Meeting with Equa
We kicked this week off with a playtest with Equa’s COO Mathew Polowitz and Equa’s Lead Engineer, Ian McCullough. The playtest with the general feedback being that the biofeedback should be more noticeable. We also found a few bugs involving orbs/boxes spawning into the meditator’s hands causing some parts of the experience to auto-select. After we get some other fixes in from Playtest Day this week and merge changes, we will spend the rest of the semester iterating on the strength and noticeability of our biofeedback indicators.
User Experience and Playtest Inspired Changes
This week was focused on making tweaks from the feedback received during playtesting. While we continue to optimize assets and play around with the intensity of the environmental biofeedback, we have made three major changes to benefit user experience. Firstly, as mentioned as a to-do from last week’s blog post, we swapped hand gesture interactions so that now when meditators close their fist, the experience pauses. When they open their fist, the experience plays. This change was inspired by people intuitively creating these hand gestures, even when given instruction to swap their purposes in our previous build. The hand gesture swap also has the added benefit of preventing accidental pausing when the meditator reaches out to touch orbs and boxes.
We have also added a 15 second “play” period that lets meditators mess around with deliberately changing their breathing patterns to see how they affect the environment. As a team we’ve talked about this idea for a couple of weeks and have, after various playtests with our instructors, peers, other playtesting guests, and Equa, that this might help users better understand our experience. As a result of the hand gesture swapping and addition of the play period, Gillian had to revise the current script and re-record Faris’ narration this week.
In addition to those changes, Zibo also implemented a fix for meditators occasionally being misplaced in the environment. Now, the VR environment is oriented so that meditators are always facing forward at the start of the meditation, regardless which direction the meditator is actually facing. Additionally, orbs are now positioned relative to the meditator’s location, that way they are never uncomfortable out of reach.
Lauren was able to integrate some of their new biofeedback indicators into the environment, so objects like the opening and closing lotus flowers are no longer floating in space.
Breathing Summary Graph
Faris and Constanza have continued iterating on the breathing summary graph. We met with Shirley, Dave, and Heather this week to discuss its function and what we believe meditators should get from having it. Since the graph is now programmatically fully functional, Faris has passed it off fully to Constanza to make it aesthetically match the environment and make final choices on what information we want presented.
Soft Opening and Trailer Preparation
There was also some time this week dedicated to preparing for Soft Opening, which happens next week. As a team we decided which faculty members we really wanted feedback from and discussed some areas of feedback we’d like the faculty to comment on. In addition to preparing for softs, the team has also begun planning out our final trailer with Gillian writing a script and shot list while Faris and Lauren capturing images and videos.