My name is Viditya Voleti and I’m a senior
Interactive Arts major. During the summer of 2018, I interned at Quatrefoil Associates, a private
exhibit design firm located in Laurel, Maryland. I found out about them through the MICA Career
Fair where I talked to Michael Burns and Manjit Kingra. We had a lovely talk, they seemed very
taken by my work and I was really excited to try my hand at museum work. They had previously
done an exhibit and renovation of one of the elephant stations at the National Zoo in DC,
which I really loved, so I was excited to try and work there. After giving my resume, about 3
days later another founder of Quatrefoil called me up and asked if I wanted to do a tour and
interview of the facilities, which went really well and they offered me the internship after we had
talked.
Michael Burns ended up being my supervisor, as
he is the Design Director of Quatrefoil Associates and had interviewed me, and seemed
to be very interested in me and my work. However, I ended up working mostly under Chad
Tyler, the Lead Designer and head of the “Experience VR” exhibit, which was the project
I spent the vast majority of my time working on. My responsibilities in the “EVR” project was
to create a proof of concept virtual reality game that can be played at the end of the exhibit,
giving the visitors an experience that culminated the knowledge they learned from the exhibit. I was
tasked to find an existing VR platform (game or toolset) that would allow easy creation and
testing without coding or creating assets. I found the game Rec Room, a free to play VR game that has
a heavy emphasis on community creations. I spent most of my time at work creating a 1 to
2 player cooperative game that really showcasing what being in virtual reality is like. Chad
and Michael were very interested in getting me on this project because no one in office has a lot of
game design experience and wanted my input and design abilities there.
I’m mostly proud of the game I was able to
create. I feel bad about how long the process was, but Chad completely understands the time
limitations, especially because I wasn’t able to work on the project outside of being in
virtual reality, which can be very draining mentally. I hadn’t worked in VR before, and I’m very proud
of what I’ve learned and what I was able to make with the resources available to me, and
everyone who has played it seems to really enjoy it and say it’s well done. I really got
comfortable working in this new medium and even saved up to get my own VR headset and computer to
continue working on other projects in the future. I learned a lot about the process of making
exhibits, and how it’s a very different beast (in terms of quality and time span) to work on
museum-ready exhibits and installations.
In general I’m very happy with my time at
Quatrefoil, if albeit not what I wanted to get out of the internship experience. I went in
wanting to get away from video games and game design and do more interactive and physical design,
but I’m still incredibly happy with the experience I got. I learned a new medium I’m now at least
physically and design-wise mentally comfortable with, and I met some really wonderful people
who seem happy to work with me in the future.
