I got the opportunity to talk with David Arenou, a student behind the project Immersive Rail Shooter, so I decided to try something new and make an interview. Here are 7 questions to know what this project is about.

Hello David, can you first present yourself?

Hi! Well, I am 22 years old. I am in my last year at L'Ecole de Design of Nantes where I studied interaction design. I am currently doing my final internship at Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs France, in the User Experience Design department.

How would you describe your project, "Immersive Rail Shooter", in one sentence? Did you work on it alone?

I'll try in one sentence: « IRS » is a video game which uses real space as playground and which engages player's body in the intense action of a rail shooter. Let me add a few words: beyond this application, my diploma project is a reflexion about immersion, gaming, and mixed reality as a way to immerse. It was a solo project and I dedicated it half of my final year.

Immersive Rail Shooter [Vimeo]

What was the main technical challenge you faced while making this project?

From the beginning, my project was fixed on the current video game context (Wii, Natal, Move) and I meant not to define a long-term concept. So, during the creative phase, while prospective concepts abounded, the challenge was to keep in mind this short-term issue. I also really wanted to prototype my concept in order to make some usability tests. Thus, I had to anticipate and think about which technologies were accessible to me.

Regarding marker detection, which technology did you use? Any particular reason for this choice?

I'm used to work with 3DVIA Virtools because it's kind of easy to get to a convincing result. So I naturally headed toward this software to create my game. However, I still needed a detection technology to track the player's movements. I knew that ARToolkit was available on Virtools and after few tests with big markers, I decided to use this library for my prototype. Finally, it was the opportunity to catch up with Frantz Lasorne who worked with ARToolkit for his diploma project « Scope ».

Were there features you wanted to add which weren't implemented for one reason or another? Are there some you didn't plan and which were included while experimenting?

I would have loved to add head tracking to my prototype. It could have been possible. When isolated, this feature worked pretty well actually, thanks to the head marker orientation. The only problem was that it definitely took to much computer resource. Once added to the rest of the application, it slowed down the whole thing.

Otherwise, I didn't have the chance to discover spontaneous features. I would rather say that I did have the chance to validate almost all features that I thought, during the prototype phase.

Immersive Rail Shooter concept

What are the possible evolutions of "Immersive Rail Shooter"? What are your plans for the future (for yourself and/or the project)?

I truly believe that something which looks like « IRS » is already being developed in video game studios. Of course I'm referring to the Microsoft Natal project which could have been the perfect device for « IRS ». Let's wait until next E3 (in June) for announcements from Microsoft and other publishers, to see what they're going to propose.

As far as I'm concerned, I'm still working on my prototype. I'm going to participate in the Virtual Fantasy student contest at Laval Virtual 2010 (the International Conference on virtual reality). My orange helmet and I will be there to make some demos !

Is there something I didn't think of you'd like to talk about?

Come to Laval next week! I'll be glad to show « Immersive Rail Shooter » … and even let you people try!

Thanks, David, and see you next week. I'll also be at Laval Virtual, probably mostly around the booth H4 with the Paris ACM Siggraph.

A reader is not supposed to be aware that someone's written the story. He's supposed to be completely immersed, submerged in the environment.

Jack Vance