The Changing Room is a design conjecture that highlights the issues present with many immersive interactive experiences offered on the current market. One of these problems is that modern interactive and immersive experiences are typically static. This drives away customer retention and ultimately leads to businesses crumbling after highly successful initial years. This is rather simple. People just get bored. They don’t want to return to something they have seen before whether this be an amusement park, museum, or other experience. Companies need to find a way to remain fresh and spark renewed interest in their consumer base.
The Changing Room can help with this Dilemma. The Changing Room is a magical room that shifts in appearance every time you enter it. You may enter it at first and it looks like a normal living room. When you enter it at a different point you may be on the deck of a spaceship. Another entry may bring you into a dungeon like tavern with a beer in front of you. Everything in The Changing Room is real. It isn’t virtual. You can feel the warmth of the fireplace in front of you. You can drink the beer that appears in the tavern. You can feel the recoil as you blast away at asteroids outside your spaceship’s viewport.
This dynamic experience rooted in physical environments rather than a VR headset represents what we should strive for as experience designers. We need to be clever about the way we make things rather than just using a VR headset and we need to incorporate modularity and a system for change into our experience designs.
