Safewell is an Entertainment Technology Center project that utilizes cutting-edge VR technology to provide an immersive and interactive safety training experience to fracking workers. The project is carried out with our client Reach Wireline, a completion service provider who owns several fracking job sites across the United States, to achieve their vision of zero injury on site.
Things that Went Well
- In terms of the working process, we were able to capture the environment well during the site visit we did at the beginning of the semester.
- The iteration process of our interaction design also went well.
- The most important part that made it possible for our team to build multiple training scenarios was that we were able to produce character animations with a creative approach.
- In 3D art, the whole art style works well with the setting of our storytelling and the nature of the safety training.
- From the communication point of view, our team was able to have a good relationship with our client.
Things That Could Have Been Better
- An “ordeal” our project encountered was to switch from Oculus Rift S to Oculus Quest two weeks before the soft opening, which led to a huge amount of work on re-configuration and optimization.
- We should also have done more playtests. We spent a lot of time discussing and designing back and forth to make sure that our experience is engaging enough. But we could have got a better idea with greater ease if we had done more playtests.
- Since we first built the game in Oculus Rift, which can run well art assets with a large poly count, so that I did not pay too much attention to simplifying models and textures.
- We should have done content reviews with our client earlier and more often, so that we won’t spend time working on assets that are not accurate.
Lessons Learned and Conclusion
Deciding which hardware or platform that the project is going to be on should come as early as possible and the team should do thorough research on the limitation of the platform. From the project this semester, we learned how to effectively communicate with clients. Since this was our first ETC project, the experience has taught us how to deal with time management externally with clients/faculty and internally with ourselves while having other work to do, especially in a time where the project moved remote and everyone was working from home.