VR Projects

Role in the Project

Game Designer (Solo Dev)

High Concept

Two VR projects with one being created for my Honours project as part of my Bachelors degree. The First project was focused around using VR to change the user's perspective to make them think differently when met with a challenge. The other came about because of a research paper I found that outlined how users react to different displays in a virtual museum and I wanted to test how that could translate to displaying information to players in VR games.

Overview

Both of these projects were created using Unreal Engine 4 and do share some assets and scripts where necessary as I wanted to focus on the concept.

Honour’s Project

As this was created as part of my Honour’s I would have been required to collect data via surveys to form results, however, due to the outbreak of Covid 19 this was not possible as I could not hold open testing sessions and other students may not have had the equipment to test the project at home but I still set out a plan of testing phases which would have included meeting certain development deadlines to collect the data I need to write my dissertation. Even though I could no longer test the way I had planned to I kept to these deadlines by developing the mechanics of the project, first making sure they were easy to follow for the player as well as avoiding motion sickness as I had a strinking/growing animation the player going through. Then I developed the tasks that the players would perform and iterated based on the feedback received.

Side Project

For this side project, I wanted to delve into testing how information like text and images can be displayed to the player in a VR space. This was after finding a paper about how virtual museum pieces were displayed in a VR museum and how users felt when viewing these pieces. Using some of the examples they had I created I small project that present information to the player and allowed them to make decisions that would then be shown to have an effect on some score systems I put in place.

The three methods I ended up using were:

Static in the world: This method had the object/text static in the world for the user to adjust their distance to and the angle they viewed the object at.
Attached to the motion controller: as this method says it had the object attached to the movement and distance of the motion controller paired with the VR headset, again allowing for the user to adjust their distance and the angle at they viewed the object at but in this case simulating the user holding the object.
Attached to the VR Headset: This method had an image display in front of the user and it would match the movement of the headset. For this method to work they found that if an image was displayed it would have to wrap around the radius of the VR headset so no one point was further away from the user given they would have to move their eyes to look over the image.