#610: Designing Escape Rooms with Laura E Hall

The Immersive Design Summit brought together over 150 of the top experiential designers from around the world, mostly from the performance community of immersive theater productions and escape rooms, but also with a small number of people focusing on VR/AR. The future of storytelling is going to be immersive and interactive, and immersive theater and escape rooms are pushing the boundaries of physical interaction and interactive storytelling with live actors. The genre of escape rooms probably has the most seamless translation for patterns that cross over between physical and virtualized environments. The most popular VR escape room is I Expect You To Die, which I covered previously in episodes #223 and #482.

Laura E Hall of 60 Minutes to Escape, presented her best practices for designing escape rooms and immersive environments at the Immersive Design Summit. I had a chance to talk with her about the unique affordances and differences between physical and digital escape rooms, as well as her broad range of experiential design inspirations ranging from multi-user dungeons, narrative-driven indie games, alternative reality games, immersive theater, and artist collective installations like Meow Wolf.

LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST

Here's @lauraehall's 10 experiential design guidelines for creating immersive experiences.#ids2018 @DesignImmersive pic.twitter.com/6EsGnVKDBq

— Kent Bye VoicesOfVR (@kentbye) January 9, 2018