March 2019 - April 2019
The primary focus of these “phase” prototypes was to take a step back and examine some of the issues that emerged from the Ten Week Prototype.
In Phase 1, I wanted to address how to move a user through a sequence while still giving them a limited amount of agency. The animated walk from the previous prototype felt unnatural, and there is no user interaction occurring in the scene, which led to a passive watching experience rather than an active engaging one. As a physical walk would not be possible in the space, I decided to try teleport points in a simplified environment. The teleport points allow me to constrain the user to a space while still giving them agency over the time they spend within that space. Additionally, I can construct scene interactions around that specific point in space and time rather than scattering them along the route of the sidewalk.
Another point of interest for me was scale and transition. Users in the Six Week Prototype were constrained to an avatar that was roughly the height of a six-year-old, yet this only moved the position of the camera. The floor would then appear to be located at knee-height for some of the taller users, which can be disorienting when physically moving around a space. In Phase 1, I created an environment that would scale itself proportionally to the height of the user. Each user would then be the height of a six-year-old child in the space regardless of their actual height.
Phase 1 Conclusions:
While teleportation was an efficient method to get down the sidewalk, it was too efficient. Users could easily just jump from point to point without taking in the scene around them. Additionally, teleportation is an unnatural movement in this space - it takes the user out of the flow of the experience and reminds them of the technology rather than the narrative the technology is in.
The presence of the controllers required to teleport is distracting in the scene. User focus in this experience should be on the content, not on learning controls.
Scaling of the environment works well for all heights, though adjustments need to be made for certain assets to ensure they do not float above the ground plane, or otherwise spin wildly around the scene.