Connecting Students to Universities: A Virtual Tour of Bucknell University
For those who want a quick demo of our project, you can click this link to immediately access our VR project: https://bucknell-vr-tour2-electric-boogaloo.glitch.me/
Background
This project was developed under the guidance of Professor Evan Peck in his computer science elective course Human-Computer Interaction held at Bucknell University. The purpose of this project is to design something that embodies what we think virtual reality (VR) should be.
Our Tools
Our project makes use of the three tools: Google Cardboard, Glitch, and A-frame. Google Cardboard is a cheap way in which people can quickly interact with VR through the user's smartphone. Glitch is a tool which is similar to google documents, meaning that it allows multiple people to edit the same file of code simultaneously. A-frame is a web framework that is built on top of HTML, allowing for the building of VR experiences.
Project Result
Brainstorming Project Ideas
Initially, we brainstormed a wide variety of different ideas for different projects to pursue. These ideas can be split into five different subgroups:
- Virtualizing a physical puzzle game — Escape Room
- Simulating a hard to reach environment — Outer Space, Deep Sea
- Creating a Quality of Life Change
- VR version of a game — Pokemon GO
- Virtual campus tour — Bucknell University
Puzzle Game: Escape Room
Escape room is a puzzle game that takes place in the real world. It often has a player or group of players stuck inside of a locked room. Given this scenario, they are to attempt to find a way to unlock the door to escape the room. The obstacle is in attempting to find a way to unlock the door. This game incorporates a number of puzzles that the player is required to solve given their circumstantial information. Porting this physical game into virtual reality may prove to be a more accessible alternative to the real game.
Hard to Reach Locations: Outer Space, Deep Sea
This idea is self-explanatory in that the user will be allowed to experience environments which they will otherwise never be able to reach. This can potentially be used as a learning tool, allowing more visual learners to interact with the material they are being verbally taught.
Quality of Life Change
In this video, two men are allowed to watch a movie together despite their being separated by hundreds of miles. By recreating real-life environments such as movie theaters, we allow people to be in situations that they would otherwise not be able to be in. This artificially boosts the living standards of people at low cost.
Pokemon GO in VR
Pokemon GO is a fairly popular mobile game that uses augmented reality. The user is able to go around their world and capture pokemon by interacting with their smartphones. We hope that virtual reality can take this game one step further and allow for an even more unique Pokemon experience.
Virtual Campus Tour of Bucknell
Most prospective students hope to get a feel for a school before they choose whether or not to attend. The campus tour provides this experience to prospective students at the cost of being both costly to attend due to travel expenses and intrusive to the current students of the school. An answer to provide a virtual reality alternative to the current campus tour.
Choosing a Project Idea
Aspiration for Virtual Reality
After brainstorming a list of different project ideas, we found that most of these ideas have a commonality of immersing a person into a new environment. The aspiration of our VR project is then to emphasize the immersion aspect of VR. Keeping in mind this aspiration helps us in eliminating ideas which go against our ideal. Some ideas which can be eliminated is the quality of life and hard to reach locations idea. While the quality of life idea is interesting, it does not push the boundaries of immersion enough. The hard to reach locations idea similarly fails to push the boundaries of immersion. While it may provide amazing visuals, there is a question of what kinds of background noise we should provide to the user.
Limitation of Tools
Our main limiting factor in this project is our method of interfacing the VR. While the Google Cardboard is perhaps the most easily accessible form of VR, the tradeoff is that it is lacking in terms of controls. The Google Cardboard only has one button and is also limited to motion capture. Keeping this in mind we can eliminate Pokemon GO since most of the fun had in the augmented reality game involves the “throwing” of a Pokeball in order to catch a pokemon. The limited controls inherent in the Google Cardboard does not present a satisfactory alternative to the current form of the game. Similarly, we can eliminate the puzzle game idea. A major draw in this idea is that the player should be able to interact with the environment around them. The limited controls provided does not allow for users to very convincingly pick up objects or intuitively interact with whatever environments they may find themselves in.
Choosing the Virtual Campus Tour of Bucknell
The virtual campus tour of Bucknell provides the user with the unique opportunity to immerse themselves in a new environment. This immersion can take the form of looking at the surrounding area, listening to the tour guide explain some key characteristics of the school, and listening to the background noises inherent in the real locations around the school. Besides this, they should be able to easily navigate through different portions of the tour by using a simple click from the Google Cardboard.
Project Scope
Researching Bucknell VR Campus Tours
As we continued researching, we found a virtual tour of Bucknell University on youtube. However, after watching it, we realized that the current VR tour didn’t really encompass what it was truly like to visit Bucknell. The VR tour essentially involved a group of disconnected photospheres with no sound involved. While the tour displayed all of the main points of the campus, we felt that it didn’t show prospective students where locations were in relation to each other. That being said, we wanted to design our own tour that would be accurate in showing prospective students what the Bucknell campus is truly like and to make them feel that they’re actually here on campus.
How Our Project Brings Value to Users
We hope that our VR tour can improve on previous designs in three significant ways: by being more personal, saves the user time, and by answering questions. We wanted our tour to be a more personal and immersive experience by providing narration from a Bucknell campus tour guide. The tour should start on the Academic Quad where our tour guide introduces himself and gives a bit of background before guiding the tour group to other locations, just like in an in-person tour. Unlike an in-person tour, our design should save time by allowing users to be able to choose their own path across campus. The user should be given the ability to choose which location to visit next; either the Engineering Quad, Rooke Science Center, Rooke Greenhouse, inside the Bertrand Library or over to Academic West. Furthermore, users should be able to ask questions in real-time and later have them answered by a campus tour by email. Rather than having a set tour that would be the same to every user, we decided to add these features in order to give users a more personalized experience, which would reinforce the feeling of being on campus.
Roadblocks
Our main concern starting out was that we weren’t sure whether we would create the tour with a 360-degree video or with photospheres. As we presented our initial idea to the class, we received several pieces of feedback and given that it would be hard to obtain a 360-degree camera, we decided it would be best if we create the tour with photospheres.
Final Project Iteration
The final iteration of our project starts the user in the Academic Quad. Narration from a tour guide is playing alongside ambient audio recorded at the quad. The movement of the user’s head rotates the photosphere, creating the effect of looking around a three-dimensional environment. A series of portals depicting other areas the user can visit will hover in front of the user. There are two ways of interacting with these portals. First, the user must center their field of vision over the portal, then they must either choose to wait for a few seconds or click a button the Google Cardboard to interact with the portal. To assist the user, a circular reticule is displayed in the center of the user's vision. The reticule is used as a signifier of interaction; its color changes when placed over a portal. After pressing the portal, the user is brought to another photosphere with new narration and ambient sounds. They can travel to the main quad, Rooke Chemistry, Academic West, Bertrand Library, and a greenhouse.
You can click this link to quickly access our VR project in order to observe all of the design choices that we have implemented: https://bucknell-vr-tour2-electric-boogaloo.glitch.me/
User Feedback
After demo day, our team received feedback based on the first iteration of our VR tour. Feedback was given in an “I like, I wish, What if” format and are as follows:
I like
- That Bucknell is incorporated into the project
- The idea of being able to tour Bucknell without visiting in person
- How accessible it is and does what it’s supposed to do
- That is has a beneficial application
- That it’s very informational
I wish
- It felt like you were walking from place to place
- There was a way to interact with the photospheres
- The scenes were videos to give the user more to look at and create a more immersive experience
- It worked with the VR glasses
What If
- Instead of hovering over options, you had arrows on the floor to select where to go
- You had a walking video
- You added a student to the tour and narrated their Bucknell experience
- The audio guided you where to look as well
- You had an actual 360 video tour
Future Project Goals
Overall, our team received generally positive feedback from our peers after demo day. However, we definitely had several areas where we could improve on if we were to create another iteration of our prototype. One aspect we would focus most on would be making the experience even more immersive. In future iterations, we plan to modify the location of the portals for each scene. In the current version, the portals for each scene is always displayed in a line. Instead, we plan to place the portals in the direction you would walk to get there. For example, the portal to go from the Academic Quad to Bertrand Library would be in the direction of the library. This helps the user learn the layout of the campus. Users develop a mental model of interfaces they interact with. In this instance, they learn the location of portals with respect to buildings in the photospheres. Placing portals in the direction users would travel causes their mental model to encode the layout of the campus, allowing them to navigate the campus easily if they become a student or attend a physical tour. While we do have areas where we can grow and improve, our team ultimately felt that we had achieved our goal of creating a new and immersive experience that also brings value to our users.
For users who wish to accesss our source code, it can be found here in this link: https://glitch.com/~bucknell-vr-tour2-electric-boogaloo