The Hangar Y Epic
2023
The Hangar Y Epic is the latest ISXP (In Situ eXPerience, i.e. immersive and interactive experience) I worked on at Realcast.
It was developed on PICO 4 headsets for the inauguration of Hangar Y, a former military aircraft hangar in the Paris area turned into a cultural venue. To this day the experience is still running in the Hangar.
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The visitors are guided in the experience by some historical figures and engineers to take part in the world's first closed circuit airship flight, which took place in this very building.
Hangar Y is built at the end of the 19th century to develop military ballooning. The site hosts the design and construction of the airship La France, visible in its real size within the hangar in The Hangar Y Epic.
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The visitors take part in the first launch of La France, a world premiere in the history of aeronautics, by helping the head engineers Charles Renard and Arthur Krebs as well as their subordinates.
My contribution
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My role was to design and implement game systems for our integrator. This project was the second mixed reality experience in which we used motion capture and performance capture to animate our 3D character models.
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The main feature I had to implement was the improvement of the locomotion and guiding system I implemented for our previous ISXP Insurrection 1944: while Jean was tailor-made for Insurrection 1944 because he was our prototype, his system had to be generalized and extended to a multitude of other 3D characters for The Hangar Y Epic.
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The system was based on targets that could be used for navigation, pointing, turning and/or gazing, and particular attention was given to smooth transitions with scripted animations. The system was integrated to 5 guiding characters.