Good morning everyone, I am Chiara Bassano and i am a fellow researcher at DIBRIS Department at University of Genoa.
In today talk I would like to introduce you a project about a VR game for collaborative
Team-Building carried out in collaboration with my research team composed by the PhD
student Giorgio Ballestin and professors Fabio Solari and Manuela Chessa, all from University
of Genoa, DIBRIS Department.
During the presentation, I will first introduce you the research goal and the experimental setup.
Then, I will describe the constraints that guided the design of our application.
Finally, I will talk about the preliminary results that we have obtained by collecting
data during the annual orientation week organized by our University and then I will show you some conclusions and perspectives.
Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality technologies have had a wide spreadspread success in the
last decade, but the employment of these technologies with an audience of people at the same time
is still limited because it is not so trivial implementing applications for a group of people
and being engaging for a group of people while only one or maximum two persons can wear the
head-mounted display and enjoy virtual reality.
Solutions currently available are based on the use of several low cost HMDs for example
the Samsung Gear connected over the internet.
They are used generally in museums or amusement parks.
If an activity is not group based or do not require interaction between users, people
can just take turns to use a single head-mounted display.
What we want to assess is the feasibility of applying VR technology to multiplayer contexts.
For this reason we propose a proof of concept of a VR system able to provide a high degree
of engagement and activation to multiple users.
Specifically, we designed a game for collaborative Team-Building, validated it during the slow
rogaining activity organized in the context of the annual orientation week which took
place in our university, and assessed participant appreciation level.
The activity was conceived for a group of up to 10 people.
A person wore the VR headset and is immersed in a virtual environment.
The VR Player has to avoid sphere shaped enemies coming from all directions by moving inside
the game area which is surrounded by tables in the real world.
The rest of the group is divided in two teams: the defenders and the attackers.
The defenders can see the virtual environment from a fixed point of view, from the top,
and they have to help the VR player avoiding/dodging the enemies.
In order to have a common reference system, we introduced colored lights (green, violet,
blue and red) so that the defenders can just say: "turn towards the red wall" or "be careful
from the blue wall", for example.
We also attached colored papers on the tables so we also had a correspondance between the
virtual and real world.
Considering the attackers instead, they used the Unity editor and they had to create custom
enemies using prebuilt scripts and assets, and they had to outsmart the communication
of the defenders.
So, the setup is pretty simple: there is an head mounted display, in this case the HTC
Vive Pro (which also provides the tracking system) and two monitors connected to the
same computer.
Before the implementation phase, we actually had to define some constraints which guided
our design choices.
These constraints will be described in more details in the next slides, but they are:
the group size; the fixed time; the fact that the activity had to be educational; and that
all the members of the team had to be engaged.
So, the first constraint is the group size.
The group was composed by 7-10 people.
The problem is that the bigger is the group, the more difficult is to keep all the members
engaged (which is called Ringelmann effect).
So, we had two design choices: first, we split the team into sub groups; then, we added
competition in order to to increase user activation.
Moreover, the time of the activity was 30 minutes.
5 minutes were dedicated to explaining how to use the unity editor, how to create the
enemies using the pre built scripts and assets, how to set the parameters in the scripts and
activate the object.
Then, the attackers had 10 minutes to defeat the VR Player and then the group switched.
So, there is a tradeoff between the time dedicated to learning and to actually performing the
activity.
This led us to multiple design choices.
For example, the average target user had to be able to complete the task, and the learning
curve had to be fast: so the activity had to be short and simple.
Then, we decided to avoid to use controllers, so the interaction was easier, and as people
were in general not familiar with unity we used pre built scripts and assets.
Finally, the absence of external movement avoid or reduces simulator sickness. As I
said before, the activity was in the context of the annual orientation week, so the application
had to be computer science related, so educational but also engaging.
For this reason we did not use a built application but the Unity editor in play (or debug) mode,
and we provided scripts which modify the common computer graphics and physical properties
of objects in Unity. for example, the position, the velocity, the dimension of the object,
but also the dimension of the collider or the transparency of the mesh.
Finally all the team members had to be engaged, for this reason we had to balance task difficulty
between attackers and defenders group.
First of all, the VR Player health regenerates over time, it starts from 100 and regenerates.
So, if attarckers want to defeat the VR Player, they have to think of a proper strategy, not
just jave some lucky strikes.
Then, when attackers prepare their custom enemies, other computer generated enemies
keep the defenders and VR Player engaged.
And when attackers create their enemy, they have to think that avoidability is inversely
proportional to the damage.
The final damage, in fact, is calculated as initial damage, 20, multiplied by different
weights which depend on the property that people modify, size, collider size, the speed
or the mesh transparency.
The more avoidable is an object, the less the value of the weight is.
Data were collected over 71 high school students, during the annual orientation week in 2019
and 2020.
As I said before, participants were divided in teams of 7-10 people, equally distributed
across genders and backgrounds, so people having backgrounds with programming were divided
in the groups.
And, after the activity, participants were asked to provide a feedback by rating the
activity.
1 meant "did not like at all" and 5 "liked a lot".
As you can see, the majority of people liked our activity even if just one person or two
could actually wear the head-mounted display and enjoy the VR experience.
The final rate is 4.4 plus or minus 0.9.
So, in conclusion, today we have high-end VR HMDs which are still quite expensive.
They are ok for single user applications, but if we want to organize group activities,
this can be troublesome and uneconomical.
Plus, they have to be tethered to computers which are expensive too and the tracking area
is limited, so multi-user VR applications are difficult to conceive and design.
However, in this work, we show that it is possible to propagate the high level of engagement
by defining different roles, attackers, defenders and a single VR player.
We hope to inspire the development of other multi-user VR applications, based both on
the cooperation or competition paradigm where more agents operate on the same scenario using
different interaction methods.
If you have questions, feel free to send us an email and thank you for your attention.