DONE FOR
University Project
TEAM
Lena Vakulenko
Jumanah Al Asadi
Lukundu Lako
​
ROLE
UX/UI
Graphic Designer
TOOLS
Illustrator
Unity
​
VR-Chat
About
There are many adaptation of chatting applications that are in use today. The VR-chat based on the Oculus Rift consumer version head unite, making use of the built in microphone and hand controllers. The chat room will be built within Unity, generating an open 3D space in which users can navigate and engage with other users. Users are visualized as 3D sphere avatars that display emoticons and emit audio; Audio drop off is accounted for, creating realistic world sound.
Chat interface
Our interface will consist of an open space of 3D elements. Below is a mockup of the VR environment we are envisioning. In this scenario you are in a chatroom with John and Kapote, and are selecting an emoji.
Our team explored the idea of a VR or 3D chatroom with audio functionality. To add a twist to it, we added the ability to display emoji expressions. As this is a new concept, our team has improvised and tested out different approaches to see how this could work. The chat room was built within Unity, generating an open 3D space in which users can navigate and engage with other users. Online Users are visualized as 3D sphere avatars that display emoticons and emit audio; Audio drop off is accounted for, creating realistic world sound. Our group aims to generate an intuitive and novel solution for people to navigate virtual space and chat with others in a natural way.
We incorporated 3D wayfinding techniques such as teleporting and 2D UI elements tracked onto 3D objects. In order to join a chatroom or enter it, you must click on it to teleport to it. Furthermore we have unique usernames and colors, 2D elements in 3D space over the 3D avatar to identify different users. Instead of doing text/type which would be hard in VR, we decided to have only audio in the chat along with 6 basic emoji expressions.
User Testing Results
We learned that feedback in 3D is different to 2D, where the feedback needs to appear in 3D space. When implementing our emoji selection functionality, we realized we needed to add a system to let the user know that they are sending that emoji to others in the chat. We implemented this using particles appearing on the screen on key press.
Finally we learned that user movement in 3D space was going to be a problem to reach different chat rooms. We explored having movement using arrow keys on the keyboard but that was tedious to select farther chats. We gave the user an easy way to teleport to chats by clicking on them. However some chat rooms were far and hard to see by the user. If we were to tackle this problem, a good idea is to have the user organize his chatrooms, and closest being the most recent.
Demo
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