Hi everyone! Welcome back to Xtension Blog! We’re entering Week 5, and our Halves will take place next Monday! Therefore, a significant focus of this week’s work revolves around preparing for the Halves.
Advisor’s Meeting:
We had our advisors’ meeting on Monday and we updated our game loop and reiterated our narrative with our instructors Charles and Heather.
- Narrative: A future where Earth is uninhabitable, involving interactions with virtual/augmented reality environments.
- User Roles: Experience for two roles – a pilot and an engineer, each with unique responsibilities and interactions within the virtual and physical environments.
User Experience and Interaction Design:
- Pilot: Navigates through a virtual world using a Tactsuit and Nextiles sleeves, locates fuel, and controls a vehicle with the ability to manipulate perception of time.
- Engineer: Engages with both physical and virtual elements, tasked with managing vehicle and cargo maintenance using thermal cameras and EMG sensors.
- Interaction Modes: Includes gestures, muscle movements (via EMG), and potentially other physical and virtual interfaces.
- Gameplay Mechanics: Resource management (e.g., water for cooling), day/night cycle manipulation, navigation, and physical/virtual interactions.
- Potential Expansion: The experience might evolve into a single-player version but currently focuses on multi-player interactions.
Technical Implementation:
- Technologies: We want to use Nextiles sleeves, EMG sensors, thermal cameras, and haptic tactsuits and try to make them connect to Unity.
- Challenges we have: Ensuring the Tactsuit is user-friendly, manages effective communication of directional information, and integrates various technological elements for an intuitive experience. Setting up Nextiles sleeves for the first time.
- Material Interaction: Involvement of speculative materials (e.g., dark energy) as fuel sources, interacting with contemporary and political themes.
Narrative and Gameplay Enhancement:
- We want to dig more into potential links to meditation or environmental connections.
- Narrative Drive: Inquiries into enhancing user engagement with a defined objective or drama within the gameplay.
- Backstory Considerations: Developing a backstory around speculative materials and the human-nature relationship in the narrative.
Preparation for Halves:
This week, we continue to polish our Halves Presentation slides, aiming to maintain clarity while highlighting key points. Our rehearsal with the instructors is scheduled for Friday, during which we’ll implement minor modifications according to their feedback. Additionally, we have a rehearsal planned in RPIS on Sunday to enhance our familiarity and comfort level ahead of the forthcoming presentation.
Here is what our presentation slides look like:
Our rehearsal in our “Enceledus” room (3310):
That’s pretty much all we have for this week. We feel that we have made a lot of progress this week, but obviously there is still a long way to go! Next week we will set down what specific task to each team member based on our Halves feedback!
Thanks for reading! See y’all next week!