Designing a historically accurate VR experience

• Research on Singapore’s Civic District in 1965
• Implement a VR experience based on the research
• Submitting application to Google Play and Apple Store

My experience working on this application gave me the opportunity to see through an application from mid-production through release. Working in Unity3D, I had to prepare two versions – one for the pop-up event and one for anyone to use anywhere as long as they had a smartphone with access to Google Play or Apple Store.

The pop-up version was only released internally with LG providing the VR devices and Audi providing the vehicles for the experience. The user was whisked away to Singapore in 1965 with prolific Singaporean singer-songwriter, Dick Lee, narrating the sights and sounds. The experience was somewhat akin to a tram ride in a safari.

Designing with the user in mind, I took cues from where certain things like traffic lights, interesting buildings, and areas with heavy traffic are and designed the VR experience to put more life into these spaces, seeing that the user will pay more attention to them as they are waiting for a red light or looking at a historic building, for instance.

For the publicly available version, it still had the same experience just without the GPS aspect of it. Instead, the user will be driven around automatically along the same route at a comfortably slow speed.