Hi! We are team Xhaler, a team of 5 graduate students at the Entertainment Technology Center of Carnegie Mellon University. We hope to make a VR adventure game using breathing as the main mechanic. We’re glad you’re here.
During the first week, we kicked off Xhaler by onboarding the full team and meeting with our advisors to discuss our project’s vision. During the pitch phase, our team’s vision was to explore the most immersive way to use breathing as a game input and to create a fully embodied VR game demo with breathing as the core mechanic. However, since breathing as a mechanic has been scarcely explored or researched, we encountered several questions that needed to be addressed before implementation.
- Does breathing truly enhance immersion and embodiment as we envisioned?
- Is VR the most suitable medium for this concept?
- Can a game with breathing as its core mechanic be engaging and fun?
To address these questions and better understand and achieve our design goals, we outlined our timeline and established a workflow for the first half of the semester.
Timeline
Our Composition Box
We have created a composition box to clarify our goals to align with both our technical and design objectives.
Challenges of Implementing Breathing Mechanics
We spoke with the developers of BreatheHero, one of the very few existing games that use breathing as a core mechanic. From our discussion, we gained several key insights:
- In combat games, frequent use of breathing mechanics can impose excessive cognitive load, leading players to rely on the easiest breathing patterns rather than engaging with the mechanic meaningfully.
- Using a belt sensor alone may not be sufficient for accurately detecting inhalation, requiring additional sensors for better accuracy.
- When quick reactions are needed, there can be a disconnect between the breathing pattern players intend in their minds and their actual breathing, which may reduce immersion.
To address these challenges, we aim to design gameplay that gives players enough time to think, allowing them to breathe intentionally rather than reactively, ultimately enhancing immersion.
Brainstorming
On Friday, we brainstormed and compiled a list of all possible breathing patterns, mapping them to interesting in-game actions.
Plans for next week
Next week, our focus will be on filtering and selecting the most promising breathing patterns and actions to prototype. This will help us further explore and refine breathing as a game input.
Additionally, we will ensure our hardware is fully functional and develop two simple prototypes to test its stability and evaluate player comfort.