The Cuban Freedom Flights

The Concept

This interactive project acts as a digital time machine, allowing users to explore three immersive experiences about the Cuban Freedom Flights: History, Photo Galleries, and Stories.

The aim is to entertain, educate, and tell meaningful stories by blending the strengths of technology and hand-crafted art to create an interactive and immersive animated short film.

Key Design Question

How can mixed reality be used to tell Meaningful Stories that bridge the worlds of traditional and interactive media?

Project Walkthrough

Key Interactions

The experience utilizes hand tracking and controller inputs to create a tactile connection to the past.

Users can view stunning galleries featuring authentic photographs from the era. Images are enhanced with depth map layers to add previously unseen dimension.

Progress is triggered by user actions, such as "Grab the airplane and follow the blue path." This gamifies the learning process.

Hear the voices of those who lived through the Cuban Freedom Flights. Through a blend of animation and physical models, their stories come to life.

Design Process

The Cuban Freedom Flights came about after a period of concept exploration and ideation, using methods such as mind-mapping and storyboarding. My concept has gone through at least six major changes. Below are some explorations including early concepts that never made it past the initial pitch phase.

Early concepts involved incorporating physical sets with augmented overlays to tell an immersive, historical story. The slides seen below explore potential user interactions and triggers.

The project draws inspiration from three key precedents that balance storytelling with technology.

One of my goals was to incorporate hand-drawn animation in a virtual environment and to design interactions during the experience. Below are some tests conducted to see if the illusion could be pulled off.

User Testing & Iteration

Reflection