Purpose:
This educational VR app would provide interactive 3D views of basic knitting stitches and techniques to aid knitting beginners who are learning on their own. Since the students would most likely be new to VR, the platform would likely be mobile.
Persona:
Age: 23
Occupation: Student, part time retail worker
Name: Nikki
Quote: “I’d love to learn knitting, but I don’t have time.”
Motivation: Nikki wants to learn knitting but finds YouTube tutorials confusing because they aren’t interactive. Between schoolwork and part time work, she doesn’t have much time to try and figure out YouTube tutorials on her own. She would like to be able to see the knitting done in 3D in order to learn.
Experience with VR: None
Platform considerations:
Since Nikki is a student and has little disposable income, the only readily accessible platform would be mobile/Cardboard, unless there were a few headsets to try at school or the library. Even then, access to the headsets would be restricted.
Since it would be on mobile, there isn’t a feasible way to simulate the knitting action, but if there were 360 video shot of the teacher knitting a basic stitch, then all Nikki has to do is move the video around with her fingers.
Technically, a 3D model might work too, with low to mid-range polygon complexity probably since needles are simple shapes and yarn follows a regular pattern. Animation would then become the limiting step. An alternative would be to have 2D videos from multiple angles and a still 360 image of a certain step.
Then Nikki would participate with her own needles, since a lot of knitting is muscle memory and it would be strange to replicate the action with controllers. (Thinking to the future, perhaps it could be AR with image recognition of the student’s motions?)
Therefore, the obvious development platform would be mobile/360 media. A high immersion game could teach the theory, but the price point and development time aren’t worth the learning potential.
[This post was written to fulfil a requirement of the Udacity VR Developer Nanodegree, and also as a fun guided brainstorming experiment. If you do make something like this idea, let me know! This is cross-posted to my quest log.]