Eye Camera Thief

Patrick Mitchell

The idea behind this prototype was to prohibit the player from looking directly at something they needed to see. I settled on making it a heist kind of game, where you play as a thief whose vision is being recorded, so they can only look at the things they steal with their peripheral vision. Even in this prototype’s messy, early state, it already feels fun and cartoonish.

The biggest problem here was determining when something is “stolen” or “suspicious.” My initial idea was to make it so looking at an object displaced from its “home”—or looking at an object’s home while it’s not there—would trigger an alarm. This meant I had to take note of whenever an object left its home and trigger an alarm if any of those objects entered the VR camera’s view frustum. I wanted to make returning the object avert the alarm, and I wanted to make the alarm trigger if an object’s home was seen without its object, but I didn't have time for either of those things.

If I were to try to add that as the prototype is now, an alarm would trigger if just a tiny bit of a displaced object’s home entered the VR camera’s view frustum. I could potentially fix that by giving an object two homes: one that is strict and small, with little leeway, and one that is bigger and more generous.

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