This week, we decided to complete 2/3 of the story flow of the entire experience, a rough version of course. We added another doctor scene and a new room scene. Now player can go through living room-doctor-bed room-doctor-end. We created a new interaction with the Polaroid we had in the game–now players can take pictures while watching the animation and listening to the voice over–to provide another element of gameplay.
On Monday, we had filmmaker and writer Lance Weiler sitting with us and talking about our project. He gave us some valuable advice on storytelling in VR and games. On Thursday, we visited the HCI Professor Geoff Kaufman at CMU and showed our latest prototype to him–our project is significantly based on his research on perspective taken. Geoff was excited to see our project and wanted to hear more about it in the future. We ended up having an hour long conversation on perspective taken in practice and how to make it right.
On Friday’s tech playtest, we tested the new interaction and storyline with six playtesters. This was the first time we had a relatively complete story to tell. The playtest results were interesting. Most of the playtesters agreed on the new direction we took, and appreciated the progression of the experience. Some of them didn’t know that they could take picture in the experience. But the ones who did actually liked it very much–they said they wished to do something with the object, and being able to literally use the Polaroid was really satisfying. The scene transition still needed some work. however. More than one playtesters complained that it was too bright and felt uncomfortable.