Royal Caribbean – Saus Mystical Quest

For the world’s largest cruise line company “Royal Caribbean International” we created Sasu’s Mystical Quest – a one-of-a-kind underwater adventure gaming room with custom-designed controllers and a themed interior onboard one of their newest and most innovative cruise ships, “Spectrum of the Seas”. As the little shaman Sasu, players are able to explore the depths of the ocean and unravel its secrets with the help of mystical friendly animals.

Our intention for the game was to keep our gamers physically active by using their bodies to control the character. To accomplish this, we had to consider many challenges, including uncontrollable sunlight conditions, a wide range of user’s age and weights, building a plug-and-play system, being resistant to the vibrations of the ship and needing to be up and running 24/7. With all of these factors in play, we moved away from a Kinect or other optical sensors, and embarked on developing our own tracking system based on the user’s balance.

Ultimately, four of our Balance Boards were integrated seamlessly into the floor, aligned in front of its accompanying 85” gaming screen. Each board contains various weight sensors to measure the balance and capped off by an LED layer covered with a 1.5 cm blurry plexiglass. This allowed us to both provide more feedback and immersion to our players while also protecting the overall system against the ingress of moisture or dust. To monitor the sensor values and send them to our Unity application, we developed our own Demodern-branded circuit boards and a modular system ensuring to plug and unplug sensors or swap out components easily.

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