Design Reflections from Ghostbusters: Dimension
Nothing says Toronto summer quite like going into a darkened room to escape to another reality.
That’s exactly what Pixel Tours got up to last week, taking a field trip down to Ghostbusters: Dimension, a “Hyper-Reality Experience” at the freshly opened Rec Room in Toronto.
Ghostbusters: Dimension popped up in New York in 2016 and finally us Canucks are getting a taste of one of the premium immersive VR experiences on the planet. Developed by Utah-based The Void, the un-tethered VR experience utilizes every gimmick in the book: wind, water, smell, rumbling floors, and vest haptics to immerse you into the wild (and wet) world of bustin’ ghosts.
The key feature of the experience is that the virtual room layout matches the real world: you can touch walls and sit in chairs. It brings a tangibility to the environment that isn’t possible with the current wave of consumer home VR. And with a bit of room geometry trickery, the world feels much bigger than it actually is.
Working at Pixel Tours on VR projects, I know a little about how the sausage is made and I wanted to dive into some of the finer points of the experience design, what’s working, and what I learned about creating immersive experiences for VR (and AR/MR).
SPOILER WARNING
I’m going to expose some of the magic behind the experience. If you’re new to VR and want to experience Ghostbusters with fresh eyes: turn back now because here be spoilery dragons.
The future is un-tethered
Ghostbusters was a slap to the face for just how important un-tethered experiences are to virtual reality.
It doesn’t take a master designer to know that the days of tethered VR experiences are numbered. The Void may be burdening the player with a hefty PC backpack but the freedom of movement brought the immersion to whole other level.
In the next year, VR will be moving aggressively towards un-tethered devices, but how will the shift affect how we design VR experiences?
With headset-based room tracking on the way, there may no longer be play area boundaries to the limit the player as they are now technologically free to wander about their home and experience content anywhere.
The Void has the convenience of bringing the player into a constructed physical environment but that kind of control and curation won’t be possible in the home.
Precise, linear experiences set in fixed environments are looking much more difficult. As designers, it’s a good time to think about procedural, emergent experiences that can shift, morph, and twist to match the physical space.
Luckily, we don’t need to look very far: augmented and mixed reality has been doing this for awhile. Fragments for Microsoft Hololens procedurally builds crime scenes around the physical space of the player: clues are placed around the room and characters will enter the scene to sit on your furniture.
Pictured left, Fragments uses train signage and litter that is adapted to different surfaces throughout the room. The coffee table is transformed into a pubic bench. The main set piece of the murder victim requires any open space on the floor.
Litter and graffiti also help suggest various other themes: urban setting, grungy, possibly underground.
These elements can be shifted and moved according to basic rulesets to create a convincing train station in any home.
Thinking about locations in terms of theme and set pieces rather than specific layouts and sizes sets a good foundation for procedural experiences that can fit whatever room the player is in, and, in doing so, create a highly immersive Void-like experience by sharing the virtual world with the physical.
Short experiences hinder immersion
The Ghostbusters experience runs at 7–10 minutes, and feels shorter than that when you’re inside.
There is, of course, an underlying business requirement for throughput. The experience must get “X” number of players through the experience an hour in order to continue operating; however, it creates a complex problem related to the design of immersion.
I started out directing theatre and one of my favourite books on directing, Sense of Direction by William Ball, described the state of an audience member for the first 10 minutes of a performance:
The curtain rises: For the first ten minutes, the audience is curious, distracted, detached, and even skeptical. “You can’t draw me in. I know the scenery is fake, I know the language is artificial, I know I am holding a program, I know I may have to fight for control of the arm rest, I know I just had dinner, I know my objective reactions to what I see, I know it is a story, a fabrication, and I know I am separated from the action. I do not believe in it.”
Then something magical happens: the resistance dissipates, the story progresses, and suspension of disbelief starts to take hold as the psychological defenses fall. The first 10 minutes, however, is an alchemy of distraction and disbelief.
You can see where this causes problem with Ghostbusters. Just as the player gets over adjusting the headset, finding the right volume, understanding the rules of interaction with the environment (and each other), the experience is over. In my 10 minutes in Ghostbusters, I never got to a true suspension of disbelief.
VR presents a whole new arsenal of psychological resistance as we try to trick the brain into being in another world: I know I’m wearing a headset, I know the avatars aren’t real, I know that’s a fan in place of the air conditioner, I know the vest vibrates artificially, I know the gun is fake, I know I’m wearing a PC and not a proton pack.
The “short experience ride” will inevitably be a part of the VR arcade for years to come, but it brought to the forefront of my mind just how important the first minutes are for any player in VR, new or experienced. It also exposed we need to find ways to break some of these psychological resistances.
The gears started grinding on how I would improve the Ghostbusters experience:
Ground the physical world
If you’ve spent any time in a Vive you have built up a mental defense for virtual objects — you know you can’t drop real controllers on to virtual tables.
Ghostbusters kept me in a weird state where I wasn’t sure what objects had physical representations and which did not. This created a hesitation to interact — especially without virtual representations of my hands.
Solution
The experience needs a clear introductory interaction with the physical world that each player must complete to proceed. The first player to open the door to enter the experience discovers the interaction with the doorknob, but the others do not get that initial handshake that links the virtual and physical. Inside the headset, I wasn’t sure if the door was real or if the player avatar collision had nudged open a virtual door.
Each player needs to open that door, or there needs to be another physical interaction to start the experience. Such an interaction would also ritualize the entry to the magic circle player-by-player and build collaborative awareness across the team via radio interactions between those inside the room and those in the waiting area.
Collaboration
Ghostbusters is a surprisingly lonely experience. It cries out for even the simplest of puzzles that requires teamwork and communication with the rest of the crew.
Wrangling the ghost into the trap does require all four beams, but the scene is so chaotic it happens naturally without requiring the team to work together — there’s just one ghost left that everyone is aiming at.
Solution
A simple collaborative puzzle would force players to work together to proceed and set the stage for a teamwork approach to zapping the ghost into the trap. It would also be an opportunity to re-inforce rules of virtual-physical interaction and set up player spacing.
Stylized Avatars
It’s handy being able to see your crew, but without full body tracking the movement approximations broke the immersion on a regular basis. The awkward foot shuffling and the often (grossly) incorrect inverse kinematics used for arm position regularly took me out of the experience. This also made me nervous about how close I was to the other players as their virtual avatars did not perfectly reflect their real world position.
Solution
Realistic full-body avatars have been explored by Daydream Labs and the verdict is: it’s hard to get right.
For Ghostbusters, a hovering torso and gun might be enough to show position of the other players without breaking their arms or using awkward foot-shuffling animations. The world is supernatural enough that stylized, disjointed avatars could work and would be well worth the immersive gains.
Wrapping Up
Un-tethered VR is glimpse into the future of the medium, but there are some lost opportunities in Ghostbusters’ design that we’re going to be thinking about in our own Pixel Tours Labs experiments — hyper-reality or otherwise:
- Have a clear “handshake” interaction between the virtual and real world for every player;
- Get players working together and juice more fun and discovery through collaborative mechanics;
- Use stylized avatars to minimize immersion-breaking tracking and IK errors — at least until the technology catches up.
And in looking towards the future of VR/AR/MR, I’m also thinking about the process of designing equally immersive experiences for the home that bridges the physical with the virtual:
- Designing experiences as a collection of set pieces rather than linear rooms or events;
- Consider the themes of a place when designing an experience as a means to produce procedural systems that can change to fit the player’s home.
What is Pixel Tours?
Pixel Tours is a product design and strategy consultancy based in Toronto. We bring sensible UX and technology intelligence to complex digital products from web to mobile to virtual/mixed reality.
Interested in working with us? Say hello!
