Project Ideas
When we first met and brainstormed the different projects we could create this quarter, we realized there were a lot of directions that we could go in.
The 4 ideas that we were the most interested in implementing were an escape room, a virtual clothing try-on, an application that allows the user to test out different instruments, and a game that includes a fitness aspect.
We liked the idea of the escape room since it would be easy to scale and we could play with different ways that the user could interact with the environment. Making the game multiplayer could be difficult since the users would have to interact with the same environment, and depending on our idea, we might need to either create or buy a lot of different assets.
We thought that the virtual clothing try-on application would be a great way of providing accessbility to those who don’t have the option of being able to try on clothes before they buy them. However, not all of us were as interested in this project, and since we will be working on it all quarter, we wanted to make sure that everyone was on board with it.
With our instrument tester idea, we realized that it wouldn’t work with the Oculus since it would require finger tracking while the Oculus has controllers. We also considered the possibility of the user holding a real instrument onto which we project instructions for the user, but thought that this could be difficult since not all versions of an instrument look the same.
Finally, we considered what it would take to create a game that was also a way for users to work out. To do this, we would need to track stats of the user, including calorie count and number of steps taken. We were worried that with a VR headset, this could potentially be dangerous, so we would need to ensure that there are safety measures that allows the user to participate safely. Since the user would also be moving a lot, we knew we would have to be very careful to make sure the user doesn’t feel sick/nauseous while playing the game.
The feedback that we received mentioned that many people have created escape room games so we should avoid doing that. After discussing it, we decided on creating the fitness game that paired with music. We decided on this since we liked that we could explore eye/hand tracking and how audio can interact with a user. Furthermore, we were excited about how creative we can be with designing this game!
Proof of Concept
To ensure that our idea was feasible, we looked at other groups’ projects from previous quarters of this class. We noticed that many groups had created different types of games, with some that involved lots of movement. Furthermore, we noticed that there were also musical AR/VR applications, such as a Guitar visualizer.
From this, we decided that even with the challenges of ensuring safety measures as well as syncing music to the user’s movements, our idea was still feasible.
Another challenge of our idea is that since we want our game to focus on fitness, we must track statistics such as calorie count and steps taken. By doing some research on how to do this tracking, these goals seem attainable for our project. For example, the Oculus has as built-in fitness tracker, which we can leverage for our game.
Finally, we briefly discussed this idea with the course staff to confirm that our idea was feasible during our brainstorming stage, although we plan to explore the details of our idea more in-depth with the course staff.