This week, we official kicked off PPP: Physical Presence Pet.
Our goal is to create a tactile XR pet that becomes an animated virtual character in the VR headset, and that you can interact with by touching a soft, physical plush.
As we are a pitch project, we have been planning and thinking about our design since last semester, and we have progress and process updates from winter break. We will first recap our accomplishments before this week.
Before Week 1
Over the break, our team members created character concept art, prototyped on the Meta Quest 3, researched technical solutions, and worked on textiles for the tactile component.
Sophie and Jerry worked on answering design questions while compiling references, such as the Interactive Shoulder Banshees sold at Disneyworld. Sophie made a first prototype of the character.
Jerry built a prototype where Sophie’s model overlays onto the Quest controller. From this Quest prototype, we concluded that the Apple Vision Pro would be our platform going forward. This is because the Quest 3’s controllers no longer track once fully embedded inside of a plush.
For the physical component, with guidance from Paige we decided on the ESP32 microcontroller for its embedded systems, as the chip has integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
We met with Olivia Robinson of IDeATe, an expert in soft technologies, to get advice on designing and building the tactile component. Afterwards, Joy compiled research papers on the psychological effects of touch. She and a couple other team members visited Jo-Ann fabrics over the break to buy a few different fabrics to test out. Joy borrowed a sewing machine and made a prototype of our physical pet, which you can see in the video below.
This Week
We decided our team name, “PPP (Physical Presence Pet),” and we placed orders for the software and equipment we’ll need to begin development.
To test our tech pipeline, we plan to do a “Gold Spike”, incorporating art assets into the AVP via Unity PolySpatial and Xcode.
Composition Box playtesting
This Friday, we had the Composition Box workshop, where we playtested people’s interactions with our fabrics and our physical pet prototype.
Most important for us was observing how people interact with a physical plush. We noted that our pillow-like prototype lacking any animal features led people to hug it like a pillow. We concluded that we needed to playtest with real stuffed animals of different sizes first to determine what interactions to design.
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