Overview of Week5
- Talked about the topic ”Why AR” again – Ideation: use physical furniture or props to let players feel that other players in the AR world can interact with their physical worlds.
- 3 directions of our experience:
1) Small games pack
2) Survival experience
3) Several isolated demos like Pupil - Technical demo 1: two players in the AR world can clap and high five together.
- Technical demo 2: two players in the AR world can pick up objects and throw or give to each other.
- Voice chat feature on the network is partially working right now. The server can now talk to the client.
Quarter recap
We collect feedback from players and also our observations through quarter walkaround. We found out that players enjoyed playing with cubes. They through cubes all around. They want us to generate more cubes and they enjoy the feeling of being surrounded with colorful cubes. Also, they enjoyed 3D drawing in the world although we haven’t achieved the multiplayer mode. They can only see their own drawing.
High-five & Clapping work!
After the initial touch with our deceives, we started building social interactions. The first demo is players can high five with each other, and they can clap. Why we choose this interaction to build the first is because this interaction is the most efficient way that we can let players feel they are in the same space and interact with another player. And technically, it’s also a fundamental function for us to build other hands interaction though leap motion.
Working on the second demo
The second prototype we tried to build is to let players pick up objects and pass/throw objects to each other. Passing/throwing objects are the basic social interaction that happens in real life. When we discussed the social interaction, all of us mentioned passing and throwing an object is the easiest way for us to feel interactive with other people. And it’s also the basic interaction for our games. Whatever the final experience will go, we need high-five and passing objects in our world.
We playtested with ETC alumni and our team members. These two demo were playable this week, but they still need to polish. We will keep working on it.
Voice chatting feature
This week, our voice chatting feature partially worked. Now the server can talk to the client, we are still trying to figure out how they can chat with each other.
Why AR?
During this week, we realized a serious problem in our project. All the demo and social interactions can be done in VR space, why we have to use AR? We found out that why AR is different is from VR is because players in AR can actually interact with physical objects. For example, players can put a virtual cup of water on their physical table. But in VR, they can never do that. So we came up with an idea is to use a physical object, and let two players interact with this physical world. In this way, one player can see another player is interacting with the physical object in his/her AR view. This player will have the feeling that another player is actually in his/her physical world. So we tried to put this idea into a scenario. For instance, a fishing scene.
In this scenario, players need to have the same physical world setting(limited by the tech we have now, we are not able to detect the precise position of the physical world and share the view). They can fish in the virtual world around a physical object. Also, players can see each other are actually sit on the physical chairs. We extend this idea to a complete experience that maybe we can build a survival game based on this fishing feature.
So, now we have some directions, we can build a survival experience, we can build several mini interactive experiences within a theme, we can also make these interactions into games and provide our players several mini-games.