This week, the team worked hard to prepare for the half presentation on week 7. As always, I’ll break the blog into 3 main segments: design, art, and tech.
Design
We have finalized the design of the game mechanisms. A detailed interaction design for the immersive room player is shown below. It is a refinement of the original design and answers some questions: how do players interact with 3 walls, how do the 3 walls interact with each other, etc.
Story-wise, we now have a detailed storyline that provides a narrative background for the players. To summarize the story: a Non-Government Organization (NGO) is making a documentary to help change policy and practices that minimize deforestation/pollution. One player (the VR guest) will play as the field agent to travel through Amazon to record footage/ audio for documentary. While other players (immersion room guest) play as the research agent to assist the field agent by communicating information relevant to Amazon. Finally, After collecting the information, the agents will have to choose what kind of documentary they want to make: deforestation or pollution.
Art
Progress was made in making the user interface for immersive room. Since our target audience is unlikely to be experienced with VR or the immersive room, the two key elements for interface design lies in usability and immersion. We have achieved it through using an information hierarchy to demonstrate information priority, introducing a swipe interaction that is familiar to our target group to ensure usability, and using visual design to provide immersion.
Secondly, we decided to shift from the realistic art style to more of a low-poly/stylized art style to provide the rainforest like environment. Below is our work-in-progress environment.
 Technology
This week our engineers worked hard to implement all features/interactions and combine them together for our first tech demo. We hope that our tech demo video will provide a better depiction of our current progress.
This summarizes the hard work from the entire team from week 6. As for next week, we are presenting to the entire ETC on Wednesday, and we are going to absorb as much feedback to iterate and improve.