GAME DESIGN AND VR DEVELOPMENT
Safe Break
The Virtual “Third Place”
NCSU Graduate Final Project, 2020-2021
Breakdown of Safe Break's Coffee Shop Menu UI Click to Zoom
“Safe Break” is an interactive experience for people with sensory sensitivity to escape to a virtual “third place” when the outside world is overwhelming. Inspired by VR experiences that emulate the autistic experience and taking cues from VR Chat and Mozilla Hub, “Safe Break,” when adaptable by its users, can provide sanctuary and a sense of belonging to those who find it difficult to acclimate to visual and auditory overstimulation.
“Safe Break” is a simulated coffee shop where players can change the environmental lighting, environmental sounds,
and environmental textures and setting. Late into development, a breathing prompt was added to assist players in developing a calming strategy for alleviating anxiety.
To create a sense of openness, the furniture, kitchen, ceiling lamps, and even interior walls can be removed per the player’s preference.
The development of “Safe Break” is meant to give back to those who might have less while dealing with more. “Safe Break” is inspired by that desire to want to experience social places, like parks, arcades, and coffee shops, just like everyone else.
ITRE NCDOT DOA Airports Simulation
ITRE NCDOT DOA Airports Simulation
Unity3D Project for the NCDOT Department of Aviation, Build 1.13.1, 2020-Present
The Airports Simulation project, built using Unity3D for Microsoft Windows PCs, simulates airport routes taken from spreadsheets of flight path data. Currently, the project allows users to simulate flight paths for all of all 72 of North Carolina’s executive, general, and commercial airports, with the opportunity for simulations outside North Carolina in the future.
Users can spawn animations of depatures and arrivals for every route that an airport serves, either every month in an entire year, or for the entire year in a single instance, on maps that will either project the United States or the entire world. Users can also drag and drop additional spreadsheets of airport data into the project, as long as those spreadsheets are formatted in a specific way and saved as a .CSV file.
