What is Besser Rooms?

My internship was at a company called Besser E.Mersive, otherwise known as Besser Rooms. They specialize in making rooms that project a scene onto the walls of the room as shown in the picture here. They are a company primarily focused on memory care, so people with dementia and alzheimers, using their immersive rooms to help people with memory issues do things that they could no longer do, such as drive. Their reasoning for this was multiple studies that showed that people with dementia and other memory issues retain memories better if they are comfortable and content. So the rooms are designed to put them into these scenarios so that they may retain the memory of it.

My responsibilities

My main responsibility was to create a scene they could use in their products, of which I had most creative and developmental control of the project which I will get into soon. Another responsibility I had was to help debugging existing projects, such as their AI agent. I tried several ways to break it such as asking it how to commit crimes or to write python scripts, but none of them were fruitful as it stayed on topic as intended. I also was asked to check out another projected they had of a scene going through a dinosaur park and give feedback for example. For a last example Gary showed me this part scene he had been working on and had me test and review features he added to the park scene.

The project that I came up with was a train scene that goes through many land scapes. I chose this as I believe train rides are fairly relaxing, to look out the window and hear the engine and clacking of the wheels. This project was made in unreal engine 5 which is a tool that I had not used in the past so it was an entire new experience for me and I got alot of help from the team on how to use the engine and best practices. The scene pictured here is one of my personal favorites, its a scene of mountain peaks above the clouds, which I think is very pretty, I do have a couple other images here to show too.

The first image here is a beachside scene with a cabin and fishing boats out on the water. Second is mountains while above the clouds. Third we have a cottage out in the middle of the cold wilderness. And last we have a mountain range with a river cutting through it, going over a bridge. There are a few more scenes but I didnt want clog the whole page up with images. Not pictured is a train station that each loop would start and end at. Making these scenes took most of my time at this internship.

That other part was video editing this project. Now I didnt have enough time in the internship to completely finish this part but ive talked to my supervisor and we have figured out what to do now that im done. However, I did learn quite a bit about video editing and sound design, and post processing. After rendering I took the frames and brough them into davinchi resolve where I put all the frames into the scene and Davinci put the frames into a timeline for me, making that part of the process fairly painless. The hard part was transitions because the lighting was never the same between scenes so I had to do alot of manual adjustment and color correction, as well as taking frames from elsewhere to transition to make it look better. I also did alot of sound design, with the sound of birds outside, flowing water when near water, and the part im really proud of which is the sound of the engine and wheels echoing through the tunnel, as you come out it transitions into a much fuller sound, then back to quiet once you go back in the tunnel. There was also plans to stitch together 3 camera angles to get the required 6000 x 2000 resolution but davinci resolve simply couldnt handle it, so I had to pass it off to Gary to finish and render it as he has adobe premier which is paid software and known good for working at custom resolutions like that.

My takeaways

Now for things I learned. I learned the basics of Unreal Engine, but its more than just programming and the ui, I learned the basics of level design and landscaping in unreal, as I have a minor in game programming as well this is really important for me to have as I have real passion for game design and development.

The next thing I learned was how do video rendering, editing, and sound mixing. This was something I never really tried before, but I believe this is a good skill to have as I would like to make videos on projects ive done to show to the world.

I also learned how to use tools for managing a project. I personally used obsidian as it is an all in one note taking and organizing app that makes it simple to plan out your days, as well as take notes during it.

I think the most important thing I learned was communication in a business setting. I am very used to doing things on my own as a solo developer, so it was hard for me to talk and ask for help to start. But as time went on I was able to communicate better with the team and solve my problems quicker.