Visiontale was an interactive escaperoom driven by immersive media technology. Over a course of one hour visitors experienced a unique story, diving into a fantasy world that came alive with a lot of decoration, great lightning, athmospherical sounds, some great actors and last but not least a great 3 dimensional video projection.

The project was created in 6 months from its first idea to its finish as part of the video technics and production lectures and was only possible due to the extraordinary teamwork and the incomparable effort, each and everyone of our core team members put into it. This event really pushed the boundaries of what is possible and what had been done at the university campus.

The world we created lived from a lot of small details, some puzzles, an interesting story with an unpredictable turn at the end and the experience of coming together with complete strangers and having to cooperate.

Being involved right from the beginning I kind of had the role of a production manager, even if we never spoke about it. Besides that I kept the overview over most technical Aspects and took the role of the Technical Lead Manager. While I also did all the audio planning, I also went a bit deeper into the video side of this project and helped with the projection planning, vvvv-programming, mapping, content creation and so on. This might sound like I was involved in everything, which is true, but nothing special for this project. As we were only 7 people in the core Team, we shared a lot of work between us and cooperated a lot! The midpoint of our escaperoom for example was a great pyramid-like structure made of wood and fabric. It needed the whole team to build this thing, especially as it had to be built really exact, or we would have to adjust the mapping and live with a bad result.

During the project we faced a lot of problems and it needed a lot of good planning to make this thing happen. One of my greater concerns were rendering times. We wanted to have around 10 minutes of video content and basically none of us ever really worked with blender, our tool of choice for content creation. Our content team of 4 people was quite happy, when we got our first rendering, which looked ok, but took around an hour to render on a good workstation. Luckily the new render engine Eevee was already in Beta then and so we started working with it. We could get the render times down to one minute per frame and started rendering on 2-4 machines simultaneously. After that we still only had around 1 month to work into blender and create the whole content from the ground up.

The rest of the project went really good. I mean there were obviously some issues with a Mac Pro disturbing our Dante network, which cost us about a day on site and some wrong calculations for the pyramid-structure, but thanks to having just the right amount of spare time and material planed, we could come across all of that without having to do 16 hour days, which - considering the scale of the project and the size of the team - I am really proud of.

The world of Visiontale really came to life thanks to its details. Being it self programmed ambilights behind the wooden railing of our pyramid, all the decorations we could get, Jan< animating our guests to sing some songs with him at the bar as part of a challenge, all the other challenges, that were of no technical nature, but were greatly supported by it, our great actors, bringing a whole lot of liveliness and guiding the path for our guests, the dragon scull Swaantje handcrafted and that Wolfgang recorded a riddle for or everything else - we created a lot of details, things to see, touch, feel, hear, or sense in any other way.

One of my favourite things was the use of subwoofers which was kind of unconventional. I placed the two q-subs of our main pa with direct contact next to the wooden stage elements, our guests would stand on, when being in the pyramid. At one point a dragon would land right in front of them and the whole floor would shake. I also insisted on using a subwoofer for the dragon riddle. While our guests couldn´t see any speakers, as they were hidden behind the skull of the dragon, they didn't expect anything and then got fronted by a huge low voice making the air vibrate. One of the highlights definitely was our nymph. We had one actress sitting in a corner to present a challenge to our guests. She played her role in an unbelievable good manner and you say that she got a lot of numbers from male students that night…