Presence, VR and UDK - Research Document

Finally, after some extremely busy times (starting a new business, giving 3D workshops and a lot of graphic designing) I shifted gears again and worked a lot on updating my research document regarding my VR-project. For the time being the document is in Dutch, but I'm working on a translation for publication. You can download the current version by clicking the image below:

Research Document 15-03-12

So besides the use of UDK and using my own VR-equipment, what are the main changes to the original plan? Here's a short summary:

• Shrunk the original test group size to 24 people in stead of the original 32 because of practical reasons. It's hard to farm testers without the collaboration of a University's student pool. Still, if fortune smiles upon me and people notice the (well designed!) fliers I'm putting up soon, I might change this back to 32.
  
• Originally I didn't include any questionnaires to get my results. However, recently I've come to the conclusion that in some cases (especially with Experiment 1 regarding Field Of View) it's a good way to discover problems or issues I have not taken into account. Giving the test group an option to comment on certain things might shed some more light on this. Besides, you can never have too much information, no matter how relevant or not they might be.
  
• Added a new experiment regarding perceived affordance. This subject is highly interesting and I'm not sure why I didn't include this in the first draft. When creating a 3D environment with interactions, it is quite important to know how to guide the 'player' to certain areas of interest and how to integrate these theories into the overall design. This way I can eliminate many areas where the player might expect certain interactions, but aren't implemented. Like opening a door because it simply has a doorknob, or turning the handle of a slot machine because it makes sounds.
  
• Last but not least I've added a method to cross check results obtained from verbal questions: a heart rate monitor. This way I can easily compare their answers regarding presence with their heart rate and see if what they are saying is actually similar to what they're feeling.

This being said it's time for me to set some short time goals to help me put this project back into full throttle! Below is an overview of upcoming goals I've setup for this week:

1. Fully update my planning and make a SMART analysis of things to do so I can work them out strategically, keeping an eye on possible things that could go wrong.
2. Test my current 3D casino environment for possible problems regarding perceived affordance
3. Defining areas where I can make the casino environment visually more interesting by checking its composition, usage and placement of lights (aesthetic and functional). This can be done with the use of silhouetting techniques and the use of contrast.
4. Work all of these areas out and continue work on textures / normal maps on all objects.
5. Start research on DLLBind in UDK by gathering all necessary information and possible functioning demos for UDK

Well, this should be enough to keep me busy! If not I still have a lot more things on my ever growing To Do List. Stay tuned as I work these goals out one by one and post updates here :)

Virtual Reality and Presence - A Digital Media Production

For the past few weeks I've been getting swamped with all kinds of new project start-ups. The crown jewel though (in my own honest opinion ;-) ) consists of a rebooted project I had been working on last year, involving some research in the field of Virtual Reality (V.R.). As technology is advancing at a exponential rate, V.R. is being used more and more to simulate real life conditions to help scientists and researchers in their respected fields of expertise.

A good example is the way certain test subjects are confronted with their fears (in limited amounts) with the use of a V.R. environment, eventually and hopefully overcoming their fear in the process. This technique is called exposure and has been used in the field of psychology for some time, but only since technology is pushing the boundaries between reality and its virtual counterpart closer together and shrinking the no-man's-land between them, it has become more and more interesting for researchers to implement and use V.R. in order to achieve their goals.

Presence
Of course, the V.R. environments and their fidelity to the real world are closely related to how people will perceive them as genuine and 'real', which is extremely important when you want to achieve maximum results. This sense of immersion and realism people are able to feel in V.R. environments is called 'presence' and has become an important measurable unit in the field of V.R. research. After all, a greater feeling of presence will most likely be followed by high fidelity responses from test subjects, eventually leading to more reliable data results.

The past 10 years have been very interesting in the field of V.R. and presence, with multiple angles having been researched, clearly indicating many factors have their impact and influence on a subject's presence in a V.R. environment. With the help of presence as a measurable unit it has been pointed out that the amount of interaction within a V.R. environment has a direct connection with a subject's presence. This so called 'tactical immersion' (Civitarese, 2008) helps with making the virtual world your own and can be as simple as completing several tasks with the V.R. environment.

Other factors

Besides interaction there are also other factors to take into consideration when using V.R.. For example narrative immersion, which can be triggered by an emotional story (Gorini, Capideville, De Leo, Mantovani, & Riva, 2011), or audio (Bonneel, Suied, Viaud-Delmon, & Drettakis, 2008) (Nacke, Grimshaw, & Lindley, 2010), but also the relation between animated human-like 3D models and their human likeness (Tinwell, Grimshaw, Nabi, & Williams, 2010), which in turn explains a lot about the uncanny valley (see picture below).

Last but certainly not least there has been a lot of recent research on a more visual level, regarding presence. Lee & Kim (2008) have pointed out that besides the geometrical quality of 3D objects there is another important factor to take into consideration with V.R.: depth perception. It was this article which gave me the idea to set up my own V.R. environment, putting visual quality along side interaction and see how different setups would influence a subject's presence. My idea is similar to theirs in respect to their 4 different scenarios, where they combine a Low and High version of both visual and interactive factors (see example below).

 

Out with the old, in with the new
As I said at the beginning of this post I have worked on this project last year, developing a V.R. environment for use with WorldViz's Vizard engine. Unfortunately due to an error in planning (or perhaps miscommunication..) I wasn't able to make use of a special V.R. installation at the University of Nijmegen at the time, forcing me to either wait a few months or rethink the project over. I chose the latter and came up with something much more interesting I think.

2011 VR Setup - Topview

2011 VR Setup - Perspective

WorldViz's Vizard engine has multiple things I like, but to be brutally honest (and from a 3D artist's point of view) its terrible OpenGL based engine can simply not live up to current Next Gen engines, unless you're a programming genius (which unfortunately I am not!). I had to spend way too much time on developing features I really needed for the visuals than I bargained for, so this time I'm going for another engine: the Unreal Development Kit. Also, instead of using thousands of dollars worth of equipment I will be showing off my own VR-Kit which still only exists on paper, but will gradually be assembled using consumer products, eventually giving readers something special: a way to make their own VR-Kit and use it with a great engine for indie developers: UDK.

While my experience within UDK is fairly extensive I will have to battle my way through yet another programming problem though: setting up a specific protocol in order for my own equipment to communicate correctly with UDK's input. During the next couple of months I will keep you updated on my progress and struggles, hopefully giving you some valuable insight in this area. Be sure to come back and most importantly: let me know if you have any problems or solutions in the same field. I'm always happy to help!

Hello World

Welcome to my own world of immersion and where games and reality frequently meet or cross their paths. Through this web log I will share and shed some light on some of my own work and projects, throw in parts of my opinion on games and to be frank, I'll probably add a little nostalgia every now and then :-)


How it all started... 

Ever since my father brought home an old Sony MSX2 computer I've been hooked to the digital world and the many mysteries it held, and still holds. I was only 5 to 6 years old, but already typing in unfamiliar words onto a screen and hitting that magical ENTER button while the suspense built up, only to be confronted with something I will always remember as the screen seemed to be spitting out always the same thing: 'SYNTAX ERROR'.

It was obvious to me that a career in programming wasn't going to be my thing, so I embarked further on my journey through the world of MSX, starting with all the games my father would bring home. I didn't know anything about piracy back then, but I'm fairly certain that besides the ROM cartridges every single game had been copied. I played and played, mostly Konami titles that were ported from their arcade versions, until I stumbled upon a game that truly captivated my young mind: Metal Gear.

Most from my generation know this franchise saw its light on MSX2 (no, not on the NES or Playstation!) and to me it was the perfect combination of excellent gameplay and intriguing storytelling. I can still hear the alarms going off when I think back, frantically trying to hide from all the enemy soldiers while waiting for their alertness to wear off. Come to think of it, I think the first game I ever bought was Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. The graphics were mind blowing at the time, including the moving portraits while talking to characters through radio transmissions.


The Internet

When we got our first Internet connection at home my digital world grew exponentially by the day. Apart from providing me with the means to connect with others and play my first FPS online (Duke3D with a dial-up connection was fun!) it gave me that old MSX feeling back. That feeling I had that there was so much to discover and that the possibilities seemed endless. Every time I typed a keyword on the old search engines back then, it gave me that old suspense just before hitting the same old ENTER button. Back then you actually had to wait quite a while before results were finally downloaded to your computer, unlike today's instant searches and suggestions made by modern search engines.

It was back then, around 2001 and during one of my nightly searches that I came across something I had not seen before and really intrigued me as passionate graphic designer and gamer. While I was looking up information on Adobe's website about Photoshop, I found something better: Adobe Atmosphere.

Atmosphere for me, was the first platform where interaction with 3D computer graphics and other users was possible, and in an easy way, putting people and their art in touch with others around the world. It consisted of a client (I used a browser plug-in) which was free for all, and a separate software bundle for building content. Unfortunately, the creator bundle wasn't free and thus I never got introduced to 3D modeling, at least not for the time being ;-)