Augmented Reality Mixed Reality Virtual Reality
Project write-up: Designing and user-testing a VR experience
Guest Contribution
Introduction
As part of the Udacity VR Developer Nanodegree, the goal of this project was to design, develop and user-test a VR experience oriented around a memory puzzle.
Design Process
Statement of Purpose
In developing and testing this experience, a comprehensive approach to design and thoughtful consideration of user feedback will contribute towards creating an excellent experience for the end-user.
Creating a User Persona
The first task was to build a detailed picture of the type of person who might experience the completed VR App…
Meet Amy:
Amy is 38 and works as an Analyst in a BioMedical lab.
She likes to quote: “The mind is our most powerful muscle”
Amy’s Motivations:
Impressed at her medical colleagues’ ability to prolong life, she’s concerned that people’s minds are not lasting anywhere near as long as the rest of their bodies now do and expects this trend to continue. She is actively seeking ways to prevent the mind from ageing… She worries about her parents.
Amy holds puzzle games in high regard because she sees that they are not merely digital Skinner-boxes, but have real potential to improve neuropathic health. She believes that immersive VR puzzle games may be valuable tools in this arena.
Professionally, she recognises that deep-learning algorithms may soon have a higher success rate than highly trained humans do at interpreting scan data and wants to avoid being ‘disintermediated’ by a particularly ingenious algorithm. She is searching for other ways in which she can keep people in good health for longer.
Amy’s Experience with VR:
Amy has long been aware of VR, having read about it in classic sci-fi fiction, having seen it portrayed in 90s movies and experienced it at the Science Museum, but is relatively new to experiencing VR in her life on a regular basis.
Scene Design
The first design choice was whether to create a layout with the 3D assets that had been provided for the project or to create brand new assets and produce a more adventurous layout?—?I decided to create the scene from scratch, given my ideas for the project and previous 3D content creation experience.
I made sure to craft the scene in line with the suggested ‘abandoned building’ aesthetic with a ‘mysterious/brooding/magical’ ambiance.
Addressing these themes, I sketched the basic requirements to start the ideation process:
An entrance: Users begin the experience in the Start Area
A space for solving the Puzzle: Users encounter a 5-Orb memory puzzle in the Play Area
An exit: Users conclude the experience in the Reset Area:
I then sketched a series of ideas in a free-flowing idea generation session:
Start Area
My instinct was to create an enchanting woodland ruin amid the roots of an ancient Oak tree, time-worn masonry covered with ferns, etc…
I would have loved to create this imagined scene, but it would have been far beyond the scope of the project, so I elected to make a simple rock wall with an entrance built into it.
The doorway:
Although the entrance area was relatively spartan, I used angular blocks to give the structure some visual interest (inspired by ‘The Ugly House’ T? Hyll).
Puzzle area: An abandoned Reliquary/Crypt/Chapel
First I considered the physical size of the room: leaving room for the puzzle in the middle of the room and not wishing to distract the user from the puzzle too much, I extended the room a little to the left and right in a way similar to a typical medieval church’s cross-shaped floor plan?—?only smaller?—?so about 8m in length and width.
A cross-shaped design allows the corners filled with abandoned objects placed out of the way and lit sparingly?—?just enough to suggest their presence without distracting the user from the Puzzle.
The area is basically a classic vaulted stone cellar?—?the kind of structure that survives for centuries without restoration.
As the puzzle essentially blocks the player’s progress until it is solved.
I wanted to represent this somehow?—?a physical representation of the user being blocked, e.g. a gateway or drawbridge?—?although a functional drawbridge would have been fun to include, it wouldn’t really fit the ‘abandoned’ theme, so I chose to use a closed double-door covering the ‘exit’ portal which automatically opens when the puzzle is solved.
Reset Area:
Given a simple placeholder at first, this area was designed and created after the first user test.
User Testing
Initial User Tests
The scene had been roughly built and arranged, but had not yet been lit.
Each user was given a verbal introduction to the task before commencing the experience. Rapport was built with each participant.
All test participants were asked the following questions:
Question 1: What do you see?
Question 2: How would you describe the mood?—?the ambiance of the scene?
Question 3: What size do you feel you are, compared to your real-life self?
NB: all test subjects were adults between 5’5″ and 5’10” …For future tests it would be wise to include the participant’s approximate height for reference, so that unusually tall or short people’s responses aren’t discounted as outliers.
Question 4: How would you go about progressing through the scene?
(This question was used in part to get users to press the button and proceed to the next stage)
Shortcomings adjusted as a result of the initial user tests:
The camera Start position was re-positioned about 5% lower than before.
Users did not seem sure what to expect from the experience, so I modified the Billboard to give the experience some context and inject some humor . It was also made larger and given some personality. Users now anticipate that their memory will be tested, which preconditions them to expect some form of memory test ahead?—?encountering the orbs lighting up in sequence has immediate meaning?—?their relevance becomes much clearer.
Importantly, the billboard background color was made semi-transparent so that the user could see the doorway beyond.
To help with recall, the Orbs were individually colored: each Orb was given a unique color and their particle systems made to match each respective color.
Potentially they could be made to represent different shapes / icons: if the puzzle needed to be made easier or augmented to illustrate the advantages of short-term memory tools (e.g. training a user in the ‘Loci’ method) different shapes or familiar objects in progression could be used.
The scene was made darker and given a more brooding ambiance.
The Lighting was baked, tweaked, baked again… and again! Two sets of crepuscular rays were made to shine through the hole in the roof and cast light on the sarcophagus. They were animated with respect to each other (to give the impression of movement above).
An animated patchy floor mist was added (but removed later).
A rudimentary Skybox was created to better match the scene’s desired mood.
The main 3D models were replaced with higher quality versions.
The Reset area beyond the exit doorway was greatly improved: the user now ends the experience by passing through the exit door and into a corridor which appears to ascend to an area beyond?—?a warm-hued light shining from around the corner.
Lighting:
Light sources were added: I felt that lit torches might seem insufficiently magical or detract from the ‘abandoned’ feel of the building, so I used an exterior light source: light was made to stream dramatically through a crack in the ceiling, made more apparent by adding two planes of crepuscular rays which were then animated to give the impression of movement above the ceiling. This was enhanced by feint clouds of mist wafting down from above.
The sky above the ceiling crack was made much lighter, giving the impression of higher-dynamic-range lighting.
I dialed-up the secondary bounces on the radiosty generation so that the primary light source created a vaguely spooky ambiance and added a couple of area lights (also baked) to highlight scene objects.
Follow-up Testing
Participants were prompted to engage with the experience as before.
Question 1: Compared to the previous version of this experience, what are your first impressions of this new version?
Question 2: What aspects do you feel have improved, compared the previous version?
Question 3: Were this experience to be re-made from scratch, are there any aspects of it that could be improved?
(A good way of asking “What could be improved?” in a way that tends to elicit more honest replies by getting around people’s unwillingness to offer direct criticism. Kudos to John Cleese for this.)
The consensus was that the experience had become richer and more visually interesting. It felt far more polished.
Some of the textures looked odd (they were under-sampled or their UVs had not yet been defined).
Shortcomings adjusted as a result of follow-up testing:
The billboard was moved further away from the camera and raised so that the user didn’t have to look down too far in order to select the ‘Start’ button.
Camera movement timing was adjusted slightly.
Amendments to the scene were were mostly cosmetic: enhancing the physical structure of the environment to improve fidelity, adjusting the lighting levels to enhance the mood, fixing object overlaps, etc. Patches of feint mist were made to drift down from the hole in the ceiling.
Break down of the final piece
The following images are screenshots and video of the final experience.
As the development has been well chronicled, I will let these images stand as a visual summary of the final piece:
NB: The iPhone I used did not allow any screen-video-capture to be recorded (I didn’t fancy jailbreaking the device just to allow video-capture, which could have introduced untold security vulnerabilities), so I set up a camera rig and shot a video of the screen running the experience— hence the slightly washed-out appearance of the video:
https://medium.com/media/861163eb5c54257bf45302356bb6f72a/href
Conclusion
The most valuable benefit that resulted from the creation of a Persona and the iterative user testing was that the needs of the end-user were considered throughout the project?—?not merely as as starting reference. This resulted in a cleaner and better-presented VR experience.
In other words, the developer was made far more effective in their role because of their increased empathy for the end-user.
Next steps
The user tests were great for eliciting useful information about the experience. In addition to this, it would be interesting to employ different test types for specific elements. For example: different billboard designs and different puzzle layouts could be split-tested via a slideshow format series of tests with a much greater volume of participants.
Cosmetic improvements could include enhancing the quality of the Start Area: making the rock wall more dramatic and better-lit.
As a User’s sense of scale is important, it would be useful to place familiar reference objects around the start position so that the user can get an intuitive feel for their own physical size (their virtual height within the scene) right away. In reality, Castle doors (especially those with portcullises) & Barrels vary hugely in size, so the torches at head height were the only tangible visual aid for determining character size in the scene.
The space could be littered with boxes, shattered wood, broken masonary, etc. Animated cobwebs billowing in the breeze and scurrying rodents would add a theatrical flair.
Level progression
It would be good to create more puzzles that would be experienced sequentially or, better still, give the user several choices regarding which exit to take, presenting them with a choice of harder, easier or similar difficulty. Elements of the puzzle, scenery, ambiance, etc could be randomized so that no two puzzles are the same.
Memory training
As mentioned before, well-presented puzzles such as these could be used to train people’s memory. For example: training a user to use the ‘Loci’ method would yield tangible real-world benefits in terms of their enhanced ability to remember things.
It would be necessary to work with neuroscientists in order to accomplish the best results…
Amy would be very happy to help.
I hope you enjoyed this write-up!
Perhaps we will get the opportunity to work together someday.
C. A. Vulliamy.
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