Try it live Description
Halls of History: The Veiled Study is a new room in Halls of History, a conversational mystery game, perched high in one of Leonardo da Vinci's painted landscapes: winding rivers and blue crags fading into the haze he called sfumato. One bay holds a fire with the Keeper of Stories above it, a dry and watchful living painting. The other is a dark chamber cut into the rock, where a plain wooden box sits on a round table with no lock, no keyhole and no way in. The Keeper will only tell you who to ask.
Everything you need comes out of conversation. You talk out loud, in your own voice, with living portraits of history's minds, and a meter reads each exchange as it happens. A figure shares what the conversation has earned, and what they share decides what you find when you search their rooms. Ask Marie Curie the right questions and something of hers turns up in her laboratory; Leonardo's workshop holds something too, though it may take more than one visit to find it. Carry what you win back and defend it to the Keeper, who judges the story you tell about it.
Curie and da Vinci lived four centuries apart, and the box needs them both. Each thing you bring back does only what it did in its own century; the puzzle is working out what they do together, and the door at the far end of the chamber waits until you have. The box hides its secret in a different place for every visitor, so nobody can hand you the solution: you have to understand it well enough to use it. It is a gift for anyone who learns best by asking why. The study opens when you can use what Curie and Leonardo knew, and the only way to learn it is to ask them.
It runs in the browser with nothing to install, and the study also has a hands-first WebXR mode built for the PICO headset: play seated with no controllers, and reach, pinch, lean and carry the puzzle pieces by hand. Every click on screen has a matching gesture in the headset, so desktop and PICO share one build, with a lighter splat tier for standalone hardware. Every room was generated with World Labs Marble, the characters speak with ElevenLabs voices, and the portraits are animated with LemonSlice. Before the contest, the author already had the Valoquent conversation system from a shipped app, including the meter that scores each conversation, and an unfinished tech demo from an earlier hackathon, never submitted there, with an early version of Marie Curie's hall. The mystery and puzzle design, all three characters, Leonardo's hall and workshop, the Veiled Study itself, the WebXR mode and the Tripo pipeline were built during the contest, from September 15 to October 5, 2026.
How Tripo was used
Tripo made every physical object in the new rooms.
- Pipeline: each object starts as a Gemini reference image and becomes a Tripo V3 model through the Tripo API, in a scripted pipeline that ends with a size pass for the web.
- Where they appear: Leonardo's workshop holds 21 props made this way, and the Veiled Study's puzzle pieces came from the same pipeline.
- Live generation: on the test build, Tripo also runs during play. A figure's conversation decides which piece appears, and Tripo generates it while the visitor waits at the door.
