{"id":1601,"date":"2013-01-30T22:37:47","date_gmt":"2013-01-30T21:37:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/blog\/?p=1601"},"modified":"2014-01-27T21:09:42","modified_gmt":"2014-01-27T20:09:42","slug":"vrlux-postmortem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/blog\/2013\/01\/30\/vrlux-postmortem\/","title":{"rendered":"VRLux – PostMortem"},"content":{"rendered":"

During last week-end, along with six fellow VRGeeks<\/a>, we participated in the Global Game Jam 2013<\/a> for some non-professional VR fun.<\/p>\n

While the four other VRGeeks created two other teams, I teamed with Judith Guez<\/a> to work on an idea that was in my head for quite some time: create an efficient escape room in VR. The theme this year was the sound of a heart beat. We decided to use a candle as a metaphore for the heart beat. (But the focus changed a bit during the jam.)<\/p>\n

We were quickly joined by two 3D artists, one sound designer and one coder who were intrigued by VR. They turned out to be a really great team to work with!!<\/p>\n

I already participated in 2011 and 2012, resulting in VREscape<\/a> and InSnaketion<\/a>. All three games were created exlusively in 48h.<\/p>\n

VR Escape was too complex for most “normal” (non-VR) people to handle: they were not acustomed to VR, and the lack of haptics feedback was disturbing: your virtual hand could go through the walls or tables, so you had to be precise (thus slow) with your movements.<\/p>\n

Thus the core of the idea for VRLux is to minimize breaks in presence<\/strong>, and make sure anyone can play with it<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

“Like a candle in the wind”<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

To make sure the game was easily accessible, we simplified the interactions: your only input device is.. a real candle. You can only move it around to interact with the game.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a>f<\/p>\n

We brainstormed about what are the interaction possibilities of a candle. It turns out there are plenty!<\/p>\n

The first one is of course to shed some light<\/strong>, which allows you to explore.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Having a very dark environment was a great way to force the player to explore. Most people sat and asked “What do I do now?”. And we just answered “Find out by yourself!”. And they did ! They interacted naturally by taking the candle, and as the environment was pitch black, they used the candle to explore.<\/p>\n

Exploration alone turned out to be a great experience.<\/p>\n

Then you can burn or heat<\/strong>, which enables interesting gameplays that I won’t disclose here in case you play the game \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

Another obvious possibility is that you can push objects<\/strong>: push them to another position, or simply push a button for example.<\/p>\n

There are of course others, but we may integrate them later \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

This means that a lot of interactions are possible without any kind of button or joystick involved. A bit like the great experiment dontclick.it<\/a><\/p>\n

The best thing is that a you already know what to do with a candle, there is nothing to learn!<\/p>\n

This is one of the strengths of VR: as it can simulate reality, you don’t have to learn any interface, you already know what to do! Natural affordances<\/a>.<\/p>\n[youtube]http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=qQabwjQMbag[\/youtube]\n

SPOILER: Full game:<\/p>\n[youtube]http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=n0OMvwtPyeM[\/youtube]\n

Breaks in presence<\/strong><\/p>\n

Minimizing breaks in presence means that you should continually feel present in the game. Breaks in presence occur when your brain detects an anomaly in the virtual reality: latency, your hand passing through a table, strange laws of physics.<\/p>\n

We paid a lot of attention to details: the behavior of flame of the candle, the light, the shadows, the realism of the interactions with the objects (trying to avoid passing through them when pushing)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

(As you can see, we used the cheap Razer Hydra<\/a> magnetic trackers to track the candle position and orientation in the game volume).<\/p>\n

Based on ideas from Judith, we also made sure that when the virtual candle touches the virtual table, the real candle touches the real table! Free haptics!<\/p>\n

At one point you also have to push a button in a box. So we put a real box with the same size and position as the virtual one, so everytime the candle touches the virtual box, you can feel it and it doesn’t go through.<\/p>\n

We didn’t need to add real walls or ceiling: it seems most people didn’t try to go this far; moreover they were nearly out of arms reach. We also made sure the tracking was reliable in the whole game volume.<\/p>\n

Atmosphere<\/strong><\/p>\n

I had this idea of a dark environment for a long time, and really enjoy the game genre of escape rooms, so I really loved the iPad game “The Room<\/a>“. It is beautifully crafted and the difficulty is perfectly adjusted. Its atmosphere is also great, so this was definitely an inspiration for VRLux, both in terms of graphics and sound design.<\/p>\n

Real game ?<\/strong><\/p>\n

When looking for team members, I was suprised to hear comments like: “We won’t join your team because we want to do real games”, or “Your games are interesting only because of the nice hardware”.<\/p>\n

I hope we are and will prove all of them wrong \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

And based on the feedback we had from (already) a lot of people, I think we’re on the right track. Everybody, including non-players, were immediately at ease.<\/p>\n

What do you think ?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A million thanks to the great team:<\/p>\n

– Judith Guez<\/a>: VR\/Game Designer<\/p>\n

– Florian Reneau<\/a>: Game Designer\/Coder<\/p>\n

– Florian Costes: Sound Designer<\/p>\n

– Charles Kaing<\/a>: 3D artist<\/p>\n

– Fran\u00c3\u00a7ois Gutherz<\/a>: 3D artist<\/p>\n

<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During last week-end, along with six fellow VRGeeks, we participated in the Global Game Jam 2013 for some non-professional VR fun. While the four other VRGeeks created two other teams, I teamed with Judith Guez to work on… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,19],"tags":[450,214,457,431],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1601"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1601"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1601\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1639,"href":"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1601\/revisions\/1639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}