Concept Formation Paper

PURPOSE

In my thesis, I would like to explore more on the interactive experiences in VR, possibly with an element of storytelling. I want the experience to be playful so that people can participate as part of the creation/explorative process and have some levels of controls and freedom.

FORM

I am currently exploring two directions: the interaction mainly focused on how the hand could control and interact with objects to trigger different effects, animation. Another is about if I can create an experience with an element of storytelling to allow single or multiple people to enter and interact with the story alone or together.

In my 6 in 6, I tested both directions using different tools in VR. One more focus on hand tracking, another is with a SDK provided by Normcore. While experimenting with the technology, I also think about it could take into another direction of storytelling experience with hand interaction and multiplayers. However, I do encounter some technical difficulties that I wasn’t able to use these two technologies to well illustrate my idea, but the experiments also make me have a more realistic understanding about these forms and what possible constraints would present if I want to push forward either way.

3 WHY IT MATTERS

I think a lot of times when it comes to VR, people would ask why. However, I always feel people who asked this question either never tried VR before so they have some prejudices, or haven’t tried the right applications yet. I personally feel VR could expand our current 2D flat screen experience to much richer and immersive experiences. As a person who is not a game enthusiast, I found it most fascinating in areas like drawing, animation and music tools, immersive storytelling and gallery experience, collaboration and social platforms. For example, the immersive film allows the viewer to participate in the storyline and shift how the story proceeds, the drawing tool allows me to create my artwork in 3 dimensions and infinite space, social application allows me to talk to people I would never encounter in my real life due to the constraint of location. I think the participatory approach makes the experience impressive and also closer to the real world interaction.

Also, some virtual art exhibitions and events make me really think about it as an alternative to be more environmentally friendly and accessible in many aspects. A lot of times, many design creations are only accessible to a small group of audience in certain locations due to the forms. It means a lot when more artists and designers could utilize it and explore VR’s potentials. As a person who is very mindful about my own carbon footprint, the feeling of prototyping without worrying about making mistakes just free myself from the creation process.

CRITIQUE

I think one of the aspects I didn’t do enough research on much is the interactions with storytelling. I was totally fascinated by the recommendation of interactive films and puzzle games while I was doing the expert interview with VR/AR artists on facebook. Also, I feel even though I have tested some basic functions of multiplayer and hand tracking, neither of the prototypes are sufficient due to the technical constraints presented. For example, I realised that I have to switch to the Windows system later in order to push forward the hand tracking one and see how it actually works. Also, I encountered many technical problems that may or may not be due to the SDK, this made me realise that the documentation or forums about the technology is very limited and some of the functions may not work exactly as I thought initially. If I want to continue with it, I also need to reconsider these constraints in the design. Instead, I feel focusing on designing the interaction results/animations rather than the gestures itself would be a more approachable way to continue experimenting with.

After testing the multiple player SDK by Normcore, I have to say that this has to involve at least 2 people with headsets constantly when doing the development and testing. Even though I feel multiple people interaction would be a very interesting topic to explore, the scale of development works for multiplayers in VR would even be much bigger than multiplayers on PC. I would like to take this as a side project instead of a thesis at this point and see if it could be integrated later. As for now, I think I still want to go back to focus on single user interactive experience to limit my scope and scale. For my next step, I want to create a few possible single person interactions with music, sound and animation effects. I also plan to create a few storylines to illustrate my ideas. One of the storylines I want to combine my earlier prototypes of emotions and dance movement with the storytelling and explorative idea. Besides, I also want to design another interactive story with “connection” as a main theme while combining it with the poem “ No man is an Island” from my 6 in 6.