Our team  

We are ‘Loud and Clear’, a team of scientists and designers passionate about creating immersive STEM experiences. 

The problem 

Communication is not just an essential need, but a basic human right.  Without the ability to communicate we are essentially on our own.  

As future astronauts venture forth to explore the Red Planet, the need to tackle communication challenges between Earth and Mars grows greater. 

At the same time, there are many problems in our world could benefit from better communication. 

We believe we’ve developed an experience that helps people to learn how to communicate and work together to tackle complex challenges – whether on Mars, or your own backyard or community.  

The Solution 

Our solution is Mars Calling – an immersive Escape Room experience where players work together to tackle the challenges of communication between Earth and Mars.  

In Mars Calling players undertake a range of fun, puzzle-like challenges. Each challenge exploring a different aspect of communications, including signal time delay, signal quality, data limitation and data corruption.  

The Escape Room format has enabled us to: 

• Develop a compelling storyline where players will feel a range of emotions from elation through to frustration as the clock ticks down.   
• Create a situation where players must collaborate and communicate successfully. 
• Break down the complex problem of communication between Earth and Mars into a series of fun puzzle-like experiences. 
• Create an experience informed and inspired by the actual science and technology of communicating with Mars, for example, time delays, signal quality and signal corruption.  
• Immerse players in the challenge, as well as give them agency in coming up with solutions (learning through doing).  

View the storyboard here >

View the clickable storyboard here >

View the detailed breakdown here

The Experience  

Onboarding  

Upon booking, players choose whether to be on ‘Team Earth’ or ‘Team Mars’. There are three players per team. At this stage of onboarding, this is also where teams pick their difficulty level (Easy - Opposition, Medium - Quadrature and Hard - Conjunction). The difficulty level impacts time delays experienced by players. The higher the difficulty, the longer the time delay between Earth and Mars.

At ‘check in’, players are given a kit with various essential items to complete their mission.  

Each team is briefed by a person in character, who leads them up a long corridor. They are led to a large and mysterious rectangular structure with two doors. Team Mars enters one door and Team Earth another.  

You suit up and your mission begins... 

Team Mars 

It’s a historic moment, you’re the first people to set foot on Mars. Your one and only mission is to retrieve a sample left by the Perseverance Rover, which you can see through the door beyond. The sample contains evidence strongly suggestive of past life on Mars and must be retrieved. 

You walk outside, utter the first words on Mars, and pick the sample up while feeling an incredible wave of happiness. This is the most significant moment in human history. Suddenly, you hear a thud as the door closes behind you. Lights are flashing and an alarm starts sounding.  

Team Earth 

Meanwhile on Earth, as you celebrate watching the astronauts taking their first steps, one by one the monitors around the room log off dramatically, showing static and shut down errors. Lights flash and room darkens an eerie red. The Deep Space Network is down. 

Can you hear me now? 

From this time on, you experience the challenges.  

For example, in Challenge One, Team Earth must reboot the DSN while Team Mars must align an antenna to communicate with an overhead satellite. 

Communication is re-established, or so it seems. Teams quickly realise their messages are not instantly communicated between rooms, instead experiencing a time delay between the sending and arrival of communications. Signal quality is bad, and messages must be kept short to fit inside bandwidth limitations.  

Hampered by these communication problems, Team Earth must guide Team Mars as they attempt to re-enter their spacecraft through an airlock.  

Rather than being a breakout style escape room, the task is to break in. Communication difficulties, and the finite amount of time before Earth sets ticking down menacingly on a clock in mission control make for an engaging and high stakes experience. 

At the end of the experience, players get a short video on their journey with clips of them playing to share with their family and friends and remember the experience. For those teams who weren’t successful, it also gives them a chance to debrief and get clues on what to do next time!  

Mars Calling Storyboard and Gameplay  

We have created a detailed storyboard, with sketches of environments within the Escape Room.  

The storyboard demonstrates the user journey of the two teams, how the experience unfolds and the interplay between the two teams and their challenges.  

Outreach and Education  

Mars Calling has significant potential to empower young people with key enterprise skills, including problem solving, critical thinking, collaboration and communication.  

We intend to develop a pilot of Mars Calling at Scitech, a well-renowned science centre with the mission of engaging all Western Australians in STEM.  

Following testing and refinement of the pilot experience, we will develop a blueprint for distributing Mars Calling in science centres, museums and other venues around the world, with school groups and families a key target audience. 

To increase our impact, we will also create a virtual and/or augmented experience, where teams can undertake the same experience using VR/AR. For this digital/mixed reality experience, we will recreate our physical environments using Unreal Engine.  

To complement the Escape Room experience, an Earth Calling Guide for Teachers will be also be developed.  

This will provide teachers with information on how to engage students via pre-visit and post-visit activities in the classroom, with the goal of extending learning beyond the experience.