Curious Alice is a virtual reality (VR) simulation/game developed for the HTC Viveport. I came across this application while browsing through the store for ideas, as my exposure to mixed reality has never been anything more than a few fleeting videos of VR gameplay on YouTube.

In Curious Alice, the player takes on the perspective of Alice and gets to experience her imaginary wonderland through a few simple challenges. What is engaging to the player is that it captures a true-to-life representation of Alice’s wonderland, and the player gets to feel what it is like to be Alice in those situations via a couple of well done features. The player’s perspective changes in such ways that give them a real sense of shrinking or growing, just like when Alice did in the storybook. The player also gets a sense of actually tumbling down the rabbit hole at the start. The challenges, from answering riddles to playing a game of croquet with the Queen of Hearts, also keeps the player engaged in addition to its visual elements.

What I feel was really well done is how the game manages to integrate real life illustrations from an artist with its graphics, achieved through mapping the 3D objects with textures of the illustrations. This gives the player an even more immersive feel, as if they are really experiencing a storybook setting.

However, the game is not without a downside. From the limited amount of gameplay footage I can found online, it seems to me that the croquet challenge can get rather unintuitive. In the challenge, the player has to throw hedgehogs through tunnels made by the playing cards, but instead of a throwing motion like one would expect, the player has to hold out and release the hedgehog. I believe this counters most people’s expectations of how to throw an object, and can be improved by matching these expectations.

All in all, I think Curious Alice is a very well-done VR experience allowing people to truly experience what it is like to be a storybook character. I believe apart from games and training simulations, this is definitely an area of VR development that the industry should focus on. To create applications that allows avid readers to truly experience fiction from the perspectives of the characters.