Introduction
Working on different projects as part of Udacity Virtual Reality Nanodegree has been a lot of fun!! This is the fourth project that I have created as part of the course and I would like to introduce you to various aspects of the project that helped me understand the concept of VR Design in depth.
Project scope
The problem statement was to create VR version of Simon Says puzzle that we all are pretty familiar with and have been enjoying since our childhood.
Project Title
FIFA World Cup Puzzler
While I was working on the project, the main focus of the whole world was on FIFA World Cup. Everyone around, including my family members were most of the time talking about the same. So, the obvious choice for me was to create something related to soccer so that the users can connect to my puzzler experience.
Although there were many challenges that I had to face while building the project and there is still a lot of scope of improvement, but I am happy with what I could come up with. Here is a glimpse of my final project.
Video shows both the failure and the success scenarios of the game
Breakdown of final piece
The user, who is a soccer player finds himself in front of the player’s entrance inside a huge soccer stadium at the start of FIFA Puzzler experience. There is a Start Canvas that blocks the entrance and has a Start button just below the welcome message. When the player clicks on the Start button, Start Canvas disappears and the player is taken inside the field with the help of motion mechanics. He can hear a soccer tune during this movement. There are five soccer balls placed in zig zag position at the center of the field. These balls glow in a particular pattern that the player is supposed to remember and repeat in order to successfully solve the puzzle. There are separate audio tracks for the correct and wrong attempts while trying to repeat the pattern to give feedback to the player. After solving the puzzle, the player moves in front of the Restart Panel which was deactivated earlier. Player can press the Restart Button to move to the start position again.
Life Cycle Stages Involved
Project Section
Statement of Purpose
FIFA World Cup Puzzler is a mobile VR application for new VR users which challenges them to solve familiar Simon Says Puzzle in a new way.
Persona
“Spending time with yourself is a big relief”
Chris is looking for a break from his stressful job of dealing with a lot of clients during a day. His idea is to focus all his attention to a totally different task for a few minutes, forget all the stressful transactions and customers during a 5–10 minute break during office hours and come back fresh. He is looking for the puzzler to keep himself sharp and alert during the small break.
VR Experience — None
Sketches
Video tutorials taught us in detail how to create this puzzler experience using a small dungeon. Before starting to work on the project, I went through some of the earlier puzzler submissions that were awarded the “Outstanding Project Award”. Inspired from those submissions, it was pretty clear in my mind that I have to create something different.
A lot of ideas came to my mind but the two dominant ideas were to either help Dory find her way back home or to give a FIFA World Cup experience to the users.
I created some sketches for these ideas.
As depicted in the persona, I was targeting to create the application for young professionals, so creating DORY experience seemed to be childlike and I decided to go with the second option. Moreover, I felt that the users might be able to relate to it well in the current scenario. But I was not sure if I will be able to do justice with this idea.
The biggest challenge for creating FIFA experience was to have a soccer stadium in place. Initial thought was to create one myself in Blender. I had never used Blender before so I started going through the tutorials. After spending 2–3 days on learning Blender, I realised that creating a full-fledged stadium myself might not be feasible at this stage. So, I started looking for stadium models online. Luckily, I found one from blendswap.com that has been used in the project. I downloaded the soccer ball model from Unity Asset Store.
User Testing
After initial R&D for the project, it was now time to show my creation to other people. I started sharing my application with my family and friends to get their feedback and conducted a series of user tests with them.
User Test 1
Few initial questions that I asked them were:
- Can you comfortably look at all the objects in scene? Is there something that you want to see but its not visible?
- Does the scale feel appropriate?
- Is the mood well established? Can you describe the mood ?
They were fine with the scale and since they could see the soccer stadium, they could very well guess the mood of the game and told me that I am trying to create something related to soccer. So, the first user test went well except for one feedback that they could not see anything beyond the back wall. That was because I had placed the camera very near to the back wall and that too at a very low height. It was rectified as is evident from the below screenshots.
User Test 2
Next step was to add the start and restart panels indicating the start and finish of the game.
User Testing involved seeking answers to the following questions:
- Do you see the panel? What do you think it is for?
- What do you think happens when you hit the Start button?
- What do you think the restart panel does?
User was intelligent enough to understand the use of the two panels and did not have any specific feedback to give at this stage. Hence, there were no changes done in the panels.
User Test 3
Third and final step towards completing the puzzler experience was to add the movement mechanics, game mechanics and audio in the project. User (who is a soccer player) is taken inside the stadium when he clicks on start button, solves the puzzle and then moves in front of the restart panel that has a congratulatory message written on it. This was the most crucial phase of the project as motion was introduced in the game. Motion when not handled properly can cause sickness among the users.
Since the soccer stadium was huge, after adding the audio I realised that the user could hardly hear the tune from the position at which he was standing initially after entering the stadium. I tried placing more audio sources between the user’s position and the soccer balls but still the user could not hear it very clearly. Increasing the volume was not a good idea because it would have caused loud noise while user travelled from the initial position towards the balls and then to the final position after solving the puzzle. So, I moved the user position little close to the balls that caused the balls to move out of focus area while user looked at them because I had placed them horizontally. Hence, modified the placement of balls and changed them to zig zag position.
Another round of user testing was conducted in this phase and the user was asked to answer the following questions:
- Is the speed of movement comfortable?
- Do you feel sickness?
- Is there anything that gets disoriented during the movement?
- Is the audio appropriate as per the environment?
- Do you think audio goes well with the environment?
Although the user was pretty comfortable while moving inside the stadium from the start point but he complained that the speed with which he was being taken in front of the restart panel on completing the puzzle was quite fast. He did not feel sickness but the transition was not that smooth. Another feedback was that the restart panel appeared to be very close and looked like as if the panel is falling on him. I took the note of the feedback and did some changes in the project. The speed after solving the puzzle was decreased and the restart panel was taken little far away from the user.
The user liked the audio that was being played when the game started and also after solving the puzzle. It was a soccer tune that I had downloaded from zedge.net.
Conclusion and Next Steps
After working on this project and conducting a series of user tests, I realised the importance of a good VR design that can otherwise cause uneasiness for the users and hence result in a bad user experience for our application. I also learnt how to go about creating an application with great user experience in an organised manner.
As the next step, I would like to learn how to create these models on my own. I’m sure it’ll be a lot of fun too!
