blog – Full Stop

Week 14

Soft opening and Final presesntation.

During this week,we are working on the new suggestions from faculty. We received feedback that the facilitator’s viewport does not pinpoint exactly where the participant is looking at. But Unity does have the capability to track which direction the participant is facing.

We consulted with our client, who left it to us to decide whether to implement a gaze indicator; Because we know based on our observation that the viewport is relied on heavily to keep track of the participant’s point of view, We decided having a subtle indicator and reminder of the position of the center of the participant’s gaze.

Continuous ambient noise independent of dialogue clips was already implemented. Additionally, we calibrated the volume to the Oculus headset and leveled volume for all of the scenarios. And this is the final playthrough(screen recording) .

The final preso is alos coming, and here is the slides we are going to use in the presentation.

Week 13

The soft opening is coming. We are really happy to get a lot of positive feedbacks.

Good job taking something difficult and explaining it clearly. The whole thing makes sense.

6 finished pieces– a good amount of content; Personas were a nice choice for understanding audience; Interface for the facilitator is simple and responsive; The overall design is well-targeted to needs

We cherish these suggestions a lot, and this is what we are trying to finish in the last 2 weeks. Have a nice Thanksgiving weekend and I wish our final go really well

2 suggestions from faculty:

Can the system track an eye gaze? Minor, but maybe an area to look into; The audio balance needs to be checked

Week 12

We really have a connection with targeted users now. John Dessler helped us meet two students who are in the college and willing to know more about the learning how stand up for themselves when they are facing sexual harassment. We also invite our faculty to see the whole process including a short training and a VR simulation led by Lorelei, a professional psychologist.

We also have a playtest in the ETC community this week. From people who already have a lot of VR design and development experiences. We have a lot of useful feedback. In order to have a better preparation for the soft opening in the following week, We are already ready for showing off our great progress

Week 11

The most challenging problem we are facing now is we don’t have enough opinions from the targeted users, college-age women. Though we had the playtest day last week, people are mostly adults rather than the targeted users. We are finishing our 5th scenario this week and begin to shoot the 6th. We are also connecting the targeted users and planning to test on college-age women who do not have a lot of VR experience and in need of learning assertive resistance . We are also inviting faculty to check-in and help us to know their opinions on the updated progress.

We helped our client to know our latest progress, she is really satisfied with how it goes. We are planning to rewrite the first scenario and reshoot it before the soft.

Week 10

This week is a really effective week, we have our fourth scenario and the fun playtest day.

The goal of this playtest is checking how immersive the player feeling about this product and their thoughts on how realistic it is when they are having the conversation within a VR simulation. We also A/B tested giving the controller to playtester, pressing the button on the controller will indicate they have finished their line. And here is the playtest feedback.

Playtest Feedback

General Feedback

Overall, it feels real!

PC Interface

Client prefers a graphic image rather than characters on the home page.Facilitator need an interface to show the description part when it is playing before every scene starts.

Facilitator expected the instruction page explaining how to set up the VR application and how to use it.Facilitator differentiated different scenes by firstly reading the location, and then different levels. Pictures of the scenario helps too.

Usability Problems

If participants put on headset, they cannot hear the facilitator clearly.

Facilitator can not skip to the last line when the participant says they want to leave.Facilitator can not pause during the role-play. Facilitator can not predict when users finished talking and sometime hit the next button too early. Facilitator can not continue the role-play if they accidentally clicked the home button.

Visual

Facilitator thinks participants would like to see their virtual body in the VR.

Facilitator prefer a lighter filter so it doesn’t look like mustaches on characters’ faces. Facilitator thinks it is weird that the character is staring at the camera every time before a line start.

We are going to iterate on these findings in the next few weeks.

Week 9

This week, we began our third scenario. We also have a meeting with our Client in order to test the product we have now.

We have connections with our clients through both on-location meetings and video meetings. The faculty is really satisfied with the latest product, though she has some really useful suggestions.

We are improving the experience when we are keeping shooting for different scenarios. We treat each scenario as a sprint and we try to be better in the newsprint. We did playtest a lot with different people, including faculties, classmates, the client in order to iterate it. This project is really intense, we have no much time to do iteration on each scenario, but we did have improvements on along with the shooting.

For this shooting, in order to help the actor to have a better acting in the scenario, we had a table reel for preparation. The picture below is how Matthew prepare for the video shooting.

Week 8

During this week, we finished our half presetation. It is really successful and exciting.

In the weekend of this week, we finished the second scenario . shooting with Daniel Bittner. Below is a picture showing when we were shooting. We will finish the editing and the full version of this scenario next week.

We finished the first scenario finally, Below is the recording video of the whole experience.

Week 7

We defined the work scope and the work hours for the following semester. Before the half, we are exploring and finding a way to solve the problem. And now, we are going to solve the problems at scale.

Working Scope

We’ve determined that we can schedule six scenarios, using 2 – 3 actors and 3 locations; “room”, “dorm room” and “hallway”

Working hours

It will take 1.5 week for one scenario. Except for the preparation, each shooting will take about 3 hours, and we are planning to shooting by locations, that is, each location’s script is provided at the same time, so we can shoot each location at once. Picture . below is our working schedule.

The UX Designer finished the UI draft and has applied the UI to the project. This will help the one who lead the whole project have a better control of the overall experience.

The picture below is the UI draft

We finished the preparation of the half presentation, below is the slide for our half presentation.

Week 6

This week, we reshoot the first scene with Conor Triplett. This is also our first product for this project. In order to make sure the template of deliverables we are going to have for the whole semester, we did a lot of tests to make sure which direction we are going to choose.

1. Filter Test – How could we create a realistic experience without TRAUMA? The filter is going to solve this problem. The following picture is showing the different kinds of filters we have used to solve this problem.

we want our experience to be realistic but not traumatic. Compared with CG models, we found 360 video fits more. The performance, especially facial expression of avatar is more natural. Thus we decided to add a filter to cover too many details. We don’t want the effect to break the realism, so it cannot be too flat or too exaggerated. Finally, we concurred with our client that this slight cartoony filter is good.

2. Leaning forward with 2 different layers

As our project is trying to replicate realistic and impending situations when the character is leaning towards the user.

The assumption is adjusting character footage to move closer to the user will have powerful effect. Therefore, we tested on different methods: on-location footage vs. 2 layers (environment and character footage shot on green screen separately)

3. We also went through different shootings and prototyping to test the perfect distance and perfect position. We tested different distance between the actor and the camera to find the intimate and pressing feeling.

Last, is the participant’s emotional connection with the avatar is weak. They don’t know the actor before the simulation, but their virtual relationship is always closer, like friends, classmates.

To solve this problem, we give a brief description by voice over in the very beginning of each scenario. In the following prototypes, we also plan to use 360 imgs that illustrate the narration. We also plan to use 360 imgs to illustrate the content of narration.

We are also preparing for the half presentation. Nice Week 6 : – )

Week 5

This week, we explored the pipeline of the whole shooting and editing progress. This helped us to make sure how we are going to arrange the whole semester.

As a team, we went through the whole process from actor recruiting, script validating(user research), setting light and prop, shooting, video editing, stereo sound applying and the Unity3D implementation. There are a lot of challenges but it was fun. For this first shooting we spent a lot of time in the preparation. We have meetings with Alumni Jaehee and Visiting Professional Anthony Daniels, and we got a lot of constructional suggestions which will help us in the following shooting.

You can see from this video, we shoot the actor part in the green screen room. We edited and add this to another environment layer, which is recorded separately.

In the meantime, the UX designer organized the whole group finding problems in Flow, Scripts, Avatar, Actors, Usability and Visual; finally we define the problem “How do we help a facilitator provide effective training to college-age women on assertive resistance in sexual harassment without the hassle?”

Another problem we came across is the transition. We are trying to make the end-user to have a natural conversation with the recorded actor. The typical problem of 360 videos is lacking realism since the awkward neutral position. Finally, we find the blinking eye effect can solve this problem effectively, From the picture, you can also see the black stoke, which is the filter we added to make the whole experience realistic but not traumatic. We are still exploring which filter will be better in the final deliverables.

Here is what we have for this pipeline exploring