Horizon
Designed a world in Meta's "Horizon Worlds" platform for my company Publicis Sapient, as we were looking to expand our knowledge and understanding of the "Metaverse" in practice by building actual experiences.
CONTEXT
Publicis Sapient is an agency that focuses on "Digital Business Transformation". While they have not often done much XR work the growing popularity of the "metaverse" has forced the org to begin preparing it. I was tapped in due to my previous experience in XR design to help design a world in Horizon Worlds, for the purpose of sharing it out with the rest of the organization.
BRAINSTORMING
Horizon Worlds was a new platform for all of us. Therefore, we first had to familiarize ourselves with what was possible on the platform by exploring some of its top rated worlds. After a few days of simply getting familiar, we began to brainstorm some ideas for the world we wanted to create.
Brainstorm Ideas
Probing Questions
We settled on a final concept - "Campside Conference" - a camp themed retreat for remote teams looking to find a new way to work together. As we all worked through the pandemic for over a year, we were all now adjusted to remote work - however, we all could understand how it could often get monotonous. Our World was aimed at being a place where teams could switch things up and have a bit of fun while working.
SKETCHING
From there, I helped to conduct a crazy 8 sketch exercise to start visualizing some specific features/activities and the overall layout of the space.
Crazy 8 Sketches and Layout
This helped us to establish a shared vision of what we wanted our space to look like and the specific activities in it. It also helped us to begin our discussion on exactly what we build given our time frame - which was 3 weeks.
BUILDING
Now that we had a good idea of what we wanted to create, we jumped right into Horizon Worlds to get started. We started with grayboxing, a game design technique for laying out the base elements and actions of your world/game.
We essentially learned as we went, watching tutorials and building simultaneously.
DIVIDING AND CONQUERING
As a team, we divided and conquered, each working on different features spaces in our focus capability. I focused on the overall experience path, some modeling, and even some scripting. Much of my efforts went to the welcome section, campfire, and water area.
Axe Throwing
Campfire
Welcome Portal
Meeting Cabins
We had a few major areas such as an Axe throwing game, the campfire, the breakout meeting Cabins, the Pavillion, and the Treasure Hunt lake. These different areas give our target audience, remote teams, the ability to explore and participate in a number of group activities together. Our favorite worlds we explored had a number of things to do, which is why we wanted to include this type of functionality in our world.
LEARNING IN REAL TIME
Horizon Worlds has its own inbuilt modelling and scripting tools that we each had to learn as we built. This was the greatest challenge as we had to both learn the tools and build the full experience, all within 3 weeks.
Modelling Process
Scripting Process
FINAL WORLD
Watch the final output and walkthrough of the world below:
C0NCLUSION
This project was amazing to be apart of, particularly because we were a group of people all ready to learn and build, despite being unfamiliar with the platform. We were really happy with what we were able to build within a matter of a few weeks. We went on to share our learning with many across our organization, which has inspired others to begin playing around in the platform, as well as other 3D software which was our ultimate goal.
