# A Century of Progress

- Year: 2020
- Category: Location-based VR
- Client: HKU
- Role: Concept, story, technology, prototyping
- Canonical version: https://diedetap.com/en/work/a-century-of-progress/

**A VR experience where you walk freely through a hotel at the 1902 world's fair. You take the lift up, and every floor is stranger than the last.**

Made when room-scale VR was brand new and hand tracking meant gluing a Leap Motion to the headset. The find that held up best is the lift. One physical floor gets reused endlessly: every ride loads the same square metres as a new storey. The fiction doubles as the boundary system.


## The waiting room
You don't start in VR but in a room, where you're invited to join the Detroit Mystery Tour: a trip along the unexplained disappearances at the 1902 world's fair. Only once you know where you're going and why does the headset go on.


## The lift
The whole design hangs on this one thing. Doors close, the floor behind them is redressed, doors open: the same square metres have become a new storey. The lift is story transition, loading screen and safety system in one.


## The lobby
The first floor is still just a hotel: chairs, lamps, a reception desk, everything in its place. It has to be, otherwise the slow estrangement has nothing to take root in. The further you go, the further the hotel drifts from itself.


## Voices of guests who are no longer there
On every floor, shadows of vanished hotel guests wander around. By listening in on their conversations, you piece together what happened in the days before they disappeared. Nobody tells you this: you have to stop, listen, and decide for yourself which conversation is worth your time.


## The swimming pool
A long, quiet space that's no longer quite right. By now the hotel has shifted from chic to uneasy, with architecture that carries the story.


## The roof terrace
At the top, the hotel disappears. Objects dissolve into nothing as you walk through them, until there's nothing left to stand in. The disappearance you've been investigating all tour finally happens to the place itself.