Gabriel’s Puzzler Project
As part of my coursework with the Udacity VR Developer Nanodegree, I designed, tested, and iterated on an application called Puzzler. This mobile VR application takes users through a gloomy dungeon, presenting them with a Simon-Says puzzle challenge.
Unique Considerations
Due to the requirements of a properly scaled environment, the foundation of the scene was modeled off of real life entrances and doorways. Using this as a reference allowed me to maximize the immersive qualities of virtual reality.
Puzzler
Thanks to Austin McCasland and the Udacity VR team, my project was a huge success among family members and peers. I used these individuals as subjects for my user-testing, and, based on the design topics presented, my project resulted in an experience that was friendly and intuitive.
Process
Statement of Purpose: Puzzler is a mobile VR application for new VR users which challenges them to solve a familiar Simon-says type of puzzle in a new way.
Persona
For this project I created a persona named Jeff. Jeff has briefly tried VR at a friends house using a Google Cardboard demo as reference. Jeff is a college student in his last year of undergraduate studies. He plans on attending medical school, loves cutting edge technologies, and can’t wait for self-driving cars to reduce the amount of drunk-driving casualties.
Sketches
Below are some of the sketches I made as a reference for the foundations of my project
User Testing
Testing the Scene and Atmosphere
The first user test I conducted consisted of determining the scale of the environment as well as the mood. Given that the foundation of the scene was modeled after a real doorway, I wanted the experience to feel as if we were actually present in a properly scaled dungeon. In terms of user feedback, the mood was spot on, but the floor felt a bit too close to the user. Using this feedback, I iterated and moved the camera allowing my users to gauge the proper distance between the floor and their position in 3D space.
Testing the Graphical User Interface
For this test, I was able to gauge the scale of the start/restart panels quite well. Aside from some minor text improvements, such as keeping text bold, users were able to understand the purpose of each panel and read text with clarity.
Testing Movement
This test was a bit tricky but after getting feedback from several participants, I was able to iterate and find a smooth movement transition that reduced any previous simulator sickness. Between the start and play sections of the game, user-tests determined that having a transition time of 4 seconds yielded the best results.
Final Game Mechanics
The final user-test was a way to gauge how far I had come and how newcomers would react to the finished experience. For this test, I used old test subjects as well as new ones. Aside from minor feedback on the exit transition, all was positive and resulted in the intended outcome.
Break down of the final piece
Start / Welcome Panel
A simple user interface for a simple experience. From the beginning, I wanted the game to be friendly and familiar. As the screenshot implies, there is no guess work going on here.
Main Room
As seen in the images and sample video above, I utilized audio and visual cues to not only imply the directions of the game, but to add a sense of interactivity and uniqueness to the user experience. These cues are crucial in creating a compelling VR experience, and this project helped me showcase the implementation.
Restart Panel
Similar to the start panel, I wanted to give the user a sense of freedom once they completed the experience. Not only does this simple interface notify users that they have completed the puzzle, but it gives them the option to restart and try again.
Conclusion
Overall, this was a tremendous learning experience. Everything from creating a persona, to iterating from user-tests, this course has empowered me to think before I code. Having a design process is crucial to creating compelling experiences that users will want to dive into again and again. In a new medium such as Virtual Reality, having the opportunity to take a design course dedicated to this technology will impact my work as I continue my journey as a software engineer. I would like to thank Udacity for putting this amount of effort into the program — I can’t wait to continue on.
Link to additional work
For this, and all other projects related to Virtual Reality, you can visit my Github account: https://github.com/gdedi001