Overview
From last week’s playtest, we received positive feedback in regards to the ISS interior, but did observe motion sickness with the movement controls and confusion due to a lack of guidance. This week, we attempted to address some of the issues with guidance with a to-do list. We also looked to improve the immersion of the experience by fixing the interior ISS colliders to be more accurate, adding previously unadded activities in-scene for users to interact and engage with, as well as upgrade textures and lighting within the ISS interior scene. Adjustments were also made to the movement though grab controls and the addition of a snap-turn feature. Overall, this week consisted of major steps towards delivering an experience that could somewhat realistically show an astronaut’s life on the ISS, as well as working to make the VR experience more bearable movement-wise.
Activities
This week consisted of integrating activities previously excluded in the prior week into the active scenes, namely the food preparation/hydration station activity and the ISS exterior activity. Taking into account our time limit, these activities round up the list of activities we plan to have for our experience and hopefully provide a good general insight to the general spectrum of the activities of astronauts on the actual ISS.
Food Hydration Simulation
The food preparation simulation was changed from last week, notably requiring users to instead pickup a MRE object to “insert” into the food hydration station, following which the food corresponding to the MRE will be spawned. The idea was to better simulate the process real astronauts go through when preparing food to eat, where they use a hydration station to prepare dried foods to eat. There are plans for aesthetic changes to make the process of converting MREs to "hydrated" foods more realistic, but the core of the activity has been integrated in-scene.
ISS Exterior Repair
The ISS repair activity, previously appearing in the test scenes, was properly integrated into the main ISS exterior scene, simulating the job that real-life astronauts perform on spacewalks. There wasn’t too much difficulty in integrating the activity in-scene, but textures were added to components of the activities.
UI
A portable task menu fixed to one of the players arms was added to provide more guidance to players, giving a checklist of activities for players to engage with. It automatically updates as tasks have been successfully completed, and thus provides a indicator of "progress" made in the game. We also added interface to guide the player on controls, sounds for the environment as well as for UI interaction, as well as tutorial UI text placed around the ISS environment.
Environment
As the primary scene of our experience, we set about further developing the interior ISS scene, fixing collisions and working to make the textures and lighting look better. Work was also done to make all of the interior surface grabbable by have colliders per polygon.
Movement
We added the ability to grab to both controllers this time around, which is one of the primary ways to interact with both the interior and exterior ISS surfaces. We also notably re-implementing a snap-turn feature to allow for an easier way for players to turn in-game, as well as up and down thruster movement to address some of the difficulty of navigating around in-scene.
Future Plans
We plan to potentially overhaul the current way that movement with thrusters work, namely phase away from our move-in-look-direction movement to controls that separate height control from horizontal movement. This will hopefully make navigating the scenes easier for users, as well as better limit the effects of motion sickness.
We also plan to look into refining visuals for the exterior scene, namely finding and integrating better textures for the ISS model and potentially looking to emulate visual effects with sunlight.
If possible, a voiceover is also planned to be integrated to provide audio guidance throughout our experience as well.
We will also iterate upon feedback and observations from this last week of feedback, where we will notably look for further feedback and suggestions for movement, visuals, and core experience.