Description
For this project, we decided to use the act of calculating as a basis for our interactions. The idea is that the user starts in an everyday setting — in our case, a bedroom — but upon interacting with a calculator on the desk, the user is transported to an alternate world where the calculations will occur. In this world, calculations are performed by dragging and snapping blocks together rather than pressing keys in a “2D” setting.
Process & Implementation
Conceptually, the ideas were more or less there from the start. Most of the difficulties came in the implementation of the systems and dividing up the work. Tiger and Keyin worked on the bedroom world, Yeji worked on the alternate world, and I worked on scripting/back-end. Most of the interactions were made with Rigidbody physics and Monobehaviour.OnMouseDown. The world switching was achieved by placing both worlds in the same position and toggling their enabled state when the calculator was clicked. To achieve more visually pleasing graphics, we used LWRP and the Post-Processing stack as well as several PBR shader graphs.
The development journal contains videos of the process of creating the dragging/snapping interactions.
Reflection/Evaluation
I feel that we successfully provided an alternative interpretation of the act of calculating. Although the idea itself is relatively novel, the implementation works well because the actions used (dragging, clicking, moving) are rather intuitive and easy to learn. This end product actually ended up being much more robust than we initially expected, despite the fact that we couldn’t use VR. For example, we initially never thought about including interactions in the bedroom world because we were primarily focused on interactions in the calculator world. Perhaps the lack of VR allowed for more freedom of implementation, however; after all, we no longer had to worry about VR-induced motion sickness and limitations in movement when programming the worlds.
Agency
The interactions that best enable user agency are those found in the bedroom world. Upon entering the bedroom, the user is first encouraged to walk around. The user will then likely bump into the chair, which will move in response. The user is then encouraged to interact with other objects in the scene by dragging and clicking around; by making most of the items in the scene interactive or responsive in some way, the user is able to feel that they have a great degree of influence over the environment. This helps contextualize the sense of freedom that the user is meant to feel in the alternate world too and perhaps serves as a way to let users lose themselves in this environment.