In week 11, we have built a complete version of our VR training and were ready for playtesters. Throughout the whole week, we conducted ten playtest sessions. Among them, there are ETC faculties, ETC students and Ph.D. students from the client’s lab. Our target audience is graduate students at engineering school so we are very selective on the background of our playtesters. ETC students and faculties share a similar background with a decent amount of VR experiences so their feedback focuses on the understanding and intuitiveness of our VR training. Students from the client’s lab could help us correct the clearness of the procedures. All of their feedback are quite helpful for us to improve later: Here are some of the photos during playtesting:
Before the playtest, we gave them a brief introduction about our project:
“We are team Hot Metal. We are working on a VR tutorial of a 3D metal printing machine for CMU Engineering Department. What we are going to show you is our latest VR demo, which will be used for engineering students after they took the class and got enough knowledge from our PC tutorial. This demo is supposed to be played by the students who have already learned the operation. So if you are confused, let us know.”
One student acted as a guide to help them go through the demo if the player needs help and two students were observers who wrote down everything they saw during the playtests.
After the playtest, the observers asked the players the following questions:
- Do you know what you are doing during the playtest? If no, then why?
- Are all instructions clear for you? If no, what are they?
- Do you have trouble finding some objects? If yes, what are they?
- Do you understand the controllers’ interaction? If no, then why?
- Do you feel you are learning something from the experience?
- How do you feel about the sound effects?
- Do you have any other suggestions or confusions?
We found playtest very helpful for our projects. Based on the observations and feedback we got from the playtest, we could not only find out our programming bugs but also our design defects. Now we are very clear what we need to improve next week.