’re passing by.
As visitors reach the end of the maze, they encounter a distinct ramp leading up to a floating platform.
The platform rises up, bringing them above the maze. The claustrophobic sound of their own mind is replaced by the sound of the wind, seasoned with the melody of a piano. People are free to walk around on top of the maze, which is revealed to be in the shape of a brain.
Another note on sound
At this point, I take the brown noise from before and bring up some mid-level frequencies, oscillating them randomly. This creates a smooth transition from the claustrophobic sound of one’s blood stream to the gratifying sound of a breeze.
With broadly positive feedback in closed tests, we will be publicising this installation via online art festivals in the future. Meanwhile, feel free to try out the prototype (and let us know what you thought)!