Jue Wang

Two guests playing Pegasus at Festival Night

Overview

Riding a pegasus to explore Ancient Greece, challenging friends and families in the sky, flying through rings to claim territory, Pegasus is a multiplayer, competitive, VR game that we designed and developed for the SoReal omnidirectional chair.

Skills: Rapid Prototyping in Unity, Interaction Design, Usability Testing

Tools: Unity, C#, Illustrator, After Effects, Adobe XD

Platform: HTC Vive + SoReal Omnidirectional Chair

Project Duration: 4 months, 2019

Team: Shawn Kang, Zhiguo Lai, Chance Lytle, Conor Triplett, Jue Wang

Designing a Location-based Game for VR Chairs

In a team of 5 graduate students, we designed and developed a multiplayer VR game for 2 omnidirectional chairs. While wearing HTC Vive headsets, guests can tilt their body to steer their pegasus throughout Ancient Greece and challenge other warriors by flying through rings that are scattered across the map. Our main goals during the development process were:

1. Create novel interactions that are unique to the omnidirectional chairs

2. Design a game that emphasizes replayability and skill mastery

3. Minimize motion sickness as much as possible

Understand the Chair & VR Theme Park

In order to better understood what we were working with, we conducted experts interviews with the SoReal team who designed and manufactured the omnidirectional chairs after we read through the documentations. I also did secondary research from reading customer reviews online regarding VR theme parks, which gave me a better understanding of the VR theme park market, target demographics (college students), and people’s preferences on genres.

Competitive Analysis on Seated VR

After analyzing demo products that were made for the chairs, and seated VR products that were out on the market, we recognized that players’ input methods were mostly done by using either their neck or the controllers.

Competitive Analysis on Location-based Experience

We also ran competitive analyses with VR products at Dave & Buster’s, rides at Disneyland and Universal Studios, and SoReal’s own VR cinema products. Among all the chair movements we observed from above products (such as vertical motion, tilt, rumble, translate, and G force), we discovered that the most unique function of our omnidirectional chairs were the spinning.

12 Exploratory Prototypes in 2 Weeks

To get a better understanding of the chairs’ functionality, safety, and guests’ preference, we dove into rapid prototyping immediately in the first two weeks. These 12 prototypes explored different motions including sudden drops, locomotion, tilting, flying, rumble, spinning, water simulation, walking, hill sliding, and horseback riding.

Internal Testing with Classmates

Some of the Exploratory Prototypes

3 “1-Week” Prototypes to Explore 3 Directions

After synthesizing all the feedback and results we got from our guests, we started weekly sprints to develop 3 mid-fidelity prototypes. Each prototypes explore different game types, including symmetric, asymmetric, collaborative, and competitive.

Prototype 2: Bus Robot

Prototype 3: Daredevil

Testing on Different Kinds of Reins

Field Research on Horseback Riding

Learning About Horses’ Personalities

Trial and Error: How to Design Guest’s Journey

From experience diagramming, to creating concept art, to brown boxing, and finally to making stop motion mockups, I explored various ways not only to design for guests’ interactions in the virtual world, but also to visualize these concepts to the rest of the development team.

Flow charts and experience diagramming were helpful for developing the game’s structure, as they were able to directly showcase the essential components that went into the player’s experience throughout the course of the game. However, these flow charts and diagrams were not enough on their own; when it came to building an intense, non-linear VR game, we needed to define even the more detailed moments in the game in order to determine what we needed to build.

I also tried to make concept art for key moments, such as what guests see when they first entered this Ancient Greek City. But due to our accelerated iteration process and short production timeline, and the fact that concept art creation in and of itself is a very time-consuming process, I decided to move on from this kind of visualization and focused on creating quick sketches and stop motion animations to visualize my ideas and communicate with the rest of the team.

Case Study: Interaction Design for Omnidirectional Virtual World

One of the biggest challenges for designing the interactions in Pegasus was figuring out how to keep these interactions intuitive and informative to guests, while at the same time keeping the "interface" authentic to the fantasy virtual world. This was especially critical when designing for an omnidirectional, high-speed VR game, as we needed to figure out how we could communicate to players that "Hey! You just successfully flew through that ring! You scored one point!"

Initially, I wanted to display the information on the guests' arm pad so that they could see everything they needed to know in the game (timer, score, etc.) using a similar motion to checking one’s watch in the real world. Since this was a location-based, arcade-like experience, we didn’t want to make onboarding for guests any more difficult than it already was by getting guests to wear trackers on top of the rest of the equipment they needed to wear in order to play the game. I decided to create some particle effects to provide players scoring feedback, but even though they did their job well enough, these effects turned out to affect the game’s overall performance quite a bit. As a result, in order to minimize latency and motion sickness, we had to try something else.

Arm Pad Sketches

Particle Effects for Stolen Ring Notification

I found inspiration from the scoreboards on the football field, and tried to translate this same idea into the game. However, it’s inclusion ended up running the risk of making our players motion sick, since guests would need to turn their heads away from where they were flying in order to see their score.

Moving on from this concept, I considered the idea that, instead of showing scores in a single area on the map, we could use colored flags planted on buildings in order to indicate which player was in the lead. From playtesting this iteration of the design, we got a lot of feedback from particularly competitive players that they wanted to be able to see the exact number of their score during the game. Additionally, we also noticed that some players were ignoring a lot of information (speed, score, etc.) during their flight, as flying in VR was an overwhelming experience that occupied most of their attention. As a result, I created a badge for the pegasus that carried both the player’s score and timer, allowing players the ability to check their score simply by tilting their heads down onto their Pegasus. Additionally, when players fly through a ring, they will see a notification pop up around their Pegasus’ badge as feedback, so even if players choose not to look at their score during the game, they will at least see a visual informing them that their score has been updated.

This turned out to be the most effective implementation of a score tracking UI, and this design was used in the final iteration of the game.

Similarly, I also tried to use visual effects to indicate to players how fast they were going without having to resort to a text-based Speedometer, which seemed to work a whole lot better in communicating their speed than previous iterations.

200+ Guests for 1 Night - Location-Based Experience Design

We officially debuted at the ETC’s annual Fall Festival, where we hosted 200+ guests over the course of 6 hours. In order to improve overall throughput and the onboarding for the experience, I created a user-centered experience flow and utilized props, signs, and improvisation to answer guest’s concerns and questions before they entered the experience.

The Front Seat Development Team

Waiting Room with Safety Sign, Live Wait Time, Height Measure, Greek Props, and Onboarding Videos

Two Guests Playing Pegasus on Color Coded Seats

Leaderboard and Badge Sticker