Dream Land

Years Active: 2019-2020

IKALI Dreamland is an children’s amusement park in China featuring role play and edutainment for children, which is put into practice in the form of a nationwide IKALI-brand park chain. In December 2020, Ekings Multimedia and IKALI jointly operated Dreamland Shanghai.

From Jun 2020 to December 2020, I worked as a programmer at Ekings Multimedia, where I worked with clients on designing and developing interactive media applications and games with various needs.

I designed and developed a mini game, Air Balloon Pilots, in which the player controls their air balloon by balancing its mass. I also contributed in developing and testing the multi-touch infrared camera system. It uses an IR camera to track the user’s hand gesture and a projector to cast the interaction feedback, therefore it can turn any flat surface into a touch screen.

Lessons Learned

Immersive experiences pull the viewer into another real or imagined world, enabling them to manipulate and interact with their environment. It has a long history, from Panorama landscape painting to Cinerama widescreen projection process, to Cave Automatic Virtual Environment, where projectors are directed to the walls of a room-sized cube. While the contemporary screen media erode, if not erase, viewers’ perceptual differentiations between the actual reality and the virtual reality, the gap between real and virtual is where designers perform their magic touch.

The market of projection mapping, IR camera touch screens, and sensor-driven interactions is open - the entry cost is relatively low compared to VR/AR hardware research. The future lies in designing a meaningful and aesthetic experience. Level 99 Entertainment combines escape rooms, small “challenges”, and arena games with microcontrollers and sensors, making the traditional plays into self-reset “smart” games. TeamLab brings together artists, programmers, CG animators, mathematicians, and architects to navigate the intersection of art, science, technology, and the natural world. The list of examples can go on.