Zero Gravity
Project Team
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Supervision |
Goal
The goal of our project „Zero Gravity“ was to convey the feeling of flying by combining three innovative technologies: Oculus Rift, Kinect and Unity. We wanted people to have the opportunity to experience the world virtually in midair. To make this possible we mainly focused on the goal to develop a preferably intuitive, easily understandable and realistic control of movement which is as comfortable as possible and offers a great adventure to the user. Thereby we took the decision to develop an exploration game which is fun and is a completely new way of using the named technologies.
Approach
To reach our goal we went through different phases of development. Here it was very important that we always reconsidered and in some cases even rejected our ideas.
At first we had to become familiar with the appropriate soft- and hardware to get to know all the components very precisely. Next we invested some time in planning the mounting construction. We wanted to develop a solution which is both comfortable and with a lot of freedom of movement. The user should feel preferably free with just a few suspension points. Unluckily this is hardly compatible with the goal to build a very comfortable construction. Thus we always had to balance between those two purposes and adjust the construct to the other steps of development.
Therefore we had to reject our first idea and then developed two prototypes, which were based on two different concepts. With the first prototype the user controls the steering by pointing his fist in the desired direction. The movement resembles a superman pose. The second prototype is based on a glider. By using two hands the control is managed by the distance of both hands. To find out which of the two controls is the most intuitive, simplest and easiest to understand we tested both prototypes with different test subjects. Every person tested both controls by flying through a course with ringlike checkpoints and evaluated them afterwards. Hereby we were able to find out which control is the most appropriate. The results of the survey are presented below.
Altogether we got a lot of praise for the whole setting and the idea itself. The people liked the feeling of flying and evaluated the situation as very realistic. They had a lot of fun and joy which was at least one of our goals.
Referring to the mounting construction most of the participants evaluated it as rather comfortable but with the possibility of improvement as well. Especially the back suffered a little bit while hanging in the air and moving the body. Similar results we achieved for the freedom of movement. For some people the physical effort was a little bit too high whereupon you also have to consider that this is partly intended if you take into consideration that a lot of games which draw on the body go along with physical effort.
Regarding the different control-prototypes it became very clear that the superman-control was favored by almost every test subject. In every category which included aspects like intuition, simplicity, comprehensibility and consistency we got results of 2 or better (1 = excellent, 6 = insufficient). Merely the physical effort was rated a little bit worse.
It was striking that people who play a lot of computer games (5-12 hours and even more per week) rated much better on the whole. This forebodes that if people with less experience had had more time to get familiar with the circumstances the results could have been even better.
Conclusion
All in all we were able to achieve our goals. We hardly tried to not adhere to old ideas and steps of development but to consider the situation objectively with the willingness to enter some development phases again and adjust and change things consistently. This helped us to build a project which with the help of an intuitive, precise and simple control gives the user a realistic feeling of flying and is a lot of fun.
Further steps to improve the project even more would be enhancing the comfort of the mounting . There could also be the possibility of accelerating and braking to give the user more freedom and there could be spend some effort in making the world more vivid to explore.. A problem which cannot be solved that easy is the problem of cybersickness. One third of the test subjects reported brackishness afterwards.
The Zero-Gravity was created in the bachelor project in ws14/15 in the scope of supernatural user interfaces research.