On the Cutting Edge of Immersive Technology: Q&A With Secret Location’s Michala Duffield

Immersive experiences are extremely popular, and the technology to bring them to life is getting better and more impressive by the day. Experiential company Illuminarium opened its first location in Atlanta last summer, where it hosts a variety of themed immersive experiences for adults and children.

Its latest experience, Waking Wonderland, is based on Lewis Caroll’s “Through the Looking Glass” (the sequel to “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland”) and was produced in partnership with virtual reality production studio Secret Location using cutting-edge technology such as Unreal Engine to immerse audiences in the fantasy world.

XLIVE spoke with Michala Duffield, Executive Producer at Secret Location about their work on this innovative new project.

XLIVE: How did the idea/concept for the Waking Wonderland experience come about? 

Michala Duffield: It had been a long-term goal of the company to develop a large-scale narrative based immersive experience and our innovation lab team had been experimenting for some time with different technologies and interaction formats. 

We worked with a few different brands and IPs during the prototyping phase and kept coming back to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland as one that best suited to the style of experience we wanted to create: one that could completely immerse the audience in an interactive adventure, tinged with a little magic. 

There is a nostalgia appeal to Wonderland, and it is popular with a wide range audience group. There is also a well-loved story and cast of characters, which we knew we could reimagine and make our own in a special way. 

We noticed that in the location-based entertainment space, the experiences lacked interactive narrative at its core, and wanted to combine that differentiator with the best in tech execution.  

XL: How has the pandemic affected your business? Are you finding that consumer interests/expectations have changed? Is there more appetite for these types of immersive experiences? 

MD: Like most of the world we were slowed down by the pandemic and had to pause temporarily on some aspects of production, particularly those involving cast and crew, like motion capture and voice over recording. 

Since things have begun to open up again, we are seeing this reflected in the market, with more partnership and distribution opportunities becoming available for location-based content like Waking Wonderland. 

There is definite interest among audiences to experience something new and unique out of home, and to do so together with friends and family. 

We took Covid safety into consideration as we developed the project, including being conscious of capacity and audience throughput in the space, and reducing or removing interactions that involved touch. 

XL: What is your creative process for this kind of experience? Do you start with the story and then move onto the design, do you develop all of the elements simultaneously, etc.? 

MD: All aspects affect each other and therefore we were in progress simultaneously on story, user experience, visual design and technical development. 

Technical capabilities such as the quality and detail of the projected image, the performance of a render server processing animated visual effects and the responsiveness of a motion sensor to a user’s gesture, all play into how we can best tell our story. 

The narrative script in turn drives what we need to aim to achieve with all aspects of design: from the visual environments, props and characters to the user experience, interactions and sound. 

Our 3D artists and animators collaborated closely with the developers and technical artists on many iterations of design and testing, so that we could achieve the best results possible for our narrative scenes, visual effects and dynamic user-driven interactions. 

XL: What is the technology that powers this experience? Do guests wear VR headsets? 

MD: The experience is headset-free! Highly detailed 3D environments created in Unreal Engine are projected and mapped onto the walls and floor of the physical space, to create the feeling for guests that they are standing inside the magical worlds of Wonderland. 

The audience moves through the multi-room space as the animated narrative plays out and can discover various interactable elements as they go. We used Lidar sensors to detect someone’s proximity and motion and trigger various effects in response. For example, in the Wonderland Forest, you can spark a giant beautiful mushroom to bloom by approaching one of the physical props in the space. In the Mad Hatter’s Tea Factory, large buttons projected on the floor trigger elements of the factory to come to life. 

We designed a responsive soundscape for each scene of the experience, utilizing spatial audio technology to direct 3D sound around the space, according to the scene action and interactivity. We also collaborated with the artist Lights, who composed an original score for the narrative scenes. 

We incorporated haptics via low frequency vibration floor panels, which help to immerse the audience during key narrative moments and give satisfying feedback when interacting. 

XL: How do you see the types of immersive experiences that you create evolving in the future? Can you tease anything else that you’re working on? 

MD: This entertainment format and the technology that powers it is still relatively new and we are actively gathering feedback from audiences to channel into our next projects, so that we can continue to evolve our thinking and deliver something innovative. It’s very exciting to be able to watch people in the space respond and see which aspects resonate the most. 

The industry is evolving rapidly, and we’ll be testing out new motion sensing, haptic and spatial audio technologies, cutting edge software features and options for projectors and media servers as they continue to evolve. 

We are planning to bring Waking Wonderland to multiple locations soon and have some new location-based experiences in creative development currently, so stay tuned! 

 

Waking Wonderland immersive projection screens
Waking Wonderland immersive projection screens