After a successful and exhilarating Round 1 of BVW, we were looking forward to the curveballs that the professors would throw at us during the second round. Since, I had worked on the HTC Vive VR headset during Round 1, I knew that I was going to get the Microsoft Hololens as my development platform for Round 2.

ARe you ready?

For the second round of BVW, our assignment prompt was to build an experience for "Naïve guests" without explicitly asking them to do things and using techniques like indirect control in a span of 2 weeks. Naïve guests are those kinds of players that are using the hardware for the first time and have only the basic idea of the interactions. Our challenge this round was to create an experience that the guest could easily understand what they needed to do without having to guide them through each and every interaction.

I was on a team with another programmer, two artists and a sound designer. My primary role on the project was that of a Programmer but I also contributed to the design of the project. I was responsible for implementing game-play mechanics and designing the interaction with the bubbles in the Unity Game Engine. I was also responsible for maintaining the code for the game. I was able to be up and running with the Hololens SDK quickly to prototype on the idea.

We started the design process by getting a list of the interactions and gestures that the guest could do with the Hololens. We came up with an initial idea where the guest would be guiding a lone and lost fox home to it's pack by pinching and dragging a moon in the virtual world. We soon realized that this might indeed by counter-intuitive for the guests as the thought that they can move the moon by pinching and dragging may not occur to them naturally.

We then came up with the idea of interacting with bubbles in the virtual world as everyone loves bubbles and the action of popping them is the same as the tap gesture in Hololens. The experience was for you to create your own virtual fish tank with multiple different kinds of fishes that were moving around the world in bubbles, by popping those bubbles and dropping them in a virtual fish tank. We also had the surprise element of having an exploding pufferfish that would kill all the fish in a certain radius if you didn't pop it before it reached the water surface. We came up with a story that you have entered a magical bubble world and you must build your virtual aquarium by popping the bubbles and placing the items in the virtual fish tank.

Hololens ARe not really worth the hype

The first thing I noticed when I started playing with the Hololens on was that it had an extremely narrow field of view and also it had a tendency of clipping objects that were too close to the viewer. To tackle this hurdle, we made sure that the experience was happening at a distance from the player to ensure that the entire scene was visible in their field of view and also that none of our in game objects would accidently get clipped.

Another challenge for us was creating a satisfying experience for Naïve users of the Hololens. For our story, this meant creating a believable and intuitive enough bubble for the virtual space. To create an intuitive enough bubble that the player would instantly recognize and pop, we decided to use the technique of indirect control. We used the bubble popping sound effect to give the player instantaneous sound feedback, we also used the bubble popping particle effect to refortify that. To edge the players into popping the bubbles, we programmed some bubbles to be empty and some of those empty bubbles would pop on their own.

After Interim's we received feedback from the professors that said the whole experience felt happy and relaxing and the surprise of the puffer fish and the fish dying animation on the table took away that feeling. For the second iteration of the experience, your main goal in the game was to assemble your virtual aquarium starting with decorations, moving on to fishes and then feeding these fish. We also received feedback that the spatial mapping was off and that adding a prop fish tank might improve the world.

We took this feedback into account and fixed the spatial mapping of the experience so that the tank was now fixed on a table and then we placed the prop fish tank there to make the virtual fish tank feel more grounded in the real world and improve the overall Augmented Reality experience.

A major part of the project was prototyping and testing with naïve guests to ensure that the flow of the gameplay felt smooth and relaxing and that the players were able to understand what they were supposed to do. Following the several rounds of playtests, we reduced the speed of the bubbles passing by so that the guests had enough time to interact with them. We also increased the speed of the entire game so as to not make the player lose interest.

Round Complete

Our goal with this project was to make a simple experience where the guest has no difficulty in interacting with the experience. We opted for a linear story where you assemble your virtual aquarium starting with decorations, moving on to fishes and then feeding these fish. We learned how to adapt to the limitations of the hardware to create an engaging experience and how one can use non-verbal cues to successfully guide the guest through the experience.