Starting from our goal, our team has been working on explore the Sims4 Build Mode and also doing researches on user experience design in VR space. From our research, we found out several experiences have similar interactions with building objects in VR, such as kingspray, tillbrush, Minecraft VR and quill.
We also categorized the interactions in PCversion Sims4 into 3 sections – upper section, upper right section and the bottom section. From our research, in VR, players would prefer less interfaces for interactions. Because traditional UIs may take away some sense of presence. So we decided to limit the UI as few as possible. We’ve went through all the icons in the PC version and talked about ideas for each of them about how to translate it into VR. Specifically, for the upper two sections, they are more about modifying objects already exist in the space and the lower section is for adding and putting objects into the space. So we think there will mainly be two kinds of interactions which are putting/moving objects in the space and UI interactions.
Apart from UI, another important thing we need to explore is the perspective change (zoom in and zoom out). We found there are already a lot of experiences involves perspective change and successfully eliminated the motion sickness in VR, it won’t be a problem for us anymore. However, it is still a topic for us that how to let players control their perspective and how to design the user interface for that particular action…
To move away from the UI work that was done this week, we also wrapped up work on the first draft of the project branding. For the branding, we wanted to keep everything focused around the idea of building, but also to keep the feeling of years of Sims branding. We will have more of the branding to come over the next week as we wrap up the finalized versions of our poster, half-sheets, and logos. We also sent over a bundle of pre-built models for the programmers to access to start creating gold spikes for tech, along with any other beginnings of prototypes.
Next Week
We are going to fast prototype building walls in VR and try to figure out what will be the best way to expand walls and putting up levels of a house. Art wise, we are going to finish all the branding materials and start working on UIs to be translated into VR.