A Fowl Play
Solve a murder with an iPad and a hunch.
- AR
- Narrative Design
- 3D
- Prototyping
Image-anchored AR mystery. Scan the room, follow game-style cues, and catch a restaurant owner before the trail goes cold.
A Fowl Play turns an iPad into a detective kit. Scan the world, step into a mystery, and follow audio, light, and geometry cues like you're inside Half-Life: Alyx, just with more poultry and less gravity gloves.
Built in Reality Composer with RealityScan assets and Blender cleanup. The story does the navigating. The UI stays quiet.
Project Overview
Client
Concept · AR Narrative (Academic)
Industry
AR / XR · Interactive Storytelling
Timeline
Studio project · Solo
My role
Narrative, 3D, AR interaction design
Mechanic
Image-anchored AR scenes with invisible triggers between rooms.
Wayfinding
Audio, visual, and spatial cues, borrowed from game design, not UI chrome.
Tools
Reality Composer, RealityScan, Blender, ElevenLabs VO.
Inspiration
Navigation as storytelling
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Before any scan, I studied how games push you forward without a giant arrow. Alyx won: environment, sound, and geometry do the pointing.
World build
Scan, clean, place
Sketchfab filled gaps. RealityScan pulled real props into the scene. Blender kept the polycount from melting the iPad.
Scenes
Detective's office
Tone-setter. Look around, hear the monologue, walk to the door. Invisible trigger, next scene. No menu required.
Restaurant of suspicion
Three spaces, three cue types. Players stretch their legs and solve with instinct, not a checklist.
Playthroughs
Scenes, anchors, and live playtests. Watch the mystery before reading more about it.
Restaurant exploration
Full scene pass
Scene walkthrough
In-person testing
Anchor
Make the marker part of the joke
Horizontal plane anchors fought crowded rooms. An image anchor locked the scene, and version 2 swapped a wall of text for a face doodle Reality Composer could actually see.
Reflection
Simple tools plus clear cues beat complicated systems. Watching people solve the mystery with only intuition was the whole point. AR works when the world does the explaining.