Stage Fright Theatre Museum

It's a new kind of eye-candy museum where you pose in your "instagram-worthy" sets... perform on a tiny stage and face your stage fright... with an audience that is literally larger than life.

How to use

Enjoy Stage Fright Theatre Museum
Select a stage you want to perform at
Use the kiosk to enter "tiny you mode"
When you're ready, go backstage and run into the rubber ducky
When you're done, run into the tiny potion to become regular size again. (If you fall off the pedestal, there are backup tiny potions around the base of each pedestal)

Inspiration:

What inspired you to create this world? What other worlds or media influenced your creative direction?

Do you have fear of large crowds and/or stage fright? Can NPCs and virtual people help with that?

My virtual worlds nom de plume "Ina Centaur" is somewhat known for creating historic theatres and Shakespearean theatrical productions and other artistry in the metaverse, and so this was actually one of my first Horizon projects, though as I learned that the maximum capacity was 32, my dreams of a Broadway-sized live theatre on Horizon fizzled away.

I was pleasantly pleased at the virtual theatre gen results of Horizon Gen AI mesh capped at 15k. It's still not usable for VR and HD, but since this is target focus mobile... on mobile, if the model is small enough, it looks okay! And thus: "tiny you" performing on a "tiny stage"! This was basically one thing led to the next and the next, but for inspiration - last week, I recorded a live performance in stereo 3D for a friend who fears large crowds and this week I decided to pivot this to an app. As for Tiny Stages - Many years ago, I sent out postcards with tiny globe theatres augmented on them; and ofc, there's Tiny Humans.

How we built it:

What were the key tools and processes you used to create the world? If this is a team world, who contributed and how did they contribute?

I tried Horizon Gen AI and prompted text to 3D alternate universe versions of famous theatre stages. And then put each one on a pedestal. And used the Avatar Sizing API to re-size avatars from spawn point regular to spawn point tiny!

Each stage also has a rubber ducky behind the curtains you can run into when you are ready for a crowd to come in.

Challenges

What were the biggest difficulties you encountered, and how did you overcome or work around them?

NPCs in Horizon beyond baking navmesh just don't behave as I would expect them to from Unity AI Nav. I find it hard to connect with Horizon creators and the forums aren't answered as frequently as I'd like - this bug for example

Accomplishments:

Which parts of your world, or your building process, are you most proud of?

I built what I liked, even though I realize that the mainstream might like cookie-cutter generics. But hey, the purpose of these outreach events is to reach out to the niche oddballs like me!

I guess I also considered adding stats... but I don't know if that fits the bill. An extrovert would be fine having a crowd of people watch their tiny performance on a tiny stage, whereas an introvert might regard just 1 person watching for 1 minute to be enough for now.

I guess I'm not really a fan of high scores in virtual worlds - I've done that, max-ing out on billions of $L where I tried being a virtual bunny mega-lord, a skins and stiletto fashion designer - but it was all to fund "philanthropic" ventures like Second Life Shakespeare and Primtings Museum etc.

Next steps:

How are you going to keep improving the world? What would you like to add if you have more time?

I don't yet have access to NPCs with LLM realtime - so whenever that's available, that would be great... what if your NPC audience could give you feedback for your performance - or be your co-actor or stage reading manager?

Undecided (see above): leaderboards and stats, for eyeball time + audience capture engagement.