VR Puzzler: Night at the Museum
Introduction
‘Night at the Museum’ is my final project for Udacity’s ‘VR Developer Nanodegree’. It was developed in Unity and deployed for Google Cardboard on Android.
Have a look at the walkthrough video:
In this video, you can see five distinct areas or exhibits: Aviation, Gaming, Education, Space Exploration and Medicine. In each of these areas, you can watch a video about how VR is impacting each of the industries respectively.
Design
When I began designing this project, I knew that I wanted each of the five exhibits to be unique, and that I wanted the content and layout of each exhibit to relate specifically to the industry they were trying to explore. I also knew that I wanted a ‘main’ area of the experience; an area that acted as a hub for accessing or moving between the other exhibits.
Here’s my first sketch of the project’s layout:
As you can see, the main idea remained the same, but the layout changed slightly. Most notably, the space exhibit moved to its own scene.
Additionally, I created the following fictional user profile to keep in mind when designing this game:
Name: Derry Banilow
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Quote: “What up, bruh.”
Description: Derry is a typical student. He doesn’t have a lot of time for extra stuff, but is always excited to learn about something new.
VR Experience: Minimal.
When thinking about Derry, I wanted to keep in mind that a lot of people have very tight schedules, and very little time for anything extra. Because of this, I wanted to make the application as easy as possible to use, with the slightest learning curve I could so that people could just use the app right away. Additionally, I wanted to pack as much information as I could into a relatively simple app, so I decided to rely on representational visuals and video content.
Story of the Process
When I began this project, I had a pretty clear idea of exactly what I wanted to make. I also knew that I had fairly limited time, so I should utilize some of the Unity assets I’ve acquired over the years to help reduce development time.
I knew the five industries I wanted to cover, so I started by looking through the assets I already owned, and mapped some of them to each of the industries. However, I didn’t have anything that fit Education, Space or Gaming, so I had to look for additional assets to fit.
Luckily, I found Vast Outer Space, Props for the Classroom, and Simple Arcade Machines Pack.
Two of these assets already had demo scenes that worked perfectly for what I wanted to create. All that was left to do was create a room for the arcade pack, create the central hub room, and add my functionality.
I used ProBuilder to create the hub and arcade room, and also to assign materials to these rooms (it’s an amazing tool, I really can’t recommend it enough).
I had a nice image of a prototype prior to room layout finalization and material assignment, but it seems to have disappeared.
I then took my character controller from previous projects, as well as my UI behaviour scripts and brought them into the game for movement and button interaction. The only thing that remained was to add some polish and some videos.
Luckily, Unity has introduced the Video Player component, which, when used with render textures, makes it incredibly easy to play video within a scene.
User Testing Outcomes and Iteration
In previous projects, I had a set of questions ready for play testers. This time around, I decided that I wanted to try something different, and let the tester walk through the experience unguided, and without any questions to consider. Rather, I asked for general feedback in any areas that the tester thought needed attention.
During the testing, the only two comments that led to changes were:
- The environmental sound is distracting and out of place
- The framerate is too low
These comments led me to switch from dynamic to baked lighting, which greatly improved performance. I also changed the settings of the scenes AudioSources to prevent sound effects from being heard outside of the rooms where they originated.
Conclusion
I didn’t learn a ton from completing this project, but I have realized that I am getting much better at seeing things through to completion and prototyping rapidly. I also learned how easy it is to integrate video into Unity scenes and came up with some interesting ideas on how to use it in future projects.
