Team members: Varun Girdhar, Xiao Han, Ezra Hill, Marie Leung Nolan Pearson
Project Overview
The TerrARium is a pilot research project exploring the effectiveness of Mixed Reality as a tool for exposure therapy in helping high school students and early college students overcome social anxiety. Inspired by games such as Journey and It takes Two, we aim to make a short party simulator social experience, (similar to exposure therapy) that inspire a sense of confidence in social activities and encourage players to go out of their comfort zone while staying in a safe environment with the use of Quest Pro Passthrough.
There are 5 members in the team. Ezra Hill and Varun Girdhar are the programmers. Ezra is also our technical artist. Nolan Pearson is the Designer who is also in charge of the sound in the game. Marie Leung is our Artist. Xiao Han is the Producer of the project. Additionally, there are 2 artists from other teams, Rei Yamada and Anlan Yang, that helped with our art creation process. Our faculty advisors are Ricardo Washington and Ralph Vituccio, and our faculty consultant is John Dessler.
The nature of the project is experimental, and we are working with professionals who have profound knowledge and experience in mental health consulting to make sure we are following the guideline and method of proper social anxiety treatment. We have been working with therapist and psychology professor, Dr.Silk, and Licensed Social Worker, Veronica Zhang who guided us along the way.
What went well
Playtesting
This semester we have had 3 scheduled playtests with naive participants. Our participants are mostly within the targeted age range of our project. We gathered useful feedback from these participants, especially the ones who expressed that they experienced some degree of social anxiety.
Additionally, these playtests are also helpful for us as a development team to set goals for ourselves. The playtest dates acted as hard deadlines for us: knowing that we were playtesting pushed the team to make more progress and prioritizing the features related to player interaction.
Working with Subject Matter Experts
Since we are a pitched team and were assembled earlier, we were able to reach out to many mental health experts and therapists early on. Talking to the subject matter experts has given us a lot of inspiration to pull into the project. They also let us know what tool would be helpful for them and for people who are experiencing social anxiety.
Stayed focus
Since social anxiety is such a broad term and different people are anxious about different things, it was crucial for us to find one subtopic that we should focus on. We realized that some scenarios that we have considered, such as the coffee shop simulator, could be simulated with staff and the therapists relatively easily. We started wondering what are some exposure therapy scenarios that are hard for therapists to simulate in their office. Eventually, we landed on a party — a social situation with a lot of people that is common among college students. With the subject decided, it wasn’t difficult to design the rest of the experience.
What could have been better
Uncontrollable factors
Throughout the semester, the team was hit with health issues and family emergencies that slowed down our production. These situations are not predictable and are not “mistakes.” However, if we could handle them better by, for example, looking for outside help early, our development would be fastened, and we would have a more polished product.
Overscope
Initially our team was interested in doing a co-op experience. We would do some data gathering with our participants, and we would turn the result into a white paper in the end. However, we realized that it doesn’t make sense to put two people with social anxiety together, and a co-op experience also costs more development time. We ended up developing a single player experience similar to an exposure therapy. Halfway through the production, we were still prototyping our experience, and we still weren’t IRB approved. We realized that we wouldn’t have time to do the data analysis and the white paper. In the end, we decided to focus on the experience, and gather subject matter experts’ feedback on how they would make use of this experience in their therapy.
Lessons learned
Varun Girdhar
In any project, it’s crucial to start with a solid foundation. This includes speaking to subject matter experts, as it helps to eliminate any wrongful assumptions about the topic. Additionally, team meetings should be held twice a week, at the beginning and end, to ensure everyone is on the same page. When working on a research-based project, it’s essential to split the researching phase amongst the team and compare notes to ensure efficiency. Playtesting should also be done frequently, as it’s a crucial aspect of the research process. When prototyping, it’s vital to figure out what the core loop of the experience could be. Finally, a strong focus on the project flow is necessary to ensure success in research-based projects.
Xiao Han
As the producer, I learned that when I, as a producer, foresee there to be a scope cut, I should start talking to team members, and understand how they feel about the project. After I grasp how everyone feels about the project, I could open up the conversation, and make these decisions with everyone on board.
Getting to know your teammates is also very important. Understanding what they are like as a colleague and as a person definitely helps with the project progress and group synergy. A good producer should be able to observe everyone’s work pattern, so that they can assign tasks and estimate the time it takes more appropriately. Knowing whether the teammates are facing any difficulties outside of the project is just as important as knowing how the teammates feel about the project. Because often the difficulties people face outside of the project influence people’s work. If I, as a producer, could be more supportive and understanding, I could know why for example something is not done on time.
Ezra Hill
Pitching this project has been an incredibly educational experience. While there have been a lot of positives, the missteps have primarily been due to failing to appropriately plan and scope early on. We didn’t have a super firm idea of exactly what we wanted to explore during the pitch process, and this led to a period of indecisiveness at the start of the project pitch. This carried over into actual development, where even with our final design, the specific features that needed to be implemented weren’t appropriately ironed out until late in development. This ultimately led to one of the more interesting parts of the project, where we shifted from building something to match a specific spec towards a modular design that allowed us to more rapidly playtest. Going forward, I think the time cost of modularity is essential in projects where small adjustments can have a fundamental impact on player experience. It also enabled us to focus more on the creative process, which in turn, made the project more enjoyable to work on. A final pragmatic lesson would also be that the Quest platform has obviously not been built with research in mind, and the limitations of the system make the device borderline unviable for any sort of serious research. Even though PCVR has fallen out of commercial popularity, the lower access to the system allows for a more consistent onboarding experience, which could make or break bringing in participants for a study.
Marie Leung
Pitching our project based on my personal experiences with social anxiety has been a complex, winding journey. From the earliest stages, we struggled as first-years to learn about the ETC pitching process and how to form an idea that had enough scaffolding to support it. We worked hard to develop a plan that demonstrates adherence to the ETC research agenda, showcases precedents, explains how the project is novel, gives us the ability to measure our success, and includes subject matter experts (SMEs) who are willing to work with us. We discovered that it was important for faculty members to understand the pitch ahead of time so that we could address all their questions during the first round of presentations.
However, expectations set at the beginning of the semester changed as we learned more about social anxiety, creating design constraints we didn’t originally have. Working with our SME taught us a lot about our target user base and what it’s like to develop for an industry that already has its own standards and expectations. Exposure therapy techniques have already been proven to help people with social anxiety, so they became a large constraint when trying to design our experience to be simultaneously effective and creative. As social anxiety is also a mental health topic, we also needed to design carefully for our guests’ safety.
Personally, I got a chance to practice 3D modeling and discovered new parts of the 3D art pipeline during this semester. I learned about how research projects run at the ETC and how little time we realistically have to design and develop in between production work, conferences, and university holidays. I also took a hit to my health and started being more conscious of why work-life balance is important, even though this has been a common thread through all of my years at Carnegie Mellon. Overall, I learned a wide variety of things that will definitely help me in the future.
Nolan Pearson
As a UX Designer, I learned that designing for AR requires a different mindset than traditional UI design. In AR, the design needs to account for the real-world environment and how users will interact with the virtual objects. This means that designers need to be aware of factors such as lighting, depth perception, and spatial relationships to create a seamless experience for users. I also learned the importance of prototyping and testing in AR design. Prototyping allows designers to test their ideas and see how they work in the real world. AR prototypes, in particular, can be useful in gaining insights into user behavior and how they interact with virtual objects. Testing, on the other hand, helps to identify design flaws and areas for improvement, which can inform the design process and lead to a better user experience.
Conclusion
Overall, the team learned a lot from the hardship. Despite not being able to achieve all the goals that we originally planned for, we were still able to deliverable an experience that we think has a lot of value. Several therapists have also expressed that they would like to see this experience being fully developed and incorporated into the clinics.
If we had time to develop it further, we would add a companion app or interface on desktop or phone that allow the therapists to curate the experience depending on the patient. Some customizations that they could do include adjusting the amount of NPCs in the scene, enabling and disabling voice activated dialogue systems, SUDS placement, and etc.