Week 3 – InTouch

In week 3, we have done 2 main aspects of work.

For Projects:

We begin to get deeper understanding of Social VR and VR at large. We have finished a nice chart for Competitive Analysis, which helps us get to know the up-to-date information about VR applications. After the Monday meeting with our client, we have a better direction of what we want to explore for Social VR, and before the end of this week, we have already did brainstorming 3 ideas about visualizing gazes and social interaction inside Soical VR app. They are:

Visualization of Gaze: (& telepresence)

Questions to Answer:

How is gaze best visually expressed?
How much should the user be aware of self?
What are appropriate ways of expressing avatars?
How does a second player join a room (how does this appear?)How can it be ensured that users dont interfere with one another when they enter or interact
Should we foster separate or shared instances?

Competitive Games: (1 v 1, Many v Many)

Questions to Answer:

What are things teachers can do that students cannot do (simultaneously and asynchronously)?
Is it ideal to set up students in the same room, shared room, or a separate room?

Teacher Lecture: (1 v Many)

Questions to Answer:

Is it better to have separate instances (run by teacher, individual) or shared space w/ suppression of the gaze of others?
What information can be given by the teacher? By the students? How could UI/UX elements be interacted with by the teacher be visible to the students? How do we allow the students’ follow up questions to be visible to other users?
How does the teacher visibly express an answer to a question?
Questions to Answer:
We are going to shift the schedule to focus on Gaze then the 2nd and 3rd ideas are going to be addressed closer to 1/2s and for the rest of the semester

Lots of testing, then prototyping

Challenges this week:

As for the technical parts, we are getting up to speed on the code from the programmers of Social VR and trying to build structure upon it. This has been a particular challenge this week, as Michael and Jeremy begin to build an entirely new network that we will rely on for the duration of the semester. This particular task has represented an issue for our team because Michael, our lead programmer (and also our only dedicated programmer), is mostly unfamiliar with network coding. However, Michael and Jeremy have pushed through and are set to deliver a finished, basic networked prototype, in which one user can see another user in the same space, in the SocialVR application.

For Team:

We have done the branding for ourselves! We did different versions of posters and try to find one fitting our project the best, and now a brand new poster and logo for our project has been born. The designer for it is Erika Lee. However, we are still doing refinement to our branding, and the final works will be shown on next Monday in ETC. Thanks to the hard work from other designers: Xin Tu and Jiaxin Wen.