March 2018 - April 2018
A continuation of the Four Week Prototype, this project implemented the technical skills we gained and applied them to the Ruby Bridges narrative.
I began creating a framework for the full experience. This included a functional start menu, introduction featuring an audio interview of Ruby, a Prologue sequence with the user seeing from Ruby's point of view, and an interactive sequence to give background and historical context. We spent the first four weeks of development working on the Prologue, then took feedback we received from that level to adjust it and form the interactive scene. Users take on the embodied form of Ruby Bridges for the prologue portion, including her animated walk down the sidewalk in front of William Frantz Elementary School. Basic animated figures were used to create a mob from the motion data captured the previous month, and introduced audio of one of the documented chants used by the mob.
I experimented with various levels of user control and perspectives within the scene, as well as different forms of menu UI and navigation. With the intention of prototyping for a museum-style setup, I wanted to incorporate different forms of interaction and perspective often seen within museums while seeing what VR can potentially contribute to the learning experience. Following the prologue sequence (after this prototype referred to as “Scene 01”), the interactive scene includes a top-down view of the entire environment with the ability to click for extra context about the time period and the events occurring after this day.
This prototype taught us a lot about the rules involved in crafting embodied narrative experiences and brought up several ethical areas of question. Embodying Ruby Bridges made assumptions about what we the designers could possibly know about her experience, and the animated motion often caused mild motion sickness in the users (who were standing for this experience). We questioned the usefulness of the interactive scene in the overall experience, which became one of the catalysts for us to question who our audience was going to be and what our goals are for the project.
DETAILED PROCESS: a week-by-week breakdown of project production on my blog.