What’s Up in Wonderland? is a virtual reality experience created for the Samsung Odyssey platform. Inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, the experience draws heavily on fantasy tropes involving actions that would be impossible in the real world, such as physically shrinking and growing at will. This is a fun, experiment of playing with scale that allows the player to experience diverse fantasy environments from different size perspectives.
In the narrative, the interactor is tasked with finding a ruby belonging to the Queen of Hearts. You see the March Hare pick up the ruby and escape through a tiny mousehole. In order to become small enough to enter the mousehole, you must use a fairy-dust covered bottle labeled “Shrink Me.”
Now, mouse sized, you can continue chasing the March Hare through the mousehole into the vibrantly colored magical garden of Wonderland! All the mushrooms and other vegetation in Wonderland tower over your head as you search for the ruby the March Hare has tossed away. You also find another bottle of fairy-dust labeled “Grow Me.” Once the ruby has been reclaimed and you have returned to your original size, you realize that you are on the castle balcony and that the ‘magical garden’ you were in previously is just a tiny mushroom patch, acting as a reference to how small you had shrunk.
Students: Anuraj Bhatnagar, Allison Crochet, Karthika Jayaprakash, Edward Zhang
