Movie Runner
A VR video game designed to help people who have interview phobia overcome the fear through immersive environment and interactions.
Type: One-Week Individual Project
Skills: Problem Framing, Sketches, VR Prototyping, 3D Interaction Design, Video Editing
Tools: A-Frame/HTML/JaveScript/Adobe Premiere
Timeline: Oct/10/2020 - Oct/17/2020
Overview
This project is a 1-week individual project that focused on VR prototyping. I designed a 3D video game for users to immerse themselves in action movie scenes to help them do exercise within the movie plots. This design idea aims to help users complete their daily work-out without feeling bored.
PROBLEM FINDING
This project was inspired by a universal pain that many people have been through. People feel PAINFUL and BORED when they repeat doing those exhausting work-out exercises.
DESIGN GOAL
My design goal is to use VR technology and interaction design to help users transfer their effort on exercise to the effort on accomplishing an adventure journey in an action movie setting. It will become COOL and FUN for people to burn a decent number of calories within a movie setting.
SOLUTION OVERVIEW
Users can choose their preferred action movies and their preferred scenes to complete a mission in the movie. Users will be able to experience the action and story plots in the movie while doing some exercises. Users will have the chance to complete a mission with their favorite action movie star, experience the same movie plots, enjoy the same movie setting, at the same time, they can DO EXERCISE WITHOUT PAIN!
Select the action movie they want to immerse into
Select a character in the movie as their companion
Select a specific scene in the movie which they want to exercise in
Do exercise in the selected movie scene and plot
Design Process
PAPER PROTOTYPE
To better understand the 3D configuration of different design elements, I started with VR sketches. Different from the traditional sketches for ideation, VR sketches are drawn on 360-degree sketch paper. The VR sketch method requires designers to draw the scene from three directions on the same piece of paper with 360 panorama grids. I tried to use 360 panorama grids to align my sketches to a wide-angle view and then put the sketches into a 360-degree photo viewer to see how it would look like in a 3D environment
PHYSICAL PROTOTYPE
After testing my VR sketches of initial ideas in the 3D environment, I started the physical prototype. I used play-doh as my physical prototype tool. It turns out they are very handy and affordable for designers to play with the initial ideas before diving into the digital prototype, which might be more computationally expensive.
Select the Action movie, Exercise Companion, and Exercise scene
Exercise Scene 1: Running Scene
Exercise Scene 2: High Knees Lift Scene
Exercise Scene 3: Boxing Scene
DIGITAL PROTOTYPE
Due to the time limitation, I picked the running scene as my digital prototype scope for this one-week project.
ITERATION
After the first round prototype, the course instructor Professor Michael Nebeling pointed that the running scene had an endless running route, which might easily cause Motion Sickness. He suggested adding some more dynamic models in the VR scene for users to have interactions with so that users do not have to stare at the endless ahead.
Endless running road
Add 'killers' coming from the other side
Design Outcome
The project is still in progress, I only made the prototype for the running scene to test my initial ideas and see users' reactions. I still need to work on more detailed interaction design and the other exercise scenes. Here's a mid-fi prototype for this unfinished project:
Please come back in a few weeks for further updates...