BVW Round 2 Final – Fall, 2019

Last week, ETC students made their final presentations for Round 2 of the Building Virtual Worlds (BVW) Class for the Fall, 2019 semester. If you are not familiar with this class, students are challenged to build five virtual worlds throughout the semester. They must work quickly, creatively, and collaboratively as they have two weeks or less to create each world.

This semester, the assignment for Round 2 was to create a consistent, highly interactive and engaging experience that allows naive guests to feel like they have a lot of freedom in the choices they make. Additionally students are not allowed to give instructions to the guest as they are only permitted to use indirect control.

After the final presentations, we caught up with Team 29, made up of five first-year students, Jiewen Chen, Yiqi Chen, Hyo Eun Kim, Junyi Liu, and Shengyao Xiao to learn more about their world. ‘Baby Go’ is a VR experience built on the HTC Vive to explore a baby’s room filled with fun toys. The team set two specific goals for the project 1) Making as many interesting interactions as possible and 2) Making the interactions very natural.

In terms of interactivity, the team chose simple but fun toys that everyone already knows how to play with such as dominoes, rockets, destructible piggy bank, flashlight, drums and trains. They made every effort to create a world that was lovely and playful to encourage the guest to explore.

In terms of the interest curve, they focused on finding the balance between freedom and constraints as well as making the experience rewarding. In order to encourage the guest to continue to explore, the team used candy and interactive toys as visual indicators and rewards. While trying to create a climb system for the world, the programmer notes a lesson learned is that simple interaction may require complex logic.

We encourage you to take a look at the fun and exciting world of “Baby Go”!

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