WEEK 9 – HALVES PRESENTATION

This is the week of halves presentation! We have presented our work to all the faculty and classmates via presentation for the first time!
To get more feedback, we sent our build to Dave (our client) a week before. And thanks to Dave, we got a lot of useful feedback so that we can iterate the build this week and the next week.
Because of the halves presentation, our development team didn’t have much updates. This weekly blog will talk about feedback from Dave, the presentation and functions we are going to implement the following two weeks.
Based on Dave’s feedback (please find it in the end of this blog), we are going to primarily focus on changing design of the carpet (mat) in the room to provide more warmth and feeling of in the room.
Since we didn’t implement a lot function in the in-room mode, we will start implement raycast in the room to select objects with function as design, duplicate and delete integrated.
As we mentioned that visual feedback is super important in VR, we’ll add plumbob glowing effect to indicate trigger press.
We also found that adding ceiling in in-room mode may bring more sense of presence.
For the design mode, we were using actual objects to indicate different designs. It was very confusing and can block player’s sight and intersect with other furniture (in all a lot of problems). As a result, we will change the actually objects to pure color palette.
Presentation wise, it was smooth. We may gain more feedback during next week’s faculty meeting.
Feedback from Dave:

Table Scale:

  • The new drawers are more natural feeling than the vertical sliding version.
  • The drawers felt a little far away. Just a little.
  • Wish I could slide the drawers out instead of a simple click.
  • I liked the experiment of using each drawer as its own category of items.  I really felt like I was in my shop working with legos or other model building pieces.
  • Selecting the buttons feels pretty natural (once you figure it out). But there was a tiny learning curve due to lack of feedback.
  • When you select a table button both vive controllers show you in that mode, but only the hand that pressed the button is actually in the mode.  (For example: Select delete with your left hand. Both hands show delete on the controller. Clicking on an object w/ your left hand deletes the object. Clicking on an object w/ your right hand picks up the object)
  • The drop placement with the ghost image is vastly improved since the last version.  Good props to whoever spent the time doing that work.  Even door and window placement felt much better.
  • Love love love that floor objects are held at an angle on the controller. Makes it feel so much more natural when trying to put the object down straight.
  • Clicking to move a door or window drags the whole wall along with it.

1:1 Scale:

  • When you pick something up you’re holding it from the bottom. But the object is so large it’s unwieldy and it feels very clumsy/unnatural to move/manipulate.
  1. Possible Solution: Maybe the object in hand is at table scale and the ghost object shows it at 1:1scale.
  • I really wish there was some way to quickly switch between modes (delete/clone/design) without having to return to the table
  • I wasn’t able to open or warp through doors so walls were still a big movement blocker. Can’t walk through my house.
  • It wasn’t immediately clear how to exit 1:1 mode (since it’s a different trigger than entry and isn’t shown on the controller)
  • Holding an object and returning to table mode keeps the object in 1:1 scale.  I’d suggest one of the following few ideas to help solve this.  1) disallow player from leaving 1:1 scale if still holding an object.  2) Change the scale of the object based on what mode you’re in  3) Cancel the held object and return it to place when switching modes

Design Mode (Both Scales):

  • Seeing the various options floating above the placed version seemed a little problematic for a couple of reasons:
  1. Scale-ability:  what happens when you have 5-10 variants? How do you display them all at once or cycle between them?
  2. Focus:  By presenting the various color options as duplicate objects next to the “real” object it made it feel a bit daunting. Because every variant is presented at equal weight to the “real” object it was easy to lose focus on which one I was supposed to be looking at due to the noise of seeing multiple objects side by side.
  3. Possible Solution:  Perhaps showing a color swatch selector or painter’s palette may be a bit more streamlined and elegant.

Rotate (both scales):

  • Only seeing the ghost object rotate and not the object in hand severely limits the usability of this function. I really want the object in hand to rotate so I can physically move it around into place and get a preview of it (without actually placing it down yet)