Implement rough prototype of Start Menu and In-World Ads.
Write a rough draft of the User Study Forms.
The tea behavior works the following way:
The user must fill the teapot with water from the sink. Once the water particles hit the teapot, a liquid will appear as if it is full.
If the user holds it to close to themselves, it will clip and a glitch effect will appear. Water particles will fall out and the liquid will disappear. The user will have to fill it up again.
Once the teapot makes contact with the teabag, all the remaining liquids and particle systems will be brown. The clipping will go on, so the user just has to manage to pour it onto the mug without letting it clip.
Teleporting visual instructions. Exploring ways of tutorializing in VR using mimicry and space.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CG5KHdijTKQ/
The Start Menu is in place featuring a portrait of movement the player can mimic. There is another model of the main avatar throwing their head, inviting the player to do the same. The user can enter the portrait and practice throwing their head and teleporting. There are some few written lines, one about throwing the head to teleport and another about pressing the grip button if they ever need to recalibrate their body to their head.
Once the user is ready, they can enter the portrait which has their camera view as a texture, and begin the experience.
First implementation of absurd in-world ad. These are triggered by gaze and use mask shaders to give the illusion of penetrating the structures.
The first pass at the user study forms has a consent page and the formulaire with three questions. As of now, they are pretty open. These are:
Is this your first experience with VR? If not, tell us about your previous experience.
Please describe in your own words what this experience was about.
Long-answer response: identify anything odd you experienced. Some areas that you could talk about are narrative, interactions, main character, secondary characters, settings, and overall feelings/perceptions about the story.
In the coming week I will:
Get the experience to a point where I can show users.
Polish user study forms.
Enlist at least 5 users for the following week to begin tests.
Finish the end of the third scene (Plug behavior and scene transition)
Write at least 1,000 more words.
Start implementing the final tea glitch.
I was able to accomplish the first two, but unable to finish the tea glitch since I have to decide how I want the user to be able to fix the glitch. Further, I am having difficulties with simulating water since the physics are non-trivial. As of now, I have two major issues:
I was using a water simulation system before that was too non-performant. Now I am using the Unity particle system with collision detection for the particles. They have difficulties recognizing meshes, though, so when I pour the water onto a teapot they fall through.
I am still unsure how to have the user “fix” the clipping. Beforehand I thought I would have them extend their face but this wouldn’t be visible and thus apparent to them. It would also force them to have the controllers dangerously close to their headsets. I’m thinking maybe another fix like opening a closet full of heads and choosing a smaller one might be better.
Issues that arose during this week’s discussions that I was able to address were two:
Anti-robbery door was fixed. Now once the user grabs the tea, the door won’t open again until they finish the transaction interaction.
Study of immersive ad strategies for a more relevant portrayal of them in virtual ads. I included the two concepts I sketched out for the start and pause menu and in-world ads that mainly draw on interactive product models and mini-games where users can simulate consumption in otherworldly ways (these are enticing, but not true to life: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTOvtcunHoY&feature=emb_title see 0:39).
Start and pause menu where the user can step into the portal of the current camera texture to reenter the experience where they left it off. Portraits that are also portals feature models of the main avatar navigating by throwing their head and doing other things that serve as a tutorial for the player. First pass for in-world ads. The user can step into them like portals, and sometimes models of the products can interact with the world in absurd ways.
Here from the future to add the clip of how this add implementation worked out:
At the beginning of the week I finished another player behavior. I was able to polish the looping behavior a bit by limiting the number of “past selves” to five.
Most of this week was spent doing research on artificial intelligence for games. I am reading AI for Games by Ian Millington. He goes over all sorts of algorithms that have to do with movement, collision detection, and decision-making. I am investing time in this research so that I can be sure that I choose the right system for my needs: maybe a simpler system would suffice for the behaviors I want.
Some new ideas arose that can be extensions of whatever AI system I choose. Because most of these systems depend on data about internal states of the character, I can choose that data to determine the moods of other characters. For example, maybe I keep a toll of how many objects the character has interacted with (this could also be focused on a specific interaction, like how many times did they write on the paper). This number could determine whether the convenience store worker is in a good mood or a bad mood when they reach them.
Another area of research that arose for me is the relationship between programming a character and writing a character. I find it fascinating that screenplay considerations like a character’s desires versus needs come into play when designing them as goal-oriented systems. Interactions between the main player’s desires/needs and the AI they will encounter can be thought of as the crux of any space where they meet, determining the potential outcomes of player-NPC interactions.
This week I focused on sourcing 3D artists for my models and on slowly adding each main player affordance. I made a basic model for the first scene which starts in the main player’s apartment.
I intend to use this first space as a sort of tutorial for the kind of interactions one will find on the “outside”. This week, however, I managed to work on affordances specific to the character’s body.
The first one is the mode of transportation. The player can grab the characters head by pressing the trigger and positioning one or both controllers on the head. Then, they can throw it and wherever it lands the user will teleport.
The other functionality consists in the “self-awareness” exercise which records the player’s movements, loops them, and respawns the player in another location. The result is a room full of “past selves.”
Right now the script is working for just the head, new complications arrive when you add a body with an IK. This I will finish in the coming week.
This week, I wrote the script for what I formerly referred to as A Glitch in Three Acts. The thematic remains the same, but now it is titled Earl Grey Lavender Tea. The experience is about a businessman, Torpedo Black, whose sole objective is to find and buy some Earl Grey Lavender tea so he can finish some tedious paperwork. This goal takes him through the surreal and glitchy streets of Prague, through which the user has to improvise to adapt and resolve some of these absurd happenings.
Beyond that, I created a mood-board and made some quick concept art for one of the mechanics and for one of the locations.
Layout for the convenience store where you can buy some tea from Oreilly’s mouse pikachu.
Below, you can see my plan for the last scene. As soon as the user gets back to their apartment, makes some tea and sits down to finish their paperwork, a “self-awareness” exercise is triggered. The user’s animations will be stored and looped, after the user is respawned to another position. This will happen several times, and the user will be able to watch their “past-selves” all across the room in a loop.
Finally, I researched GOAP systems and created a trello board where most of the assets and tasks are outlined. GOAP systems are a form of AI I plan to implement where a planner class is responsible for taking a character’s goals, decided by their states, and choosing which sequence of actions is better to accomplish these goals. Actions have preconditions and effects. This means that characters states and world states serve as preconditions and effects. The goal of an action or a sequence of actions is to change character states and world states.
The goal of the overall story is to experience where the ordinary and the extraordinary meet. Faced with a tedious task like bureaucratic paperwork, Torpedo the businessman needs to navigate a clashing of worlds (Magritte like characters meet Oreilly’s in the warm setting of Prague) which produces glitches only he can fix or side-step.
Going forward I need to do a lot of reflection around affordances and responsible design. I want to avoid making the story too male-centric, and I would like to play with affordances and expectations consciously. Navigation is still something I need to figure out and craft intentionally.
Welcome to my final project. For this project, my priorities are as follows:
Push my concept ideation process to be more directed toward visually solving problems.
Organize and build well-functioning code that can be maintained.
Explore the intersection of surrealist and glitch aesthetics.
I won’t reveal the main plot points now, but imagine Rene Magritte meets David Oreilly (whose CG library I will be borrowing from freely) meets Kingdom of Hearts. The idea is for the narrative to be intertextual, mixing visual narrative languages in a clear, linear story. And truly, the story couldn’t be simpler. The user’s sole desire is to go out and by some Earl Grey lavender tea so that they can get to some tedious paperwork.
The characters will be subject to glitches which the main character will have to fix in gestural and more intuitive ways. For this, I have to carefuly study existing glitches in virtual worlds so that I can intentionally implement them and provide the user with a way to fix them that is not code-based, but gesture-based. E.g. if an object is clipping, the user might need to reach up and grab the invisible camera rig and adjust it to an appropriate position.
All of the action will be set in the Zizkov area in Prague, where I was lucky enough to live in for a year. The culture there is rich with inspiration for surreal meandering.
I am enthusiastic since I will hold my process to a higher standard and ask for any needed help along the way in order to reach these standards.
