For a target audience of 3-5 year olds, we created a unique experience introducing innovative and interactive
ways for kids to play and learn. Our interactive installation plays a big role in the transformation of Royal
Caribbean's Youth and Family programs onboard, introducing the latest and greatest technologies onboard their
existing and upcoming ships.
Interactive Animated Stories with Different Outcomes
With that question in mind, we built the interactive animated Storybook Fairytales in which children actively
participate in the narration through physical activities and interaction using our custom-built and designed
controllers. In each chapter, they engage in small quests where they - together with the animated characters -
should move around the scenarios and solve mild problems to determine the story’s path. The kids’ actions interact
in real-time with the animations appearing in the story, whether helping a character to choose which direction to
go by pointing the controller or act out to win an imitation game, turning the children into lead players of the
narration.
Scream, Jump, Act! And Other Game Interactions
With our main target group in mind, we didn't want to limit the way the audience was accessing the story, but
rather extend the way the narration could be controlled. Hence, the gameplay includes other moments that require
different kinds of interactions, mostly divided into two categories: sound-based interactions and movement-based
interactions. The activity - whether screaming, making a funny face, jumping, following a dance sequence, making a
gesture or repeating a rhyme - is detected on a tablet and managed by the narrator, who has the opportunity to
personalize the climax and development of the story.
Putting everything together
The adventures that our main characters experience are mainly story-driven. To be able to seamlessly transition
between story and action, we used Unity to create all sets as fully realtime 3D environments. For story sequences,
animations were created in Maya and then transferred into Unity’s own timeline system. This gave us full control
over the animations and allowed us to create cinematic visuals. When the story arrived at an interactive moment,
we would transfer control over to the children and allow them to directly trigger and control animations of items
or characters on screen. These were also created in Maya but the children were able to control the intensity or
blend between several motions, so that simple inputs could translate into exciting and engaging actions on screen.
The stories are narrated by a crew member. For that, we created a tablet application that directly communicates
with the storybook and gives them story hints and action queues, as well as allowing them to take control of
interactive moments and decisions.
Each story lasts around 10 minutes with branching storylines and up to 14 interactive moments per story.
