Oct
31
2020
For what is undeniably a most unconventional Halloween season, we, the nerds of Ideum's Creative Services department, decided it was a suitable time to conceive of an immersive experience that would be similarly unconventional, a blue-sky, just-for-fun idea that applies our love for technology's ability to tell a story in thoroughly unorthodox ways.
As we do with all our work, we started with a story—but this time, the visitors and guests would themselves be the characters, driving the narrative with their problem-solving abilities, cooperation, wits, and, ultimately, their ability to keep cool under pressure. Visitors would be put into a physical environment designed to feel entirely real, and would be presented with a simple overall objective: escape with their lives.
Our concept eventually evolved into a grand conglomeration of various forms of immersive experiences that we all love here at Ideum: from participatory museum exhibits, escape rooms, theme park dark rides, haunted houses, role-playing games, all the way to flight simulators. Visitors would engage with technology that is entirely diegetic to the fictional world in which their adventure takes place: a futuristic space station on the verge of collapse. They must actively participate in actions they have seen time and time again in sci-fi films... but here, they must actually perform those actions themselves: restarting critical systems, observing instrumentation, re-establishing control, hacking into the ship’s computers, and ultimately escaping a looming threat.
This format also provides advantages in a post-COVID experience industry: limited throughput, where groups of 6 arrange their experience through a reservation system, and a controlled environment that can be sanitized between player groups during game reset. Even though this concept remains purely blue-sky, we are excited at the innovative thrills and chills such a format offers. So without further adieu, Ideum presents... Escape from the Tokushima!
