Unseen Media: Tabletop Mystery Games

For the past year and a half, my team and I at Unseen Media designed and built a mystery-themed board game that incorporates augmented reality technology into the game experience.

For our first game, we designed a mail-to-home box that players open to reveal “clues” that help them solve the mystery of “what killed social media influencer, Charlotte Depsi?”. Combining the physical “clue” pieces in front of them with our web-based AR tools that players can access through their online “agent profile," players slowly unravel the story as they move through the game.

This project evolved out of an idea to build a platform that incorporated AR technology into escape room games in mid 2017. Through over 100 interviews with potential customers, we eventually landed on a mail-to-home game that does not limit players by location or by time. The mail-to-home concept opened our idea to a larger gaming market.

To date, we have participated in NYU’s Fall 2017 Prototyping Fund, NYC Media Lab’s inaugural XR Startup Bootcamp, the XR Beta Residency Program at the RLab in Brooklyn Navy Yard, and presented our prototype at the Augmented Reality Expo 2019 in Santa Clara. As a culmination of everything we accomplished during the XR Bootcamp, teammate Brian Hui pitched our product to an audience of over 300 at the Exploring Future Reality conference at NYU Kimmel Center. Video of our pitch can be viewed below.

I mainly produced all 3D AR elements, but also contributed heavily to the overall game design, the user experience design, and digital fabrication of game objects. Because of this project, I honed my media design skills, while also extensively learning the ins-and-outs of operating a business and marketing a consumer product.