Stay Alive
Interactive, immersive, historical virtual reality experience
Story based on Stay Alive, My Son, Book by Pin Yathay
S, S., Bousis, V., Ward, C., Devades, V., & Bassler, S. (2019)
@ MIT Reality Virtually Hackathon
Gripping and powerful, Stay Alive, My Son is an unforgettable testament of cruelty, courage, sacrifice and survival as a young Cambodian must decide whether or not to abandon his sole surviving child in order to escape the sadistic purges of the Khmer Rouge.
(Google Books)
The interactive experience uses the insprirational narrative of several stories as dramatic pretext to outline the choices the user must make at each scene. Each decision will either result in their survival, imprisonment, or death. With each choice, the stakes heighten. The user stands to lose everything, including their family. Finally, at the end of the experience, the gravitas behind each decision will complete a puzzle about the user and their specific life story.
We took a lot of time in the begining to storyboard the narrative and the interactivity. We also spent time organizing our workflow so we could pick up speed later. We build it using various software programs including unity, Photoshop, logic, audition, 3Ds-Max, QuickTime, iMovie, GitHub, Oculus STK's. We created most of our 3D and 2D assets, but used some free ones from the Unity store.