Week 12 — Real and Virtual Worlds

Mobile AR — creating augmented experiences, by Schleser, Max R.C. and David, Gaby

This reading was very interesting on the topic of mobile augmented reality, something I have only briefly explored during one of our practical lectures. The text was very informative in helping me understand the progress of AR since its creation and some of its most important milestones. I was aware of some of the most recent ones, being Pokémon GO the strongest contender to “the most important one” in my opinion as it is a game that was played for millions of people around the world and really mixed the ideas of AR and world exploration, helping to fight the sedentarism that is vastly associated with gaming and gaming practices. The book also informed me of a new AR experience thanks to its case study. After reading about CultureClic I went further and watched a few videos on YouTube as I do not live in France and therefore cannot experience the app myself, and I found it super interesting and people’s reactions were also very positive. Unrelated, but this app immediately reminded me of my best-friends final project for his BSc Software Engineering where he had developed an app that did almost the same thing but was not AR. Maybe it is time for a partnership and some improvements.

REACH OUT AND TOUCH SOMEONE HAPTICS, TACTILE PRESENCE, ANO MAKING VR PHYSICAL, by Peter Rubin

This text on haptics and VR was very interesting and it made perfect sense adding to what we learned this week. It was fascinating to know about the progress that was made in the haptics field. I admit it is far more advanced than I expected it to be. And it is surely much more challenging than it is advanced, which says something about all the progress that was made. One of the sentences from the text I really enjoyed was “But what about texture? How might we be able to distinguish soft pima cotton from pebbled leather-or even smooth skin?”, which to me just reflect so well the amount of effort (having gotten to a level where this is the ‘new question’), dedication (wanting to achieve this) and quality (having the technologies that allow for these types of sensibility and precision) that is put into the study of haptics in VR. Lastly, I really liked the new taxonomy that was created for the user’s feeling of presence which was distinguished into five categories:

· Sensory: The stimuli created by the hardware-visual display or haptic feedback

· Cognitive: Mental engagement, like solving mysteries

· Affective: The ability of a virtual environment to provoke a fitting emotional response

· Active: Empathy or other personal connection to the virtual world

· Relational: The social aspects of an experience

Thanks to this taxonomy I was able to better understand the complexity of haptics and how they relate to the sense of presence, something that had only been emphasised on the visual and audio sides of VR.

Voices of VR Podcast #351: Redirected Touch: Using Perceptual Hacks to Create Convincing Haptics

This podcast on haptics and the perceptual hacks that go into creating convincing ones was very interesting as it offered some insight into the challenges developers face and the importance of surpassing them. I liked how Luv Kohli stated that to him, the ultimate potential of virtual reality is to connect the users with our real-world and its reality, which shows the importance of the progress that have been made in the field and the importance of continuing to evolve and solve the problems that are encountered. One of the factors that Kohli mentioned was important was to have good accuracy with haptics, as touch is not the primary sense the brain reacts to, and when in doubt, it will rely on/trust the eyes more than the haptics feedback, which would break the sense of presence and affect the player’s belief in the reality they have before them (they are experiencing). As for one of the challenges that, at the time, virtual reality had yet to achieve was the combination of redirected walking and redirected touching (explore and touch in large environments) which would create an experience even more realistic, though problems with mapping (placement) (due to the rotation of the user and the real-world position of objects) are one of the reasons it is so difficult to achieve.

Games and Experiences I have played

I decided to include here a list of games and experience I have played that helped me develop my project:

SUPERHOT VR

This VR game is a masterpiece. It is regarded as one of the best VR games ever made, and rightfully so. The game’s core mechanic is “time moves when you move”. The player is in full control of their body and the sense of agency and presence is present from start to finish in a spectacular way. The ludic elements of the game are incredibly well structured: the physics are realistic (having in mind that core mechanic which means that at times things will float if you are not moving), the enemies are positioned all around you, forcing you to rotate your head to see all of them, the levels are designed to allow for some movement (feet) but it is not mandatory, the sound design is immaculate as you can perceive an enemy’s location from the noise they make, and all the game’s mechanics working together provide a good time for the player.

We Live Here

This 360º view drama animation tells the story of a homeless woman living in a tent in a park in Los Angeles. The experience places the user inside her tent where they are guided through interactions with her belongings, unravelling memories that explain her past life and explain how she ended up where she is today. The experience lasts around 12 minutes (considering the user does not take a long time to grab an object to trigger the animations/sequences) and it is very moving and emotional. The empathy the user develops towards the woman is real and the fact that the experience is in VR makes it even better. The sound is designed to work with the 360º features of the experience and it adds a lot to the experience as it improves the sense of presence as is the example of a scene where horses are running in circles and the user is not placed at the centre of the circle, meaning that when the horses are passing closer to the user the sound they produce is louder than when they are farther from them.

I recommend this experience to everyone as it really puts our reality and how easy we get things into perspective. Imagine not being able to sleep in peace because you do not know if someone is going to burst into your “house” or if your things will be where you left them if you leave them for a few minutes. It is really frightening to live like that…

National Geographic Explore VR

I have not played this experience myself but I watched a few videos of it in my Oculus Quest 2 which helped with the spatiality and surrounding sound (though I am aware the quality is not the same as if I had played it myself). The main reason I experienced this product was as part of my research for my project for this module (Real and Virtual Worlds). One of the settings of the game is Antarctica, which is very similar to my project’s (the Arctic). Though the experience is slightly different, some aspects of National Geographic Explore VR helped me shape my idea. The agency the user has in this experience helped me understand how I wanted to have some sort of agency in my project too, and one of the ideas I was inspired by was the use of ice picks, though in my project they are not used to climb but rather as an improv tool to break rocks.

BBC Earth: Life in VR

I have watched several videos about this experience ever since I started the design process of my own experience. Being an experience where the user is up close and personal with the animals I felt it would be fruitful for me to explore it a little more. I noticed that visual realism was not the experience’s primary motivation, as they did not have the most realistic assets (animals). Instead, the focus was more on achieving realism through immersion and embodiment, as the controls and movements were very well designed and quite smooth. Though the objective here is similar to my project’s, the approaches taken are slightly contrasting. Despite that, I feel like I learned a few things about realism beyond the visual accuracy, something I had set as my primary focus at the start.

Nature Treks VR

This experience served as an inspiration to create my scenarios. Here I saw some good example of realistic and beautiful scenarios. Though none of those I saw fit or resembled my Arctic scenarios, the composition and structural design of some of the examples have helped me understand how to design mine and gather some ideas to apply to them.