Month: November 2021

Research Question

1. How do players communicate and interact with each other in games through different platforms?

2. How it affects players’ feelings of social presence?

These two key points affect all the game’s settings and the following research. A variety of different interaction and communication methods are applied in this work, and user tests are performed to collect players’ opinions on the gaming experience and the impact of interaction and communication settings on social presence.

The purpose of this user test is to observe the players’ in-game communication and interaction behaviours in different platforms and to further find its possibilities to affect players’ sense of social presence. I tested with 4 groups in total, with 2 people in each group. In addition, because of the time and distance limitation, two groups were tested remotely, while the other two groups of the testers performed the test co-located.

• 

• 

• 

• 

Task1 – open the door

At this stage, VR players need to find the room where the non-VR player is locked. In this process, non-VR players could give instructions of the direction to guide VR players to the right room, while VR players need to shoot the enemies along the road.

• 

• 

• 

• 

Task2 – Laser area

In the laser area, players need to avoid the laser light that causes damage. Since non-VR players can only control the movement of the avatar instead of dodging or manipulating objects, they need the help of VR players to move the provided reflective cube to reflect the laser and let them pass without being injured.

• 

• 

• 

• 

This task is designed to be impossible for one player to complete. In this part, players need to further apply the skills they learned from the first task, such as grabbing and shooting and maintaining communication and coordination with each other.

Task3 – Block bridge

At this stage, the small blocks are linked to the larger version of the blocks, and if players move the small blocks, the larger blocks will move accordingly.

VR players need to move the tiny blocks to build a continuous bridge to cross. At the same time, there will be enemies that keep approaching and non-VR players need to defeat them while VR player is trying to make the bridge.

This stage is the most complex task, requiring players to have more fine control, more coordination and cooperation.

Colour code

In this project, all the PC players related objects will be blue, including their avatars and gun; while all interactable objects that VR players could grab would be green. Meanwhile, anything dangerous or belongs to enemies is red.

Shader

Here shows some shaders I made and some are used for the final version of this project.

Avatar representation