WEEK 5

Prototype Progress

This week, we added in some art assets for the environment. Although some assets are in their final state, we plan to do a lot of refinement of the visual design and layout. This mainly serves to help people focus on the drawing tool and give us better feedback, since they won’t be distracted by being in the sterile, default Unity environment.

There has been a bit of a learning curve getting the environment to look nice in the game engine, as the Unity preview doesn’t always look the same in VR. The scale also needed to be adjusted a couple times, since it’s difficult to gage how something feels in VR without going into VR.

End User Communication

In terms of talking to our NYU collaborators, we pushed to have a mock session for our team scheduled next week, so we can better understand the processes of art therapy. We also began helping Tom set up his personal Oculus Quest 2 headset to use our prototype, so we could try make sure true remote multiplayer VR works, enable future remote playtests with them, and allow him to try the prototype for himself.

Next Steps

The next steps are to begin playtesting the tool with others to see how the space, the tool, and the multiplayer aspects feel at this preliminary stage. On the technical side, the focus is on smoothing out bugs with this particular medium: making the strokes more continuous, adding basic brush dynamics, and improving multiplayer lag. On the design and art side, we are going to continue to flesh out designs enough to be implemented in the coming weeks.