Welcome to the Future

In the not-to-distant future every home, work place and even car will have an Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistant. This assistant will talk to you, provide information, surf the net for information and analyse your personal data to help you make informed decisions. To make players feel like they are truly stepping into the future, we built our own AI to welcome players to the installation and invite them to choose their own adventure. The AI was designed to look like a hologram. She stops and waits for players to make a decision before carrying on with her narrative.

The Innovation Lab needed the installation to be self-serve for occasions when staff are unavailable to walk visitors through the games. We built a touch screen that was mounted in front of the Heads up Display (HUD). With light projection this stands out in the lowly lit space and draws the attention of the players. Touch screen elements were designed using hand prints and animation to make it easy for players to understand how to get started. Once the play button is hit, the AI talks players through every step of the game.

There was a huge amount of information to communicate through the four games including macro trends, future technologies and business models predicted to disrupt each industry. To set the scene and ensure players are in the right mindset, an introductory video runs through the industry as it may be in the future. Players have the choice to watch the video again, or to skip if they feel that they already have a good understanding of what the future holds. Futuristic footage is hard to find, and costly to develop from scratch. Creative use of stock footage and editing was employed to transport viewers to the future.

The target audience for the four games are senior executives in large institutional organisations. Successful, highly intelligent individuals used to consuming large amounts of information and making decisions. They are also likely to be highly competitive. Players are invited to choose the industry they wish to explore, and are set a mission with tough targets. Each game presents the player/s with a series of five decisions; each answer impacts the players score across two or three different metrics. At the end of the game players are assessed on their performance against other players prompting a range of experiences and further discussion on how they could have responded differently.

A large number of complex messages were required to be communicated throughout the four games, and as such the HUDs were crammed full of information. This could be daunting, so clever animation was employed to call attention to key on screen elements, in time with the narrative delivered by our hologram AI.