October 2018 - December 2018
In moving forward, Tori and I considered the direction of our project and how to best present key moments within the narrative. Previous prototypes served as technical exercises, and the next step was examining how to bring forward the narrative itself and place the user within.
The 10 Week prototype extended the first scene of Ruby walking up to the school. The user begins with the same Prologue with audio of Ruby Bridges from an interview. This Prologue now includes two historical images from that period of time. The scene fades into the user sitting in a car with a government official and Lucille Bridges. As the car slows, the official turns to direct the user and Lucille offers her hand to exit the car. As the user reaches out to touch her hand, the camera will rise indicating for the user to stand as well. The camera then moves along the sidewalk through the crowd in short segments. Each segment is broken by a fade to black, another clip of audio of Ruby speaking about the experience, and upon fading back in the mob is closer, denser, and grows slightly in size. The scene ends with the user standing on top of the steps of the school before fading in to the next scene.
At this point, we have begun narrowing down how we would like the rest of the project to play out. Following the Prologue and Scene 01, there will be two other scenes broken by audio transitions similar to the Prologue. Scene 02 will take place with the user sitting inside the Principal’s office as children are removed from the school in increasing numbers, and Scene 03 will take place a few days later within a classroom in isolation other than the teacher. This is the general format for the experience that we have decided on, although we have yet to begin work on developing the other two scenes.
Important things learned from this prototype:
Proximity. Designing for this experience, everything in the space felt just a little too far away. Designing for a properly scaled experience and really pushing the possibilities of proximity in a stressful VR environment is something to examine in the next iteration of this level.
Movement through a space. We spent a lot of time thinking through how to move the user through this area in a way that made sense with the scene. The result for this prototype was a crude “sliding” animation, which felt very artificial and did not quite account for the varying heights of the user (a technical issue to be addressed). The “blinks” in the middle were to help break up that motion, although we have also discussed using the proximity of the crowd to “teleport” the user to progressive points. Creating our own static standing “blinks” that allow for absorption of a moment without requiring the user to process forced movement. A discussion to have for the future.
User identity. We consistently went back and forth on whether or not the user should have an avatar, posing a difficult question. By providing an avatar, do we suggest that the user is embodying Ruby and therefore supposed to be her? This doesn’t seem to be a realistic expectation. We could choose a neutral avatar, and for this prototype we decided not to use one at all. However, not having an avatar of some sort can be jarring in a VR experience. I conducted some “virtual mirror” tests as an attempt at a middle ground- perhaps the user doesn’t have an avatar, but we can remind them of Ruby’s identity through environmental reflections or cues. Either way, this is a continuing point of research that remains up in the air.
Audio. The audio present in this prototype presents a little more variety from the Six Week Prototype, though still needs some variety and environmental ambient sounds. Other factors such as volume tweaking and component adjustments will need to be considered for a more solid sound design in future, along with optional captioning.
Technical Compatibility. The release of SteamVR 2.0 in the middle of this prototype did not play well with using VRTK assets. I will be finding alternate ways to accomplish the interactive portions that aligns with SteamVR.
Our next steps will require further examination into these issues and some small scale prototyping to determine potential paths forward in the space, and beginning to consider stylization for the scene.