16. User Testing Goals and Outcomes​

(a) Goals, Questions, and Hypotheses: 

Goals:

-To increase awareness about urbanization

-To gather data on each user’s decisions after we communicate our message

Questions:

-How will users respond to the switch in environments?

-Is the transition between the new and old city effective? Does it maintain immersion?

-Do players get lost or go off-track often?

-Do players understand their current assignment?

-Is our narrative easy to follow and understand?

–If yes, does the narrative resonate with users?

–If no, what made users lose track of or lose interest in the narrative?

Hypotheses:

#1: 

a) Users will follow the events in order due to the boundaries that guide/restrict the users movement 

b) The sequence of events is important to the narrative. We are hoping that the design of our environment restricts/guides the users movement through the world in a controlled way without feeling like we are leading them on one single path. The open-world exploration aspect should still be present. If the user does not follow the sequence of events as intended, we will need to revisit the design of our environment in a way that leads the user in the intended direction. 

c) Closely examine and gather data on the path users take during our playtests and adjust according to any interruptions found. 

#2:

a) users will experience two different times of the same city, and reflect upon urban change to towns and cities b) This is important for our story line, because our sequence of events is non-linear and the main experience we want our users to get is a reflection on the changing landscape with the effect of urbanization and city development. We’ve been aiming to narrow down our scope, but we also want to keep our focus on the changing world of towns to cities and what people enjoy. c) closely examining the time people take when interacting and experiencing the two different sides of the same town.

(b) Methods: 

-We read our narrative and concept out to our participants from front to end

-We listened to feedback and asked extensive questions about their concerns

(c) Results: 

Users reflected and all had different answers on whether they would turn the park into more housing or not. This resulted in neutral stances, stances against, stances for, but overall, people wanting to see more and think about the bigger picture more. Our project generated conversation on urbanization, reaching our goal.

(d) Meta-reflection:

After one of our lab classmates reminded us about the importance of transitions. The more we thought about the feedback, the more we realized that we had to nail that portion of the experience. Since we will be switching between the new and old cities often, the effects and smoothness must be perfect or formidable enough for the user to not question it. If we can get the user to like the transition, or even have a neutral stance on the transition, it would help our overall project a lot. If it was not executed well, the user would feel negative emotions (annoyance, confusion, etc.) after just a few transitions, diminishing our user experience drastically. Overall, we learned that even a semi-frequent mechanic (in our case, transitions) can have a massive impact on the user experience.

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17. Prototyping Process

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For our environments, we first started off with creating a grid layout using the cell blocks in Google Sheets. Since our environment in unity is built using tile-based assets, this allowed us to map out specific tile locations.

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18. Development process

(a) Summary

Our development process all started in class when we settled on an Idea. Our first Ideas came from us exploring two different categories; health and fitness, and climate. We then settled on climate, and with help from Bernhard, we explored different sources on climate and how people connect and immersive themselves in it. 

Some of these sources included the Washington post and Yale education displaying scientific studies about how VR is already using Nature to connect and how people are getting outside less often, but still need the benefits from it. By exploring these resources we began to ideate different ideas about how we can connect others to climate. (links from studies pasted above poster.)
We then began discussing different Ideas over Discord and in class. One of these ideas was to make a VR where you can go on a hike, making the experience accessible to those who may not be physically able to climb a mountain. Another idea was to make a beautiful picnic so people can experience it without insects. After exploring more about how much we liked nature, we also started feeling Nostalgic about the green spaces we used to visit in the City as kids and how those places are gone now, turned into housing or used for other purposes. With that feeling we decided we wanted to guide our project to relate with those feelings, and have people explore the contrast, benefits, and downsides of both green spaces, and cities. (Miro brainstorming included as image below)

With this idea we explored different ways we can do this such as having two different timelines or worlds, seeing the result of different futures, or having multiple door options. Ultimately we decided we liked the timeline idea, and planned on incorporating as much of our experiences of our own childhood in the project as we could. Realizing this scope was too big, we narrowed down to one moment in the future and the past, and included info from our research and thoughts as audio to immersive the user.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/04/28/can-virtual-nature-be-good-substitute-great-outdoors-science-says-yes/
https://e360.yale.edu/digest/u-s-study-shows-widening-disconnect-with-nature-and-potential-solutions

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(b)

Using miro (our scrum board) was helpful for our group, as we got many ideas down and were able to compliment each other's ideas with our own experiences. By writing down our own ideas we also could see patterns and thoughts that overlapped between us and resulted in us narrowing down our ideas. What wasn’t so helpful about the scrum board is that our ideas would sometimes get too big and we would want to focus on too many things at the same time, resulting in a large usage of time.
Our team used the miro boards to help us ideate and narrow down our topic, as well as pivot when we needed to. We used it as well as discord to keep our ideas organized in multiple strings, so we could see a path of documents from our start to our finish of our experience. 

Everyone kept our project up to date and we were all on the same page. Due dates to help us every 1-2 weeks helped keep us on track of needing to be where we needed to be and we planned time to work on it together, and divided up different parts of the Scrim at times our schedules didn’t always align.

Some of the most clear tasks we remember were choosing a theme, ideating on our topic, and the presentation. With these core 3 checkpoints in our timeline, we believe our project became clear. Not so clear tasks involved creating razors/slogans, and project title. These weren’t the most clear because after our presentation we got a lot of feedback to pivot our idea and main concept, so we got a little lost in what to name and how to sell our concept when we were in the middle of changing/pivoting it to something else.
We integrated our pitch and selling of our idea through exercises done in lecture, and discussing asa group what we really wanted our user to reflect on and experience. By doing this we were also able to add more to our in person experience with ideas of a pine tree scent and white board to narrow down on who the player was becoming (the mayor) and the decision they needed to make (green or grey).
Our process bounced back and forth quite a few times, and we ended up centering our final concept/experience on our original presentation that had to do with making an important decision of keeping a green space green, or turning it into grey (more housing). We knew we wanted to keep our ideas open, and biases out, while still having the user make a hard decision. Our process of how we did this was going from ideating to final idea, and repeating steps 1 to 5 a few times (concept->Idea->workability->drawng board-> final project).

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19. Critique:

In our two round-table discussions with Bernhard, he likes our concept but wants us to explore the narrative portion of the project. If we have all of these maps made with no incentive, users will be confused and/or bored quickly and ultimately not get anything out of the experience. 

We created a narrative so the user can feel personally connected to the character throughout the experience. This character starts off as a child and reflects some of the our team members’ experiences growing up in Coquitlam. The character grows up as the area he grew up in progressively gets more urban. This character eventually finds themselves in a position to influence future urbanization or preservation of nature, and it is up to the user to decide.

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20. Equipment needs

What kind of equipment will you need for your showcase? 

some equipment will be the dividers as represented in the slides, (to create / separate our experience.)

Other equipment that we will get on our own includes: forest smell (sage scent), city smell (cardboard + water)

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21. Technical Documentation

How to run - with your HMD connected to your PC and the Unity file open, go to Build Settings > Android > Build and Run. This will install the application onto your HMD. In your HMD, go to your app library > Unknown Sources and the app should be loaded onto the headset.

External Assets - Low Poly Epic City by Polyperfect

Scripts - the ChangeScene script is a modified version of the one used in the labs. This one checks the name of the current scene. If the name of the current scene is a, go to b and vice versa. This script is placed on the guidepost object and includes DontDestroyOnLoad so that it can be accessed in all scenes.

Problems and Solutions - the original plan was to have multiple time travel portals throughout both scenes. To keep the position of the player the same when they teleport, DontDestroyOnLoad was placed on the player. However, when switching back and forth between environments, the player would no longer be able to move, due to there being multiple XR Origins. Instead, we decided to just have one portal where the spawn position of the player in both scenes are the same. We later learned (from another group) that an easier way to achieve what we originally planned was to have both terrains within the same scene and create a script that altered the opacity of the terrain.

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Links - exe and apk: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bZs7UqPIjShO5OvJTs3MMa3DnrpcYxQh/view?usp=sharing

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22. Appendix A

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The style will be low poly. If we try to create a realistic environment and miss the mark, the immersiveness of the experience will be ruined. By using a style that is clearly not real, users can focus entirely on their surroundings rather than contemplate whether or not something looks real enough. Low poly still has the ability to achieve beautiful environments such as in Poly Bridge and Astroneer. Low poly will also help us save on computational power.

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23. Appendix B: Sketches & Misc

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a) Desired user experience and how your VR experience ideally transforms immersants 

We hope users leave our experience with a more informed perspective on nature and urbanization. It is easy to be biased towards one direction. By placing users in the same environment in different settings, users can have a first hand experience of the change that occurs in an environment over long periods of time.

b) How is your project taking advantage of the special affordance and opportunity of VR? 

Many of us experience the effects of urbanization in our neighborhoods but this happens over a period of many users. This gradual change is less noticeable. In our experience, users will be able to switch between urban and nature environments instantly, seeing immediately the changes in the two environments. This will allow users to see just how drastic these changes are. Also, by placing the user directly inside the environments, they can build an emotional connection to the area.

c) Relation to course design challenge

With the course design challenge being “impact”, we chose to address the impact of humans on planet Earth, specifically urbanization and deforestation. Studies have shown that the rapid digitization and urbanization of the world has disconnected us from nature and that virtual nature experiences have similar effects to real ones. However, studies have also shown that urbanization is necessary for economic growth and can even have benefits to the environment in the long term.

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