Fun week for Project Hypnos! This week we playtested, then attended GDC and visited Oculus Story Studio, which was an amazing experience. What did we do?
-We ran a great playtest early this week. We had our testers watch two sets of scenes: the first where a boss is bullying an employee, and the second, a romantic scene, both with someone of your gender, and another. We patched the hole in the bullying scene with photoshop, which created just enough immersion for us to run our playtest.
We will be compiling the results next week, but we had some early observations:
Many people reported emotional reactions to the scenes: success! Key words people used: judged, shy, tense. Our guests were not passive observers, but felt they were part of the scene.
People tended to look around for awhile, and then settle in on the area where narrative is taking place. People would rarely look behind them. We also observed that eye contact was key for people feeling part of the scene. Finally, intimate scenes, while find for some people, did cause discomfort in others. It’s amazing how immersive this medium can be! That does mean that finding the best stories to tell in this medium takes some extra work.
The biggest stumbling block was the imperfections in our stitching, and the missing camera in our Bullying scene. We patched over these issues as much as possible, but it was still the thing that most pulled people out of immersion. We will continue working on stitching techniques.
-The majority of our team attended GDC. VR was big this year! We attended several talks about VR techniques, especially for filmmaking. We learned about everything from recommended framerates, to art styles, to effective ways to turn the camera on. We look forward to putting our knowledge to good use.
-We visited Oculus Story Studio. This was an amazing experience! We got a chance to see some of what they were working on, and how they deal with some of the same problems we struggle with. We shared our story plans with the team, and they reacted incredibly positively! It’s gratifying to learn that this team struggles with some of the same storytelling issues we do, and being able to discuss solutions.