Following our multi-award winning collaboration with Within on A Brief History of Stunts and Clio’s Cosmic Quest, PRELOADED were asked to bring our latest Wonderscope story to Magic Leap. The challenge was to reimagine the story in a way that remained true to the Wonderscope iOS original, whilst making use of Magic Leap’s powerful spatial computing capabilities. 

The result is an innovative voice-driven narrative adventure that encourages room-scale explorations and embraces the affordances of spatial storytelling to deliver real learning on mixed reality headsets.

BRINGING OUTER SPACE INTO YOUR SPACE

In Clio’s Comic Quest, users are invited to journey into space where they meet Clio, a tiny particle of stardust who dreams of illuminating the universe as a big, beautiful star. Tasked with helping her, users read dialogue lines out loud to challenge bullies, meet a Red Giant and help Clio become the star she’s always wanted to be, all while learning facts and engaging with a fully interactive solar system.

With spatial computing, we were able to put the user right in the middle of that journey. Using the combination of the Magic Leap 1 headset computer vision cameras and integrated depth sensors, we could map the world around the user and seamlessly integrate digital content into the physical space. 

Building upon these unique affordances, we created an immersive experience where nebulae ripple through the environment, planets can be picked up, and even the kitchen table has been sprinkled with stardust. It truly brings outer space into the users’ space.

THE FREEDOM OF VOICE

Clio’s Cosmic Quest is one of the first experiences that brings the power of voice to spatial storytelling. Within‘s voice recognition system, in combination with the headset’s freedom of movement, enabled us to allow users to engage with characters like they would in real life. Using voice as the main UI, we managed to create an eyes-up, hands-free spatial computing experience that encourages users to explore their own environment. 

Given that the experience is not anchored to a specific spot, we had to predict the player’s movement to re-centre the story as they moved around. The solution was creating a system that used gaze to keep track of the player’s position. This was readjusted based on the height of the player to make the experience accessible to diverse audiences and age groups. 

A NEW CLASSROOM

Our goal was to design a seamless synthesis of STEM-learning, kinesthetic learning, exploration, reading, confidence building and storytelling.

In Clio’s Cosmic Quest users are able to converse with characters and play an active role in the narrative. This storytelling format helps to create an emotional bond with the characters and build confidence for young readers to read aloud. It also creates a safe space for users to explore the story’s themes, allowing them to expand their emotional intelligence and, as they grow in confidence to take on Clio’s bully, learn resilience.

The Magic Leap experience also provides a fully interactive solar system in AR that allows users to explore planets and tap into facts about them. Touch interactions like traveling through space and grabbing planets are all driven by natural hand gestures. This feature also helped us to teach star formation by empowering users to bring particles together and fuse a protostar.

This spatial format creates a new type of classroom that can be accessed from any space, wherever the student is, on whatever planet!

Download Clio’s Cosmic Quest on Magic Leap and if you want to learn more about PRELOADED’s work in spatial computing please get in touch.