There was a lot of changes for our team during this week.
What we did this week/Challenges:
-New Direction
Unfortunately, this week our client contract with SocialVR was abandoned. This gave us an opportunity to pitch three ideas our team wants to explore based on the previous project description. The keywords we extracted from the description were Social, Virtual Reality and Storytelling. Based on these guidelines, we brainstormed what we want to explore and how we are going to implement these keywords into our project.
After the brainstorm meeting, our team was able to come up with three ideas.
- Traditional Narrative Card/Board Games Merging w/ VR to Enhance
Immersion/Interaction for Non-Technical People - Interactive 2-player Narrative Puzzle Game that Relies on Teamwork/Interaction
for Success - Previsualization tool in VR
After a discussion about the ideas with the advisors and the team, we decided to choose idea 1 for the following reasons.
- As our team wanted to explore the new interactions between users that can be done in VR, using a multiplayer tabletop game as the medium would be suitable for our purpose.
- It is meaningful to explore whether or not a traditional board/card game setting can be applied in VR in a way that makes effective use of VR to enhance the existing game.
- There is a high demand for tabletop games in VR among critics of VR who find VR to be unattainable or unrelatable.
- We can make use of the research we did for our former project and it also plays at our strength.
-Project Overview
We expect our final deliverables to be a 3 – 5 minute multiplayer tabletop game that brings innovative social interactivity to the VR realm. We hope that by developing a relatable and familiar VR experience such as this, it can reach an entirely new demographic of board game lovers who are turned off by VR. Also, we believe that through exploring new ways of multiplayer interactions, we can make VR experience less isolated.
Our team is very excited to with our new direction because we will be able to explore an area where it is still new to the industry and a lot to be discovered.
-Team
Since the overall direction of the project changed drastically, we had to change the logo and the poster. Our team name “InTouch” was chosen to emphasize that we would be exploring how new interactions between users can be done in a tabletop VR game setting. Also, because we are using Oculus Touch for our controller, it also conveys the device that we are using. The poster was done by Jiaxin Wen and the logo was done by Xin Tu.
InTouch Logo
InTouch Poster
Plan for next week:
- Prepare for quarter walkaround(Feb. 13th, Monday)
- Set a new project schedule
- Brainstorm on interactions between users
- Prototype game mechanism