Grounded 2
PAX West
A fifty by fifty foot convention booth that shrinks you to the size of an ant and drops you into a public park. Twelve guests at a time, on a ten minute cycle, walking one direction through a scripted loop. Designed, modeled and rendered. Never built.
The brief
Obsidian was launching Grounded 2 at PAX West, a survival game where you play a kid shrunk to the size of an ant in a public park full of things that want to eat you. A booth of monitors and a banner would have shown the game. The point of this design was to sell the premise instead: put people in the park at ant scale, and let the space do the work the trailer usually has to do.
Structure came before any of the set pieces. Twelve guests enter together every ten minutes, and the booth runs as a one way loop with a scripted opening rather than a room you wander into. Throughput is the constraint that decides everything at a convention, so the cycle was fixed first and the park was built around it.
The whole trip on one sheet
Queue along the bottom edge, into the lab at lower left. Down the forced perspective hallway on the west wall, through the spider nest, and out into the clearing. The meeting room and storage sit behind the north wall where guests never go. Exit through the juice box on the east side, to the merch counter. Every render further down this page is a view from somewhere on this drawing.
It starts in a lab
Ominent, the company responsible for the shrinking in the game, is the company that greets you. The door counts down from ten minutes in the queue, so guests can see their turn coming. Inside, a clean corporate briefing video plays. Then it goes wrong: an explosion cue, the room drops to emergency red, and fog jets fire from the walls. A side door slides open, and the only way on is through it.
You shrink by walking
No screens, no lift, no effect to maintain. The hallway does it geometrically: the fence pickets and the grass beside you scale up exponentially as you move, so by the time you reach the far door the blades are overhead and the clover is a canopy. You never see yourself change size. You just arrive somewhere the world is enormous, and your own body is the only thing that stayed the same.
Shop from inside the web
The door opens into a spider nest: webbing across the walls and ceiling, a 6′ spider on the wall, and the merchandise hung in the web itself. Guests browse and order on tablets, then keep walking with their hands free. The goods are waiting at the counter when they come out the other end. Retail sits at the front of the experience instead of the back, and nobody carries a bag through the good part.
Play under the mushroom
The centre of the booth is a clearing with a mushroom the size of a tree at the middle of it and mushroom stools and pebble ottomans around the base for people waiting on a turn. The demo stations are dressed to look like the player built them out of grass and bark using the game's own base building system, so the hardware reads as part of the world rather than a row of kiosks parked in it.
A brochure and a bottle cap
Brookhollow Park, where the game is set, gets a park brochure blown up to ant scale and used as a photo backdrop. Beside it, a bottle cap the size of a coffee table, dressed as Nuka-Cola: a quiet nod to Fallout New Vegas, the game Obsidian made in that world. Convention crowds hunt for exactly this kind of thing, and finding it is what gets a booth posted.
The glass meeting room came from Obsidian directly. Their team needed somewhere on the floor to take meetings, so it was designed as an Ominent lab office and put behind the north wall, in the world rather than beside it.
Ride the ant, then grow back
Opposite the spider nest, a soda can stands with a hole punched through its side, and the hole leads into an ant mound. Inside is a rideable red ant and a 360 camera rig for boomerang clips, which is the shot that leaves the building and does the marketing. Next to the can, a Punch-O juice box with a hole in its side opens onto the way out: a flashing LED hallway that runs the forced perspective trick in reverse, so guests grow back to size as they leave and land at the merch counter to collect what they ordered in the web.
Take the trip
The full guest path, front door to merch counter, in the order a guest would walk it.
Twinmotion walkthrough · Full guest path · 1:25
It never got built
Obsidian is an Xbox Game Studios property, and Microsoft chose to consolidate its PAX West presence into a single Xbox booth rather than fund a standalone Obsidian activation. The design was finished, the renders were done, and the floor was never built. That happens more often in this work than anyone admits, and the drawings are still the drawings.
