Brainstorming:
The first week started with a group brainstorm session on ideas for the project. We agreed early on to do something with VR and Unreal, and to create an XR experience that could best be experienced in VR. We came up with several ideas, such as:
Immune system educational VR game
Space educational game
Flying around exploring planets
Driver VR game - somehow different from last semester’s
Space walk simulation
Focus on education students about astronaut
Add history element, and actual footage
Incorporate other space education stuffs - probably not if we want to flesh out the space station
Physics education about planetary physics
Interact with planets and seem how they orbit
Would have to learn orbital mechanics
Exercise game
How to make it novel?
UMich tour simulator
UMich bus simulator
Most of these ideas were educational in nature, a number of which were intended to explore an interest in space, whereas others were meant to explore areas such as the human immune system or teach new skills. The idea we would end up iterating on for the first milestone week was a space walk simulator.
Idea analysis:
Novelty:
A primary concern was differentiating our XR experience from existing spacewalk simulations. One way we would try to address this was to focus more on providing historical context, as well as trying to give some insight on an astronaut’s life outside of spacewalks by creating an additional experience within the ISS.
Social Impact:
Our motivation was to create an experience that could encourage interest in space, as well as in space exploration related professions in students. An VR application could provide an accessible and memorable experience to incite such interest.
On a related note, potential stakeholders we considered were elementary school teachers, as well as perhaps NASA or other professionals that would be interested in bringing more interest into space professions.
Financial Sustainability:
Stemming from our alternative ideas, we explored the idea of having the spacewalk simulator as one of a series of similar VR experiences, such as an immune system or driver education experience. This would create a library of VR applications to encourage name recognition with users.
These titles, including the spacewalk simulator, would likely be digitally purchased and accessed, similar to many VR applications.
XR Emphasis:
We feel that experiencing the floaty space movement, as well as exploring the ISS and seeing a (mostly to scale) Earth, would make great use of VR to create an experience that can best be experienced in an XR context.
Progress:
For our milestone 1 deliverable, we focused on getting the core experience implemented to ensure that it was feasible both from a technical standpoint, as well as user reception standpoint. This primarily included getting good looking models, getting fundamental movement working, as well as creating an interior scene with some interactables in place.
In terms of models, there was a good selection of both Earth and ISS models to select from just from Sketchfab. However, in both cases we did desire more detail in the form of textures: the Earth model’s textures did not quite hold up when scaled up, and the only .fbx format ISS model did not come with textures. We plan on addressing both issues in a later milestone, as both are central to the initial experience of our spacewalk simulator.
Fundamental movement features we implemented in this week’s deliverable were grabbing and thruster movement—these would be the main way for users to navigate the VR environment, and well as the main technical hurdle in making the most genuine spacewalk experience possible. The grab mechanic relies on a grab affordability on the target object, and seemed to mostly work with our ISS model. It did require some work with getting a good enough mesh to better accommodate grabbing of most parts of the ISS. The thruster movement at this stage relies on where the user is looking, and combined with a slight risk of users potentially spinning out of control, also warranted the implementation of a brake trigger. This would somewhat limit the fluidness of movement, but we discussed adding more features to allow for pitching and yawing in the next iterable.
Finally, we also set up an initial interior scene, which could be accessed from the initial exterior scene featuring the Earth and ISS. For now, we implemented a treadmill mini-game, but the idea later on is to add additional interactables to provide more insight to the inner activities on the ISS.