Internship in the Afterlife

You work the check-in booth of the afterlife. A soul arrives, its name is shown for a moment, and then you have to rebuild it from memory: the syllables come out of a mystery box one at a time, slot-machine style, and you place each block in order on the display in front of the soul. Spell it right and the soul is certified and walks up the stairway; spell it wrong and the floor opens. Drop five and you are fired. The report planned names in English, Mandarin and Hindi, so the puzzle is partly memory and partly reading a script you may not know — the point of the project, which the team framed around the language barriers international students, tourists and immigrants deal with.

The interaction is one loop of grasp, place and check, and the capture shows each part: putting on the employee lanyard to start, the prompt to memorise the name, hands picking up coloured letter blocks, and the two endings — “Congratulations, you did great” and “You are fired”. The team’s report also specified the feedback for that loop in haptics: a light vibration when a block is picked up, a gentle ting for a correct placement, and a stronger, buzzer-like pulse for a wrong one, with recorded phrases in several dialects adding pressure after a mistake. That is the plan as written; the capture cannot show whether the haptics shipped.

Made by three people for XR 5020, taught by Prof. Wallace Lages. Komi drew the storyboards below, Komi and Namrata did the 3D modelling, and I built the interaction systems — the grab, the placement, the check and the consequences — and programmed the game.