Blog 9

We are excited to announce that our project is now complete! Our weeks of hard work and teamwork has led to us creating a fun and educational game! This week we focused less on the project itself, and more on presenting it. We created a slide deck that we presented to the class. In addition, we also made a room in Spatial that our classmates and several people from Magic Leap were able to view.

The teammates did the following work this week:

• Dylan: Helped create the final presentation slides and the Spatial room.
• Tianyang: Finalized the laboratory scene by adding duplicate prefabs. This helps the room feel more filled, and less empty. He also helped with the presentation slides and created the video demoing our project.
• Steve: Performed live demonstrations during the Spatial presentations. This gave viewers a better understanding of what our project was when exploring our room
• Frank: Helped create the Spatial room.

Plan for the next week: Next Tuesday is demonstration day! We will be presenting to our classmates, instructors, people from industry, and the general public.

Blog 8

As the final demo day approach, we are excited to finalize our project and be ready to present it to the public. This week, we are mainly focusing on fixing minor bugs, improving the scoring system, and user experiences.

The teammates did the following work this week:

• Dylan: worked on improving the bunsen-burner with better operation mechanism. Specifically, he implemented a tripod and the wire gauze on the top of the bunsen-burner so that the user can place the beaker safely on the fire. In addition, he improved the heating score which will give a better feedback to the user based on the heating time and the chemical they use.
• Tianyang: Worked on assembling the final lab scene. Decorated the final scene with real-life biochemistry lab elements. Implemented a tray so that the user can use it to transport many objects at a time for teleportation. Designed the final scene so that every equipment is in user-friendly places. Steve and Frank: Worked on the user interface and instructions.
• Steve and Frank: Worked on the user interface and instructions. Implemented the “helper mode” which is controlled by the buttons on the Oculus controller. Once the user opens the helper mode, they will see a textbox with specific instructions and background information on each complex lab equipment.

Plan for the next week:

• Tianyang Dylan: 1. Finalize the Lab scene with more decoration and user-interface elements. 2. Make a demo video for the presentation.
• Steve and Frank: 1. Make and decorated the spatial room for our team. 2. Try to implement some sound effects for our lab scene. 3. Make the slides for the presentation.

Blog 7

This week, our team focused on wrapping up the development of the lab space, as well as the implementations of the functionalities of the equipments. More specifically:

• Steve and Yongzhe worked on implementing the Petri dish and incubator. They have also implemented a Petri dish in the fridge that allows respawning so the players never run out of equipment.
• Dylan worked on the scoring mechanism for the centrifuge. The scoring mechanism now considers the occupied slots as well as the liquid volume. Dylan also worked with Tianyang on implementing the virus component of the lab, which reacts accordingly under conditions such as heating.
• Tianyang mainly worked on researching the process of developing the vaccine. He collaborated with Dylan on the scoring mechanism for the centrifuge, and provided insights on the reaction system for viruses.

After implementing all of the features in the lab and consulting with the staff during check-ins, we are excited to move on to the next stage of our project! For the next week, we will be focused on developing the main storyline of our lab simulator, as well as implementing visual indicators for user instructions. We have decided to design a storyline that follows the real process of developing a vaccine, and it will, of course, requires a lot of research and background information! Gladly, Tianyang in our group had some prior experiences in biological science! The main focus for next week:

• Research background information and details on the process of developing a Vaccine. Tianyang has been doing this since the start of the quarter, thus he will be in charge of this part for the week.
• The main storyline for demo day. Dylan will work on designing the main storyline for the demo day. Dylan will communicate with Tianyang on the process of the development, as well as collaborating with the rest of the team on user side developments.
• User instructions. Steve and Yongzhe will be designing and implementing user instructions for the lab equipment. Yangzhou and Steve have all taken HCDE courses that cover human-computer interactions and user experiences, and they are excited to implement instructions for the lab! We are also considering visual indicators for the instructions, but it will depend on the process.

Overall, we have shifted our working process to be more user-focused for the next few weeks. We’re glad that we’re able to finish the development of the majority of the lab equipment, which took way longer than we thought it would.

Blog 6

After the MVP presentation, it is now very important to catch up the normal pace and keep up with the following objectives we set in the beginning of the quarter. In this week, we do have a lot of progress in the vaccine laboratory:

• Improved Liquid machanism which allows liquids to be stored in general containers (in a beaker, in a pipette, in a test tube, in a petri dish)
• The liquid now stores data: whether it contains a virus (or a specific strain), whether it has been processed by the centrifuge, whether it has been heated
• A tube generator in the fridge which offers us infinite supply of virus (original pathogen)
• A single handed pipette responding to SteamVR controller inputs, hence now we can have a spare hand to hold the test tube
• A bio-hazard contamination container, players can throw unusable tubes inside to destroy them
• Fixed the everlasting bug which causes liquid to disappear when VR goggles is put on after the scene started

In this week, there's a lot communications between teammates, which is crucial for the design of the gameplay. Actually, every team member took part in contributing each of the process listed above, and that's why we could have a breakthrough of the development.

With regard to the objectives in next week, here are the plans:

• Steve, Frank: Finish petri dish gameplay. It requires to design an incubator and petri dishes with embryo cells. The player needs to move the virus from the tube to the petri dish.
• Dylan: Implement the rest of virus + chemical heating mechanism. The player should add the virus to a beaker with chemical liquids, heat it, and move the virus back to the tube.
• Tianyang: Adding game and equipment instructions, improve machine interfaces to be more user friendly.

Blog 5

We are very excited to announce that this week we have released our MVP for Vac. Inc! Our team has made a lot of progress in recent weeks to get to where we are right now. We actually met most of our goals for the MVP release, which are:

• Load into a biology lab
• Have a fridge to store chemicals
• Chemicals can be poured between beakers
• Virus samples can be placed and spun in an intractable centrifuge
• Virus results are output by a virus tester
• Liquids can be stored in an intractable pipette

However, we weren’t able to reach all of our MVP goals. Some things we had to push back include:

• Instructions for user to follow when playing
• Virus can be killed by mixing with chemicals
• Virus can be mixed with chicken cells in petri dish

In addition to releasing our MVP, we also added some additional features this past week:

• Dylan: Allowed liquids of different color to mix colors when poured together
• Tianyang: Created the virus tester to determine the reliability of the virus sample when after placed in a centrifuge
• Steve and Frank: Fixed some liquid bugs with the pipette

Our plans for next week are:

• Dylan: Allow virus sample to be killed when mixed with a heated chemical. Also allow for chemicals to cool when placed in the refrigerator
• Tianyang: Get pipette to place liquid in the test tube. Try to fix a bug with the liquid shader where it doesn’t load properly. Fix the virus tester to work more reliably
• Steve and Frank: Refine pipette to only require one hand to use by incorporating button inputs when holding pipette

Blog 4

This week was productive. We were able to make our lab more interactable and ready to compose the game for MVP. The crucial milestone that we accomplished for this week is that implementing all essential lab equipment or elements for our vaccine game. Most importantly, we have a pourable liquid working that is ready for our next step. It will be the core element for our virus sample and chemicals that we used to create a vaccine.

The teammates did the following work this week:

• Dylan: worked on the liquid prefab using shader and implemented the pourable script that allows the user to pour liquid from one container to another.
• Tianyang: Implemented the centrifugal machine to be operable. He made the tube container inside the centrifuge physically compatible with p-tubes, which we are going to use for store virus samples. Besides, the user could open and close the lid of the centrifuge with a button. The centrifuge's power control is also implemented with hover buttons.
• Steve and Frank: Worked on the bunsen burner along with its flame particle system. The main functionality they implemented is to use a hover button to control the fire of the bunsen burner within the particle system. Also, the burner with its switch is now moveable with the user's hand and grasp. They also fixed the gravity bug that remained from the last week so that every lab equipment is now interactable and working correctly. After Dylan finished the liquid prefab, they implemented a petri dish with the liquid.

Plan for the next week:

• Tianyang Dylan: 1.put the spin rate display on the centrifuge. 2. Design a virtual machine used for testing scores of the performance of vaccine samples. 3. Put "virus tube generator" in the interactive fridge. 4. extend the function of the liquid by adding variables. 5. Implement the purpose of heating liquid with the burner.
• Steve and Frank: 1. Implement a fully functional pipette that used to extract liquid or virus samples to different containers. 2. Implement the chick cells for the inactivation of the virus 3. Organize the lab with all the elements so that we could have an MVP.

Blog 3

This week was an exciting week! We officially started working on our project and implemented our lab! Our key milestone for this week is to load the laboratory scene we have acquired from the Unity Asset Store in our project and initialize our lab environment. In addition, Steve and Frank have also implemented interactable objects in the main laboratory scene, including, for example, the test tubes and beaker. Some of the implementations are not perfect yet - we suspect some bugs are related to the asset settings itself, and we will work on a fix over the weekend. One additional note is that we did not use the lab scene we originally planned to use. The original asset contains large scenes and additional objects that cause performance issues when running. We moved to another lab scene, which was also acquired from the Unity Asset Store, and we believe the scene has more potentials since the lab has more rooms, which may be used for future implementations.

Tianyang worked on the liquid implementations for our project. The liquid simulation in Unity has limited capabilities, with potential bugs that might impact the user experience of the application. We are still having discussions over the issues, and we are talking about potentially having another representation of the liquid.

Dylan mainly worked on making larger objects interactable this week - we now have interactable fridges that can be opened, and doors that automatically open when walking near them. This weekend, we will primarily work on resolving the bugs we are having so far. The most urgent issue relates to the gravity bug when a user picks something up.

For next week, we will focus on making the bunsen burner interactable and to heat chemicals in the tube and an interactable Centrifuge that turns on with flint lighter.

Blog 2

This week we decided to narrow the focus of our project. Our initial idea was to have this grand laboratory environment that simulates real life. It would include proper chemistry sets, as well as train the user to practice proper laboratory safety. However, given our 7 week timeframe, we realized that this was not going possible. So, we decided to center our project around the actual process of developing a vaccine. While this in itself is also a difficult process to match, we will simplify it to fit into our project. Specifically, the game will be divided into different sections that make up the vaccine development process. We will implement the first section as part of our MVP. It will involve pipetting the virus into a petri dish of chicken cells, blending it with a centrifuge, and heating chemicals with a bunsen burner.

Plan for next week:
Load up a laboratory scene in Unity and implement pipetting. The virus and chicken cells will start in a refrigerator and must be grabbed out of the fridge. Afterwards, the player must pipette a sample of the virus into the chicken cells, and let the virus sit for a bit. We will install several Unity assets that include the necessary laboratory equipment, as well as a lab itself. Frank and Steve will work on getting the lab loaded into Unity, and making the prefabs interactable. Dylan and Tianyang will work on implementing the pipetting mechanism.

Blog 1

Week 1: For the first week, we got together as a class to work through the unity tutorials and oculus tutorials which introduced the basic techniques we will be using in Unity. After the class, we share our brainstormed project ideas together and evaluated each of them to decide which one we are going to work with.

Week 2: During the second week, we finalized our project proposal by discussing the potentials with the instructors and TAs. We listened to the creative ideas and comment about how to make our project more meaningful to the community. After we planned out the overall blueprint for our project, each of us took one task to finish this week. Dylan worked on setting up the template and website for our project. Steve recorded the pitch video, Tianyi wrote the project proposal and Yongzhe finished the blog 1.

Plan for next week:
We will set the initial lab environment for the project and allocating basic lab instruments and hazmat suits to the scene. The first milestone we are going to accomplish is the contamination process both before entering and exiting the laboratory. It requires the following steps:

• Change the Laboratory suit properly before entering.
• Shower upon exiting.
• Decontaminate all materials before exiting.

Project Proposal

Proposal link

PRD

PRD link