For the second project I worked with Ellen, Chris and Luize. The inspiration for this project was loosely on interactions that take place in our daily lives, as we wanted to create interactions in a more real-life environment to make the user’s experience more natural. Then we started brainstorming on different scenarios of actions people do in their everyday lives, and ended up making a kitchen room because everyone is familiar with the place. We thought about various interactions that might occur while the character is in the kitchen and decided to make the switch as our main interaction. The user understands that the place is very unusual after playing with switches, since the first switch responsible for turning on/off the light and the other one is responsible for making the place alternate by causing fireflies coming from plants that emit overtime. This gives the user the idea that switches can do something more than just turning the light on or off.
Our initial idea was to create a bedroom where the user wakes up by turning the alarm off, then turns on the light and goes to the kitchen to make the coffee, but we decided to use the light switch as the only interaction because of some limitation of available assets and some other circumstances.
I worked on setting up the room and adding decorations and furniture. Adding walls, furniture and some other staff was very time consuming, however, I really enjoyed the process of working on it. When I finished with setting up the room, Luize updated the scene by adding the physics and the ceiling with the indoor light. Afterwards Chris worked on implementing the interaction with the switch, turning on/off the light, and Ellen worked on adding effects to make the place alternate such as fireworks and fireflies.
We added small lights on the switches to draw user’s attention to the switch area (Image 9). That way we tried to make things more clear and understandable, we also added some text such as “press E to turn off the switch” so when the user enters the switch area the text appears to help the user understand how to navigate and how to turn on/off the switch.
The only action that the user does is walking around the room and turning on and off the switch. We wanted the user to start with just looking around the room and then realizing that there are two light switches. The reason why we wanted the user to start from being next to first switch next to the window is in order for him to be able to see one of the effects that we added, fireworks (Image 10). After seeing the fireworks, user can turn on/off the first switch which is right next to the window. When turning off the switch, user realizes that not only did the lights go off but the fireworks are also gone. When the user moves around after being alone in the dark room, he sees another switch located on the other side of the room with a little light on it, by inviting the user to go the next switch area. When the user enters the second switch area, the the text-box appears on the screen with instructions on what to do next. After being in the second switch area, when the user tries to turn on the lights, the fireflies start coming from the plants and fulfilling the room (Image 9). We also tried to download the proper switch assets, in which the user would see how the switch changes while turning it on or off, to satisfy users expectations. (Image 1).
Initially we wanted the user to use VR controllers to play with switches, however, since we didn’t have access to VR headset, we had to use the keyboard. The reason we have chosen to add text-box with instructions is because it will make the user feel comfortable navigating and make the next steps easier to understand.
Although there have been some challenges that have arisen throughout the project, such as not finding proper assets, lighting difficulties and putting up the furniture together, I am extremely pleased with the overall work we have done in such a challenging situation. The end product came very close to what we foresaw for our project first, if feels natural, but unusual and surprising at the same time. And I think we have managed to achieve the goal of an alternate world, because the results of the interactions are very different and extraordinary from our normal everyday life.