Unmute

C#, WebGL, JavaScript

Unmute is a semester-long team project at Entertainment Technology Center, Carnegie MallocUniversity. The initiative of the project is to explore the possibility of conveying scientific knowledge to young people, especially high school students, in a more entertaining way.

Working closely with our client Dr. Samira Kiani, we built a virtual museum experience on the topic of CRISPR using Unity WebGL. Users use a mouse and keyboard to control their avatar to move around and explore for knowledge in a theme-park-like world that is juiced with meaningful interaction.

You can try the experience at https://app.etc.cmu.edu/sparks/.

More information can be found at: https://projects.etc.cmu.edu/sparks/.

I work on this project as a full-stack programmer and producer. As the only programmer in the project, my responsibility includes Character Locomotion & Animation, UI system, Interaction Logic, and Web functions support. I also work as one of the co-producers on the team and take care of the maintenance of the project website and development blog.

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We organized the experience as the image shown above.

The Plaza is a huge open space covered by a beautiful dome. There are lots of fun interactions hidden in the Plaza for users to explore. You can also take the elevator to the second floor to watch the video trailers of the work collection from Dr. Samira. There are also portals to teleport you to 3 different halls where you can watch videos and read articles to actually learn knowledge about CRISPR.

We designed 3 CRISPR-related mini-games (one puzzle game, one memory game, and one rhythm game) and hid them in this virtual world for people to take a break after learning stuff. I worked with the UI designer in the team and implemented the logic of the mini-games(the rhythm game is still under development).

We also implemented a simple achievement system. Users will collect a badge for each interaction they triggered. We use this method to encourage users to explore as much possible.