As a team we created a list of things that we thought we did well this semester and a list of things we wish we had done. Additionally, we all individually wrote a brief reflection on the challenges and successes we faced as individuals.

Team

Did Well:

• Prototyped and tested environment and iteration concepts
  • Especially relevant for the first two weeks and last half of the semester
  • Had ability to get a vast amount of quantitative and qualitative data
• Explored several representations of biofeedback
• Adapted to changing sensors well/staying on track despite a major change in the product
• Connected and communicated with Equa
• Listened to and acting on feedback

Wish We Had Done:

• Research sensors more deeply in the beginning
• Split our efforts during our sensor crisis so that we could make design progress and research progress instead of swarming to solve the sensor crisis
• Built a more systematic & intentional approach to playtesting
• Considered the needs of a Quest Build consistently throughout the semester
• Committed to designs and iterated on them early on for shorter iteration loops
• Further explored the potential of the soundscape
  • Would’ve particularly enjoyed having a sound designer on the team
• Organized presentation preparation better
• Get clearer constraints from Equa early on
• Spent more time in pre-production to better define our purpose and what our finished product would look like
• Asked for more outside help early on
• Committed to being a discovery project
• Set expectations for how our work environment is treated
  • Faris and Constanza felt that there should have been more praise and positive feedback between team members.
  • Gillian and Lauren felt that there should be no expectation for providing consistent praise between team members.
  • Zibo felt he was appreciated appropriately.
• Take more ownership of our decisions when making choices as individuals
  • The team agreed that we spent more time looking for teammate permission/approval than was necessary. 

Individuals

Faris

While this project was challenging at times, I feel fortunate in that I was able to explore many of my personal development goals, in addition to getting to learn from many of my teammates. I started off playing around with environment design, made a few cool shaders I enjoyed (even if many were cut) and got to learn some Houdini for the waterfall. I learned a lot about my own limitations, the importance of an Art Director for maintaining stylistic consistency, and the immense value of a designer and how they fit into the workflow. I wish I had more opportunities to create better shaders and visual assets, but my role as programmer took precedence out of necessity. I also wish we had more clarity over the separation of roles and responsibilities early on, as this could have avoided some confusion for us in the earlier stages of the project.

Gillian

I am really proud of what my team and I created this semester. I learned a lot about the development pipeline, especially for artists and designers. There was a lot going on particularly from a UX perspective that I had not really thought about being needed before. This semester I thought I did a really good job of communicating with Equa and that our team delivered something satisfactory for them. I do wish we had defined their expectations a bit more early on, because there were times I felt we were working around what we thought were constraints, only to find out that Equa was more flexible about aspects of the project than initially thought. In our team post mortem/feedback meeting, I was told that I did a good job of restructuring our timelines and priorities whenever major changes occurred (like when we changed from heart rate to respiration rate or drastically edited the script). This was a big relief to hear because creating explicit sprints and longer timelines was something I realized I did not know how to do at the beginning of the semester. Overall, I feel like this semester has been very productive and incredibly beneficial for the development of my production skills.

Constanza

Working as an experience designer in VR context, I was interested in VR interactivities and design systems at the beginning of this semester. My original thought is that VR can provide an environment that includes a lot of inductions for relaxation. According to this paradigm, the design challenge becomes: how to choose the best elements and feedback pattern to cause a sense of relaxation. This makes me keep asking questions such as “It’s this pattern causes this feeling?”,”How could we test this out?” and also self-constraints on making design choices.

However, in the contract of editing Equa’s evidenced-based guided meditation script, I found UM meditation techniques are more likely an exercise, and a couple methods of perceiving things. It doesn’t have a relaxation induction as most breath-guided meditations do. Understanding this paradigm, the design goal becomes more manageable and less cognitive-science-based. My takeaway on this is that designer should set a contextualized paradigm and bring this up as early as possible. This will help to set the goal smaller, do the low-fi demo quicker, and evaluate with less effort.

Zibo

I joined this pitch team simply because I felt we can do some cool stuff with meditation in VR with biofeedback and I can contribute to it. And we did, beyond my expectation, after a long journey. As the only one to build infrastructure for our project, I felt sorry when my pre-production survey failed to prevent us from sensor failure, but the team supported me to get through the hard time and finally found an even better alternative, and I feel nothing but grateful for it. I’m glad that after this epic fail, everything on my side functioned pretty well as intended and supported the rest of the team to do what they wanted to do. I therefore can help others with development and optimization. Overall, I feel satisfied and grateful for the whole semester, and I cannot appreciate my teammates’ hard work and both physical and mental support.

Lauren

Overly I felt like we accomplished what we set out to do, even if the process was not what we envisioned. I felt like I wrote clean, organized shaders and stuck to/improved the hierarchy set down by programmers. This ended up being a fairly tech heavy project, so it was good that I could take on more technical artist responsibilities, even though I planned to mostly focus on the environment. It’s worth noting that it’s not clear if the project needed to go in this direction or not. Our designs were ambitious and we gave ourselves relatively few limitations in terms of effort invested in art, and while we made some interesting things, it may have been a case of us creating problems we wanted to solve.

 Following that, my largest critique of the art and how it fits in with our process is the style. I thought the texture based style(lots of cutout materials on planes , since there was a lot of foliage) could allow me to develop skills I was interested in while fitting the needs of VR and rapid iteration—fewer triangles and easy integration with shaders. Having gone through the project, I think the stylized low poly approach is a better solution for an iteration heavy project. If it was a production focused project I think we would have time and space to properly optimize and consider the best way to implement the specific style. For rapid iteration however, it is simply faster to create models in the typical low poly style. However, I think it is still worth investing in the texture space to create a more unique style than the standard low poly look.