Udacity VR High Immersion Nanodegree: Project 1
Introduction
This year 2019 I decided to fully enter the world of virtual reality development. I had been exploring this fascinating new medium since 2017 and came to a point where I was having many VR app ideas of my own, and wanted to become as much a VR creator as a VR consumer.
Enter Udacity VR
To obtain the complete skill set of a VR developer, and having explored the available learning resources online, I enrolled in Udacity’s VR High Immersion Nanodegree (https://eu.udacity.com/course/vr-high-immersion-nanodegree--nd107). I chose this online course because it tackled the full process of developing release-ready applications with a focus on 6DOF desktop VR
This write-up constitutes the first reviewed assignment of the program: an article documenting the first project worked upon (a simple mobile VR revolving around a Simon Says Puzzle), and the complete iterative process surrounding its development.
The Puzzler project
Puzzler is the first project of the course and serves as a platform to learn VR design principles as well as the process of user testing-based iteration.
It’s a simple mobile VR game where the user is prompted to enter a room where 5 orbs light and chime in a defined sequence. The player has to repeat the same sequence by gaze-clicking on the orb in order to exit the room and complete the game.
Development Process
The project began with a Statement of Purpose that was used to define the nature, goal, and scope of the project:
Puzzler is a VR mobile mini-game made by Udacity and targeted as an introductory experience for people discovering interactive VR. It presents an interactive 3D version of the classic Simon says Puzzle.
Persona
Following the statement of purpose, I then created a persona to define the targeted user
I decided to aim this experience for the typical student curious about VR
Here’s Emma, 20 years old, studying history at University
She’s always been interested in innovative storytelling mediums and recently had the chance to discover VR as a novel attraction in a museum exhibition. She decided to get a Google Cardboard to try free apps and games to explore VR further
“The sense of VR immersion is completely new to me!”
Sketches
I then use quick sketching to prototype the overall structure of the game, illustrating the different states a player would go through
I also explored different concepts for the user interface menus. They would only allow the player to start and replay the experience.
I decided to choose the simplest to save development time and not have the player confused or disturbed.
User Testing
User test 1
I began the first user tests as soon as I had a virtual environment setup, in order to ensure the user felt comfortable and was able to see the game elements correctly. The tests were done with friends that were not really used to using VR.
For the first test I asked questions pertaining to the mood, scale, and visuals:
How big do you feel?
“I feel I could be a bit higher relative to the ground”
What is the atmosphere like?
“It’s kind of colorful, a bit artificial because of the brightness”
Is there anything you have a hard time looking at?
“I look more at the room than the orbs, they don’t attract my sight too much”
As a result of this first test, I corrected the player height a bit, and more importantly changed the ambient light values as well as the orb material color to make the interior ambiance darker and more believable, as well as making the orbs more noticeable by contrast.
User test 2
For the second user test, the game mechanics were complete and the players were able to experience the full loop
I asked questions pertaining to in-game movements, interactivity, and comprehension:
How does the movement feel to you?
“It feels okay, maybe a tad fast but I’m nitpicking”
What do you think about the menus and their readability?
“I think they are fine, straight to the point”
How did you find the puzzle?
“I had a bit of a hard time noticing the orb sequence playing, the orb sound effects weren’t very loud and the room soundtrack caught my attention more”
They also added that the game lacked an environment outside the room and that the absence of flames in the torches (those only had a unity light emitter on them) was a bit weird.
I iterated on those comments by slowing down the movement speed “a tad” and then went into the sound effects settings to correct the orb sound effects values and make them louder compared to the room ambiance noises that I lowered.
Finally, I set up a terrain around the room with a sand-like texture and sculpted mountains in the distance. I also set a night skybox to compliment the exterior. Finally, I went and got a free fire effect from the unity asset store and scaled it to create a believable flame in the room torches
Breakdown of the final piece
Environment setting and menus
The final game sets the player in a desert setting near night time, facing a medieval room in which the puzzle is situated. An outdoor sound loop with cricket noises adds further immersion.
The player is greeted with a simple menu panel welcoming him to the experience and prompting him to begin by pressing a button. A similar panel awaits the player once the puzzler is completed and offers to replay the experience.
The interior of the room is purposefully dim, with only a few torches lighting the walls and accentuating the wall brick textures, allowing the player to feel stuck inside the room until he solves the puzzle. That same puzzle appears as five bright blue orbs floating in the middle of the room, inside a purple spotlight, claiming the player’s full attention. A faint ominous soundtrack accentuates the supernatural theme of the scene
Conclusion
This VR experience was a great case study in user-focused VR design. From the very beginning, the end user was envisioned (as someone with little VR experience in this case) in order to tailor the design accordingly. Early on the environments and player settings went through user testing in order to target areas of improvement and iterate from there.
The result is a simple immersive experience that is comfortable for the end users, that conveys its intended ambiance correctly, and that serves well as a short introductory interactive VR game for people looking to discover this medium.
Next Steps
The potential of this simple game lies in the fact that it can be implemented in a great variety of themes and settings, making it an ideal mini-puzzle section in bigger VR game experiences.
It could also be expanded upon by adding more rooms and variations on the puzzle. An especially interesting route would be to play with the memorization component of the experience to deliver educative serious game experiences for schools. The immersive and experiential nature of VR would help with those memory retention techniques.
