Escape the Pizza Shop

During the Spring semester of 2021 I took several courses relating to do with the idea of play. One of these classes was David Rios’s Escape Rooms class, where I learned not only puzzle design but also how to interweave narrative into a puzzle. One thing I had been thinking about in addition to puzzle design was how to create a better remote escape room experience. Traditional remote escape rooms are based around zoom, but this experience does nothing to recreate the feeling of being present in an environment. That’s where Real-Time Social Spaces, a course taught by Aiden Nelson, comes in. Throughout this course, I learned the skills necessary to create a browser-based 3D environment where I can create an escape room. I have found this platform to be better than zoom because it gives users the feeling of being present in an environment while also maintaining the collaborative feel that is necessary to escape the room.

Above is a video walkthrough of my environment. I have built my very own pizza shop, which is the environment I have chosen for my prototype Escape Room project. For the purposes of this project, I added a single puzzle for users to solve while they are inside my pizza shop. The puzzle was created using p5 and uses pose net to identify the user’s pose. When the user matches the pose in the puzzle, a win screen will appear.