Immersive Design 2: Digital Affordance and Considerations
Player Direction
As the project is going to have a 360 degree view for the player, I am going to have to use techniques to lead the player’s view to what I want them to see. The way I plan to do this throughout my experience is through the use of 3D audio and light. I will use these in tandem to get a better result in getting the player to look the right way. The audio will cause the player to look in the right direction and the use of light will keep them focused on where the next thing will happen so they manage to follow along with what is happening. However, I will allow for segments in which the player can get their bearings with the different environments so they are able to see most of them mitigating any fear of missing out on parts of the animation.
Navigation
My project idea makes the issue of navigation within VR not a big problem as the player is mainly going to be stationary within the elevator. The segment in which the player enters the elevator will make use of a fade to black transition as moving the player in a 360 experience like this could cause motion sickness as it is very easy to cause a disconnect with what the player is seeing and feeling. Especially because of the lack of interaction the player has with this prototype project as the movement will be completely out of their control and unnatural. Additionally, the 360 view will not take into account the movement because of the project being pre-rendered and not real time which could be very jarring for the player.
Audio
To implement audio how I mentioned before I am going to make use of Adobe Audition to simulate 3D audio for my video. I aim to do this by creating binaural audio from different audio clips timed correctly with my animation. To make this process easier I intend to make use of the dearVR MICRO plugin for Audition which gives greater control over the simulated 3D position of the audio clips.
Embodiment
I want this prototype to simulate a playable VR experience. To achieve this I intend to have some segments in which the player’s “hands” show up as if the player is controlling them with VR controllers to interact with the environment or react to the events of my 360 experience. This will be quite limited due to how the prototype functions but I will implement the audio techniques to attempt to make the player see the prototype embodiment. I am only using disembodied hands because attempting to simulate a full body in this prototype render would not work very well with the 360 degree view as the body would only face in one direction. This would make the experience less believable and therefore reduce the immersion.
References
Dear Reality (n.d.) dearVR MICRO [Application Plugin]. Available online: https://www.dear-reality.com/products/dearvr-micro [Accessed 22/5/2023].