AirVR

 AirVR aims to ensure passenger wellbeing by targeting the in-flight experience of young travellers - targeting the 17 hour Perth-London route. Through the use of a VR app integrated with Google Cardboard, the project uses a series of gamified exercises to allow children to learn about their destination in a fun and engaging way, as well as enabling children to feel more comfortable in the limiting plane-cabin environment. In addition, the project aims to ease jet-lag and feelings of physical discomfort by incorporating concepts of proxemics and tailoring the experience to enable easier transition into the destination time-zone.

What worked?

The children loved our concept. The younger ones loved the colour scheme of light pastels and the older children enjoyed the storyline that accompanied the experience. The simple use of the point and click functionality was used effectively to make the user feel immersed in the virtual world. 

What didn’t?

Our group encountered a series of challenges throughout our design process, with the majority in the later stages of creating the application. We had a series of Unity errors surrounding the scripting that caused it to not function as intended. Due to this we also could not integrate the audio aspects into the experience as we had intended. Another challenge we encountered was, due the fact the experience was on mobile, we had to simplify our design. We had issues with frame rate (ranging from 2fps to 30fps in a single scene), mainly due to large batch calls and multiple animations. Due to this we simplified or removed the animations where possible to increase the frame rate as much as possible.

How it could be refined?

The experience could be further refined by functional scripting, allowing us to test the experience with our users in its entirety. Another way it could be further refined is if we can tailor the experience to the users destination as well as to the timezone of their destination. Our next steps would include adding more minigames for each time of day (approx. 3 minigames per time of day). We could also look into how to integrate it into the in-flight entertainment so that parents would be able to interact and control what their child is viewing. 

Process

Research

Initially I was in charge of getting user research. I interviewed 3 possible stakeholders ( a parent, an air hostess and a child who had recently travelled). On the basis of the information from these interviews we then decided to target our research towards children and I begun conducting generative sessions. I sourced potential users from the local ski team in Perisher as the children were within our age range and had varying ranges of experience on long distance flights, many of them having travelled with their families for the northern winter season from as young as 3 years old. I also surveyed their parents with our second survey to gain insights into their perspective on the experience. We affinity diagrammed our research and identified 5 main user needs. I developed 3 personas from our research and we proceeded onward. 

Ideation

Once we entered the ideation phase I storyboarded 3 concepts in possible scenarios with our personas in order to identify how well they fufilled our users identified needs, as well as developing the concept scenes for Concept 1: The Storytelling puzzle Game and Concept 2: The Hide and seek Multiplayer game.

3D Modelling

Once the concept was finalised, I then took on the role of 3D modelling the main characters of George (The Kingsguard) and the Queen. I modelled the characters initially in Rhino3D and then moved over to Cinema 4D where I lowered the polycount.

I also modelled other aspects for the game scenes such as: the low poly ground (Cinema4D); Big Ben’s Clock (Rhino3D); and the wall and roof details of Madame Tussauds (Rhino3D). 

Unity + Scripting

After we finished modelling we began building the scenes. I was in charge of the Island scene and Big Ben, with my two other teammates each building one other scene. I then scripted the scenes to make them interactive. As we were using the simple point and click functionality, most of the code consisted of variations on the code we learnt in the cube tutorial. 

Reflection

In a Mobile/Web/Desktop Interface you are designing for a two dimensional space, where you only have to cater for the user’s eyesight in terms of colours, information hierarchy and contrast. In a Virtual Reality application, because the user is not just looking at a at 2 dimensional screen but looking at the 3D space, you must not only cater for the user’s eyesight but also for movement of their neck and range of other movements. It is infinitely more dynamic and placement becomes crucial to the users experience. For example, if text is too close it becomes abrasive and intrusive to the user and if something is completely out of the users range of view, it is impossible for them to use. It is also important to cater for the environment the virtual experience will be used in. For example, in the course of designing our project we tested our scene layouts. Originally we had 4 queens in our Madame Tussaud’s sceve, one on each axis. However when we tested the scene we discovered that the queen behind the user was never seen, mainly due to the fact that the user found it difficult to turn the full 360 degrees to be able to see the queen whilst seated. 

We also initially had the user interacting with the Big Ben puzzle using the bells. However we found that the user found it dif cult to continuously crane their neck up to view the bells and as a result we switched the interaction to be with a series of levers.

Overall it was an interesting process with a steep learning curve. It highlighted both the similarities and the vast differences associated with designing in a two dimensional and a three dimensional space and the current opportunities and limitations of the two. AirVR has great marketability in the areas of children’s air travel and children’s entertainment and education and would be an asset to any in-flight experience.