Overview for week 14
- Improvements based on soft opening feedback:
- Added gloves to give a safety warning feedback
- Adjusted stone generate method
- Added talking animation
- Prepare for the final presentation
After the soft opening, we got a lot of valuable feedback from faculties, and for this week, we focused on how to adjust based on the suggestions and final polish our experience.
Added gloves to give a safety warning feedback
We definitely agree that the safety warning feedback should be stronger in our experience, although it’s totally fine to play with a virtual fire in AR, it’s always should be paid attention that players could be influenced by things happen in our AR world. Before, we had red hand feedback showed that the hands are on fire and somehow will get damage if you do so, but this is a negative clue for the activity. After a meeting with our advisor, we talked about it and came out with the solution of adding a pair of gloves when the hands model is on fire. With this design, we turned it into positive feedback that there is a protection on hand in this situation, and also in real life players should not put hands on fire. This change definitely made the experience more make sense.
Adjusted stone generate method
Instead of letting the players pull stones out of box one by one, we adjusted it into all the stones will generate around one side of the campfire. The previous solution could work, but the players would cost lots of time repeating drag stones out, this will make the activity less fun because it’s repeating the same action several times, as time goes it’s easy for them to lose the fun. By putting all the stones around the campfire, there were several advantages:
- The stones around would be a clear clue for players, to let them now they could work on construction activity.
- Players could build the campfire with higher efficiency and spend more time on creations.
- As all stones are around one player, it would foster one player to pass the stone to another one, which helped the social communication.
Added talking animation
When we designed the facial expressions, we planned to add talking animation. And as we could still have some time to enhance and polish the overall experience, we added it in this step. Our tech team spent efforts on this feature, after several adjustments, including adjust the speed of animation and figured out how did this talking activity be detected, we finally get this feature ready. After the talking animation was added on, the avatars were more “alive” even than before, players could naturally share their feelings in this experience.