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Our original idea was to recreate a Japanese Zen Garden.  Since I was the only Asian guy who ever went to Japan, the task of cultural recreation of the garden went down to me. I was excited about this because it was so amazing to see my American teammates interested in Japanese and Asian culture. I did plenty of research on it and spent time discussing the detail with artists and sound designers. The gaming mechanism itself was simple to code and understand. Players need to color different key objects so that the girl could walk around the world and see different things.

Besides programming, I was responsible for designing the whole game. Indirect controls became important. For naïve guests who had never used Magic Leap before, using the controllers might not be intuitive.  I on-purposely put the begin button in such a high position that the players need to raise their arms high enough so that the game would start. By doing this, players could get the idea of how the field of view worked for Magic Leap and get to see the UIs attached to the controller. 

 In order to recreate convincing Japanese Zen Garden, I did plenty of research on traditional Japanese buildings and objects such as those you see in the picture above. All the game objects in the garden were initially grey. Players could use the controller to choose which color they wanted to paint on the objects. I coded the objects so that different parts of a single object could be colored by different colors. Also, I created some particle effects in Unity3D to represent the waterfall, firefly and falling petals of cherry blossom.