WEEK 1-13/1
Group setting
And the platform determined
The platform we need to choose:
‘computer-generated VR, 360 degree film, mixed/augmented reality’
We want to create something vibe and emotionally, and pure narrative(basiclly), and also
Built our own Miro Board only for this project:#
https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVLrZ1Cts=/
We got three Idea at the mean time.
Mine idea is about the detective fictions-A Criminal cases and how to solve it. The user gonna be the experiencer OR the detective, they are setting to find the clues in details and find out the truth.
My references is “And Then There were No One”-Agatha Christie, a perfect case for platform transfer and how to connect the narrative with MR reality space.
The interactive method of this idea was put some doll or items in the middle of the room, and let the user touch them, and transfer in to the narrative scene. BUT I feel like I want something has more related to the real world- The MR interavtive method, like a portal, a mirror, the light of a flashlight, to see something under the surface.
WEEK 2-20/1
This week we receive a new mission for 360 film- I think this is a good opportunity for us to learn how to mission our new tasks on the transfer platform critical mission. That’s for the user research.
The new workshop
360 film shooting and editing
We think about some interesting narrative but that seems to not be the first goal for the mission-what we really need to do is to make a complete 360 film for LCC campus.
-Which Im not like the most, I always don’t know how to deal with this campus. Which got so many interesting and boring things but we need to pretend that everything is interesting. Hard and hard.
We -lexi, deva and me, think about make a film about some students break the rules and be chasing by the teachers. in those chasing process we(the user)can explore the campus a little and maybe take a look at how other people break the rules(play with the fire or eat fired chicken besides the computer, etc.)
But this idea seems not so fun to Klaus,,, I really don’t know how to chat with him btw,,,, I don’t know what he like, its weird, or I don’t really need to figure out what he like? AAAAAAAAnyway they don’t mark us by this workshop. That’s make sense, like we don’t need to try to make a complete narrative or stories but to try to figure out how to make a 360 film and combine this with the campus-a real place. Regardless we need to shot the 360 film for our critical works. That’s what really matter.
The idea of the critical
Still thinking in progress
My reference of the detective fiction turns to be a specialized novel:
“The Cabin Factory”, “And Then There were No One”,”桶川跟踪狂杀人事件”, “Murder in the Crooked House””Cult and the Interior Room”
- The Cabin Factory: In a lonely cabin in the forest, parents gave birth to a pair of siblings and imprisoned and abused them. In the end, the child set fire to the house and burned their parents to death inside. Using the fire as the clues.
- And then There were No One: Ten guilty people are trapped on an isolated island, dying one by one according to the nursery rhyme of ‘Ten Little Soldiers’. Unpredictable death and truth.
- The stalker in TongChuan: Even the most ordinary girls may be harassed by stalkers. Using photos as clues.
- Cult and the Interior Room: Cultists transform their houses into the image of cult goddesses, which can lead to useless rooms/corridors in their own houses and cause strange events to occur. Using interior room as the clues.
WEEK 3-27/1
Zhans workshop
the shaders
Shader Graph 插件
Play with shader kinda help with the model and how the model do in the unity to make animations
Shader Forge网站: explain the functions and the multiply things: basically tutorials and introductions
The narrative Theme Final Determined
We finally made the narrative framely works
There are four initial sotries to tell according to the last week:
“The Cabin Factory”, “And Then There were No One”,”The stalker in TongChuan”, “Cult and the Interior Room”
We discuss about this four topics again, and decided to refer the two with the clearest clue:“The Cabin Factory” and “And Then There were No One”.
They using the super clear clue and the understandable storyline: like a beautiful map, through a same scene.
Narrative development
Base on the keywords
We come up with some keywords that related to the basic emotional narrative-
Love, Greece, Delusions, Guilt, and a closed loop of Causality
And reference to “And then there were no One”, we come up with some ideas about ” the MR making the clues, and the VR telling the story”.
The story happens in fictional time and space.
STORY version 1
STORY version 2
STORY version 3
1. Irene places surveillance cameras
2. Kevin’s paranoia attacks and he starts locking the door
3. Sophie places heart-shaped candles and turns off the fire alarm
4. Irene makes an escape route through the secret door on the ground
5. Mark sneaks out of the room and starts checking the wires
6. Kevin finds the underground secret door opened and blocked while locking the door
7. Mark cuts the wires, exposing sparks and causing a power outage
8. Sophie is frightened by the power outage and knocks over the candle
9. Mark sees fire and noises in the darkness and tries to chop the iron door with the big scissors in his hand, but the rusty metal emits more sparks
10. The fire breaks out and everyone is unable to escape
What we gonna do next
about the story and the “technical” part
Next steps include two directions:
1.Story
We know that the story can be hard to understand for our players, so it’s not the best way for us to leave it there and made it without test. Its hard to say that we can express this story(especially the background and the character part) clear to our player-I mean they can’t get the information right-they can’t get their mission right.
2.Low Tech test
The test Eric mentions before: Our user testing part. We need to link our project with our user to see if they can know the mission or the order of this story. Which we set like two different way to achieve this-The Paper Storyboard/The questionnaire.
MR basic Design
In the MR reality passthourgh, you can see the starting button under the dolls, and you randomly pick them up and press the start button, get in to the VR experience.
The MR space means like the similar things happens in the real life. It’s happens in front of your eyes, and also happens in your life.
WEEK 4-03/02
The weakest part of the story/project
tutorial with Eric
How the player gonna know about their character and their motivation about the mission they gonna do? What gonna happened if you don’t do your mission or you doing it wrong? What elements or monologue or dialogue gonna say about these four character’s identify? Why use MR/What does the MR environment do in your test?
It’s the Very important information that we need from this tutorial- We need players to closely unite with each of their selected characters. So how does the player know about their characters?
The method we came up with now is when the player selects a doll that represents one of the characters, the player gonna see an illusion of another character who telling something with the character that player chose, telling their story and some dialogue that explains the basic background and infromation. E.g. If you chose Irene, Mark’s illusion gonna comes out and says to you “Don’t you dare think about take the money away by your self!”
We will continually discuss this.
Today we talk about the very background of our story- which happens before all the story happened in the house/villa. The background of why these four character stay in this house and how they founds out their “gold”
“The four people were friends who went out camping together. They encountered a storm on the way, but they were far from their destination and home. At this time, Sophie suggested that she saw a cabin on the road, which seemed to be a good place to stay for a night, so everyone came to the cabin.
The weather was very cold, and Mark wanted to make a fire in the fireplace to keep warm, so he came to the fireplace to light a fire, there was too much wood in the fireplace, so he decided to take some away, but he found a box of gold hidden in the wood pile. He exclaimed, “What the hell?” It attracted everyone’s attention.
Irene’s face sank. This box of gold was actually the dirty money she hid here. She thought she would not be discovered, but the others discovered her as soon as she came in.
Everyone had a dispute about how to deal with the box of gold. Mark thought that everyone should divide it on the spot, and Kevin insisted on waiting until dawn to hand it over to the police. When the dispute was unresolved, Irene suggested that it was already late now, and the box of gold should be placed here first and dealt with the next day. So everyone dispersed with different purposes.
On this stormy night, four people with their own ulterior motives acted quietly.”
This maybe not gonna tell the player directly, but it’s gonna make the story more believable.
the MOTIVATION:
1.Irene: She own the dirty money, so she wants to take them out secretly
2.Mark: He want all of these money
3.Sophie: She wants Kevin’s love
4.Kevin: He wants to protect himself
There are some simple way like an UI to achieve the goal of “let them know what to do”
- why not tell the player? like in the game “Cabin Factory”, In one of the cabins, the family’s death and fire were announced on the radio. Can we refer from this element? Like use some other elements telling the story at the MR space?
But its cant be at the beginning,,, we dont want our player know the truth at the very beginning, we want it to be at the end? or at the middle？
But we can use the O.S. to tell the background message to the player like WHO are they WHAT does they want
2. UI reminder and mission board
Poppy playtime Chapter 4# game stream-Hanzhe Wang
UI added: some game gonna give the player some “UI reminder” to tell them what is the mission and what to do. In our case, it gonna be when you landing in the VR game, there gonna be a UI reminder telling you “Lock the Door” or “surveillance the Gold“
MR testing-05/02/2025
Meta all in one SDK test in MR
Some point that have to set up before the MR:
1.meta quest link: Settings-Beta-Developer runtime features-pass-through over Meta Quest Link+Spatial data over meta quest link
2.VR headset: setting-Environment-spacial set up-setup: scanning the space
3.Unity: download Meta all in one SDK-Drag in Camera tig+ passthrough+ MR effect mesh, and turn the effect mesh-Labels: mixed(everything without global mesh)
BUT failed in the mean time: it doesn’t shows like the tutorial said: transparency
Research Question & User Research
05/02/2025
Start from the specific and go general, discover and learn from your users, and understand the role of XR experiences in society: what impact does XR have in society. etc.?
When setting the research questions: set it up with the specific topic critical thoughts- it can not always related to people, it can be related to technical, to equipment, to any other things that happened in the experience. Clear, Concise formulation of an inquiry that can be answered through your data collection and analysis
made assumptions when you ask questions: why? because you gonna have that preparing of different level of answers. You using the compare and contrast to prove it. Don’t use “How” but try to use “the methods”. Try to asks some question that cannot be searched by the google scholar.
How to come up with a research question: The RELEVENT of your topic: looking at if other people have answered your question, is it interested by others, does anyone benefit with that? So come up with a research question, Its all about :
How RELEVANT you are and how ORIGINAL you are
Need QUANTITATIVE or QUALITATIVE answers
Iteration on the Interior part 06/02
Base on my Interior design background….
So in this case we maybe gonna try to start our interior plan of the house? I mean the BASIC plan of our scene. Its gonna be very simple and clear, just to make sure that our idea about the flow of these four character not gonna crash together and make the chaos.
The first idea of the scene house is a two-story villa/house. Because we dont want the action flow of these four crash together. Well Irene need to walk and active alone, Sophie as well, Kevin need to live in the same story with Irene, and Mark as well. But we dont want our player walk up and down stairs in the VR experience, so I drew soem sketches to test the idea of “They live in same floor”
After testing the “SAME floor” idea, I tried to seek for some possibilities on they live in separate floors. We discuss about this together.
In this one we saw that only Sophie can be not interact with someone else, so she can be the very isolated one. Sophie can live in the second floor like a attic, and the others live on the ground floor.
/
Tutorial with Ana and Klaus 07/02
The narrative… up side down
We realize there are some serious conflict happens in our story- It is the point-there are way too many characters. It’s didnt make sense to our audience. The story in not powerful enough to shape all these four characters in the VR experience… Anyway, we need either more powerful/logically story or less characters.
I totoally agree with this opinion. There are some logic bug in the story chain. Like from the beginning to the part of open the secret door escaping, the motivation and behavior logic doesn’t really make sense or match to each characters.
Our solution: 1. Try to fix all these logic bug as much as possible, and make the user test next week or weekend.
2. Do the storyboard of each VR experience and give the four storyboard to to our friends randomly and ask them if they can find out the story and the truth. Collect the feedback from the users.
3. After the user research and testing, we come up with the next version of the story, maybe more powerful, maybe less character.
WEEK 5-10/02
PIOTOR Face capture class 11/02
How to create an avatar and how to run the face-capture in unity
Setup your questionnaire 12/02
Says, Think, Does, Feels
e.g. How did you experience this VR piece?
Use Open-ended questions: express what they feel in the experience in their own words
To understand what they do: you record the screen or observe what they doing, and take notes
Feels: decided how you want your players to get engaged with your experiences, let them use emotional words to describe their experience
5-7 open question questionnaire
Ask them “the first word that comes to your mind when you think about “something”(we drop the word cloud)
Set up some differents storyboard versions:
Changing
Four people///
(example. Can find the complete one here: Miro board)
Three People///
WEEK6-17/02
This week we restructured the story board, combined it to two versions : 3 people and 4 people.
And we also designed the experiment as user test- in order to test if we could make our audience understand the whole story, and which part of the stroy seems not too elegant or doesn’t make any sense.
To design the questions for our ausdience, we start from developing interview Guidelines, which can design a clear structure and set of questions for your user interviews to ensure they are conducted effectively and that valuable data is collected.
Base on the speech given by Ana(thank you so much ana), The role of the interview guide would be:
· Ensure that the interview has a clear goal and focuses on the research question.
· Provide consistency to prevent the interview from being too casual or off-topic.
· Facilitate subsequent analysis and comparison of responses from different interviewees.
These goals are embodied in our interview. The purpose of the interview is:
We are developing an interactive narrative experience that combines VR and MR. We hope to understand players’ understanding of story structure and interaction methods through this interview. We will ask you to watch the storyboard and then answer some related questions.
(1. Can players understand the multi-threaded narrative we designed and combine it into a linear story; 2. Can the designed interactive behavior be understood and run by players?)
The final version of the questions were here, included the changing and updates after discuss this with Ana.
Deleted some questions which was too difficult for the audience to answer or to understand. And we also highlight the most important question for our test: Which version of the storyboard you likes better? Why?
We try to ask for the best experience to the player, which one or which part of the storyboard they likes the most, and which character seems not to be that elegant.
Some recording of the last testing in shcool.
We have made four tests in person. They all give us lots of feedback and suggestions. Especially two of them are totally VR newer, their opinion is worth a lot,
We record all of the testing process.
In conclusion, The best of the version was Three people’s version. And worest part of the story was the logic of the Casper- They doesn’t make sense to our players, and the timline also have some problem within the testing.
We get a super important suggestion: some of the player need to re-read some of the storyboard to connect the timeline and arrange the order in which events occur.
This weekend, we will construct the story in 3 people version, and make the logic elegant.
WEEK7-24/02
Story Logic Analysis
How to re-contribuilt the logic of the whole story？
I think we kind of stuck in some “Logic trap”, some part of the story doesn’t make sense to our audience, and some of the question they asked us we couldn’t explain. Like “Why they didn’t take the gold and just run away?” “Why the fire alarm keep BIBIBI but no one coming out to check out if there really some fire?”
We got to reconstruct the whole story. Start from the background and the way they died.
WEEK8-03/03
The Story reconstruct
We have gathered and reorganized the story along with all the feedback from the interviewer, listing out all the issues we are currently facing. I believe this approach might help us find better solutions.
Then we put all of this in to the conclusion part and make it even more clear to organized. Base on the suggestions, we come up with some new ideas trying to slove the problems we faced in the process of testing the story.
Such as give an indentity to the player, and rationalization the mission and motivation of the player. On the other hand, make the player the fourth hiker?(my crazy imagination) So that we can make it the really causality of the whole story.
After this we write three version of the script of this story. We used the three perspective of our characters.
My part of the script: Casper.
The tutorial on 05/03
If I gonna say what is the part of the real big change, this is the real big change !!!
We talk about our problems and the interview result with Ana, and she helped us reconstruct the whole story!! Or we dont take it as “reconstruct“, we make it as the “organize” of the story. Some key problem sloved: Dont need to give the player a mission or a identity, just make them a experiencer of this work.
We now have the sketch of the timeline and clearly know what happened in the story!!
This is the digital version of the time line. We gonna base on this time line write another version of script.
WEEK9-10/03
The Next Tutorial
on 10/03 we have the next tutorial of this story, which is also the last tutorial of this project before the easter vacation. We have the final story processing timeline and never gonna make change on it anymore!!!
SO the basic logic turns back to the very beginning:
No one is innocent from this fire accident.
We finally have the scripts of the last version!!!
Next step:
Organized the story happening order and suttle the event list! Maybe stroryboarding the story as well.
WEEK10-17/03
The final week of the collaborative Unit—Sorry didn’t make any change on this project
WEEK11-24/03
Vacation~~~~
Just in case if you are interested in our vacation lol
WEEK13-07/04
We are trying to write the EventList from now. And we plan to make the very final version of the script this week as well, to make it as the basic of the storyboard.
When we follow the editing suggests from Ana we got the final part of the scripts: Character perspective version.
Then base on that we have the MR scene and editing the building of the realistic logic in the real world.
The basic logic chain:
MR Real Space(Background story)—-MR Real Space(select the puppet)—-Character Story(VR Experience)—-MR Real Space(select the puppet)—-Character Story(VR Experience)—-MR Real Space(select the puppet)—-Character Story(VR Experience)—-MR Real Space(Final Ending)
The reference of the background story express in the MR space:
To make the MR space:
Event List
Basically, we made the eventlist of the story, include the experience from the beginning MR space to the selecting process in the middle, and the final experience of the Fired house.
For the next step, we gonna focus on the storyboard and the setting of the Specific details