Presentation by Henry Kemp ('19), Mackenzie Busby ('18), Benjamin Wade ('18), and Andrew Craig ('18) delivered at the Rhodes College Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity Symposium (URCAS).
Escape rooms are a growing market in today's world of entertainment. Starting as online computer games back in the 2000s, they have grown in popularity in recent years into massive real life experiences, including anywhere from one to several hundred participants. As technological advances are made, the market for escape games in virtual reality has also seen an increase, as the number of games available for purchase has increased dramatically over the past couple years alone; however, it is still nowhere near the level of popularity as it has reached in society as a real life experience, partly due to the lack of accessibility of virtual reality systems. For part of our senior seminar, we have produced an escape room game in virtual reality that aims to test users' senses of presence and spatial awareness. We believe that with the growing market and expanding accessibility to virtual reality machines, our virtual reality escape room game will provide users with an interesting, unique experience and act as a source of competition for other games available for VR machines currently.