Third design - Oculus Rift

We wanted our third design to be halfway between conventional and wild.

After giving some thinking about augmented reality for both previous designs, we mentioned the Oculus Rift. Our third design is based on this technology.

The Oculus Rift is a virtual reality handset designed for video games with 3D rendering and wide field of view (110° diagonal, 90° horizontal). It is like Google Glasses with total immersion and further possibilities in augmented reality. The consumer model of the Rift will be launched April 2015, but an early developer kit's hardware is already available. The VIC Studio at KTH has one. Oculus Rift official Kickstarter page

Based on the paper sketches of previous designs and after watching videos of SIGGRAPH Emerging technologies to warm-up inspiration, we led a new Yes, and... brainstorming session.

We came out with paper sketches of a new design using the Oculus Rift.

The Museum Mystery game is in close accordance with our previous design decisions of providing children with an interactive experience at Fotografiska while staying close enough to their parents. The device includes headphones that improve immersion without preventing the kid from hearing the surrounding sounds, to avoid accidents.

Such a balance could be achieved either by the design here-above of a half-headphone leaving half the ear free, or using a conventional headphones with a sensor that captures ambient noises and add them to the game's audio tracks.

Thanks to the Oculus Rift augmented-reality capabilities, we can render a 3D-world based on the paintings, the walls and the overall environment of the player, thus creating a whole new experience out of reality. The parent can enjoy seeing real painting while the kid can enjoy playing (seeing, hearing, interacting) with art through a quest-based game.

Here above is an example of interactivity, where the player has actions to perform on several successive paintings rendered in 3D through the Oculus Rift. The player could temporarily store items in a virtual bag (bottom right).

Some quests should consist in having some kind of interaction with the parent, which could be a guide or an element of a quest. This way the kid would be forced by the gameplay to stay rather close to the parent. The names of the kid and the parents should be decided at the reception before launching the game (Kid ---> Frodo and Dad ---> Gandalf).

The rift's GUI should also include a possibility of finding the parent from any position in the museum, with 3D rendering of directions to follow.In the end, it could look like the picture below.

The scrolling menus displaying quests could be on a 2D foreground layer, or be a 3D object (the green cube) that the player could manipulate. The inventory could also be a set of squares like in most games. The progress bar with the levels of completion of the overall game should be displayed somewhere, here on the top-left corner. A button for finding the parent (Find Gandalf) should remain visible anytime. The parents should have a location device in their pocket, or a phone with a simple app running.

Using a button raises the question of interactivity, how could you click it? A solution could be the one below.

To solve the problem of kids wanting to touch pictures in the museum, they could handle a multi-functions stick. Depending on the mission, it could be rendered in the Oculus Rift as a sword, wand, pencil (to draw) or laser pointer.

All the game features should have the same purpose: making the child enjoy the visit.

We now feel that we have three solid designs! From those we can extract the best ideas to create a final 'best' design.