Team Escapades, a group of seniors studying electrical and computer engineering, has taken the escape room craze to a completely new level through their senior design project. Through the Engineering Entrepreneurs Program (EEP), Julien Chomette, Alper Ender, Augustus Vieweg and Jack Holgado created Escapades, an escape room that combines physical adventure games, immersive theater and technology.
Seniors studying engineering have two options to fulfill their senior design project requirement. Most students choose to complete a technical project that is contracted by an outside company. Others, like members of Team Escapades, complete its project through the EEP by designing, researching and creating a working prototype of an entrepreneurial idea. Some notable successes from the EEP are Jar With a Twist, a revolutionized peanut butter jar design, and Undercover Colors, a company that develops date rape drug-detecting nail polish.
The members have been friends since freshman year and knew they had great synergy and motivation when it came to entrepreneurship. Since September, Team Escapades has been creating business plans, conducting market research, designing the room and testing its product.
“Escapades was this random idea we had where we thought, ‘Let’s just do high-tech escape rooms and see what happens,” said Vieweg, the chief executive officer of Escapades.
Escapades designed and tested a dynamic, changeable escape room that incorporated high-tech elements like facial recognition, the internet of things and augmented reality. The members also ran two rooms simultaneously which added a layer of complexity and helped them stand out from other escape rooms on the market.
“Where we differ is that this is fusing emerging technologies with immersive theater so you’re not getting just a product, you’re getting an artistic experience,” Vieweg said. “The crux of Escapades is the fusion of engineering with the theater and the performance aspect of it.”
In its escape room, you take on the role of tech consultant for the CIA. You are then guided through a 20-minute story that is a race against time to solve the puzzle using teamwork, strategy and technology. One of the puzzles in the room included listening to a voice recording in order to line up names based on a pattern and then transfer that to augmented reality.
When Escapades was tested in Talley Student Union, more than 60 people went through the experience and provided crucial developmental feedback for its product. During that time, actors Alex Kovach, a nuclear engineering alum, and Patrick Povinelli, a senior studying nuclear engineering, provided a live theatrical element to the escape room.
“Having an actor in there that you interact with as a person instead of just a thing is much more dynamic,” Povinelli said. “It feels more real, at least to me … it’s a totally different experience.”
Team Escapades isn’t sure what its next plan of action is, and most of the members have accepted full-time jobs or enrolled in graduate school. Regardless, they still created a product that proves that arts and technology can and should intersect for successful entrepreneurial innovation. Escapades reminds us that interdisciplinarity is more important than ever, especially at a highly technical school like NC State.
“For us, our ideas are endless and our imagination is our only limit,” said Holgado, the chief operations officer of Escapades. “We can come up with any puzzle we want and we can have influences from different puzzles and different cultures. Combining that with technology was a cool project for this semester.”
