Check out this exclusive video footage from?Year of the Cicadas, a project developed for the XR Pediatrics lab at Yale University — not publicly shared before outside of select conferences! ?? We're currently working on the third iteration of?Year of the Cicadas, a project built in Unity (supported by Unity for Humanity) for Meta Quest 2 and 3. ?? This emotionally powerful game, exploring grief over a 17 year period between cicada emergences, continues to evolve through our iterative prototyping process. ?? The video footage shared in Dr. Kimberly Hieftje,’s post gives a unique behind-the-scenes look at this ongoing project. Stay tuned for more exclusive footage, and follow PreviewLabs for the latest updates!
Year of the Cicadas is coming along, though we are taking our time on it to get it right. Here is an early prototype of a scene at the entry to the graveyard. We wanted to set the story up by introducing the player to the 17-year, Brood X cicadas while while listening to a brief "radio interview" with one of the world's leading expert on periodical cicadas, Dr. Gene Kritsky. The radio also helped us to place the player in the Spring of 2004, in Bloomington, IN. The radio (strapped to the bike) also allows us to bring in some of my daughter's music - a sweet, sad song called "Bluebird" that was so fitting for this game. Because many of the audio files for the game are raw and gritty, having them play from the radio allows us to do a lot with the layering of high-quality audio (i.e. the ambisonic audio of the cicadas and Andrew Schartmann's original musical pieces) with lower quality audio coming from the radio (i.e. Bree's music recorded on her iPhone, raw audio files of interviews). This project is hard (personally) but so very therapeutic as well. I really hope to have this completed this year, exactly 20 years after Cody's death. Melanie (Melle) Bartl is to thank for the absolutely beautiful artwork, Andrew Schartmann is our brilliant audio designer, and of course, the amazing PreviewLabs is developing the game! Asher Marks, MD is co-producing it with me and keeping me grounded when the emotions start to take over. Unity (Unity for Humanity) is helping to support this project! Stay tuned for the next iteration! We plan to add in more player interactions and haptics (having the player "feel" the cicada land on their hand).
With Kimberly Hieftje, PhD, Melanie (Melle) Bartl, Andrew Schartmann, Asher Marks, MD, Gene Kritsky, and on the PreviewLabs side specifically Jerry van den Heuvel, Leonardo Parisi, Michael Schmittat, Aymeric Goes, Yaroslav Berezovskiy, and Bernard Fran?ois.