Game Design MA

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Christian Pearce  Elysium Concept Art

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[allthingsvr]

Jesse Schell on the VR Design Principles of ‘I Expect You to Die’

Jesse Schell has been involved in virtual reality for over 20 years, and he’s also the author of the popular The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. He was able to combine his background in VR and game design at Schell Games to create the very popular I Expect You to Die, which has been the top-ranked experience at Oculus for the last three months. It also took home three Proto Awards including the top prize for Best Overall VR Experience, Best Gameplay and Best Interactive Design. I had a chance to catch up with Jesse at Oculus Connect to talk about some of VR design principles that has helped I Expect You to Die to do so well.

Read more here.

[joshcampherma]

This interview with the developers behind Job Simulator is a very interesting look into what it takes to create a standing motion controlled VR game. I am focusing my second year on how students can be educated on VR best practises in an academic environment as to the best of my knowledge there is no syllabus for teaching people how to create a high quality Virtual Reality experience, which is what I would like to try and compile for other to learn from.

[joshcampherma]

Gamification UI Redesign

After looking through some mobile UI articles I came across this 20 Beautiful Mobile User Interface For Your Inspiration article and have based my new design on common features I thought were the most prominent across the various designs.

1.Icons instead of Text

2.Flat block colours (consistent colour scheme)

3.Clean cut shapes and angles

[joshcampherma]

Gamification Documentation

I had started to look for refrences to gamification in the book Rules of Play online when I rediscovered google scholar which i found extremely usefull for finding papers and articles about the subject of gamification I Have made a small list of the ones I feel relate to my work the most which i will be digesting to fuel my future arguments:-

Transforming homo economicus into homo ludens: A field experiment on gamification in a utilitarian peer-to-peer trading service

Casual social games as serious games: The psychology of gamification in undergraduate education and employee training

Does Gamification Work?--A Literature Review of Empirical Studies on Gamification

Gamification: designing for motivation

The gamification of learning and instruction: game-based methods and strategies for training and education

Gamification by design: Implementing game mechanics in web and mobile apps

Gamification. using game-design elements in non-gaming contexts

A user-centered theoretical framework for meaningful gamification

[joshcampherma]

[joshcampherma]

Passive and Active Gamification

As I have been researching into gamification in the workplace I have come across a lot of what i like to call Passive gamification, Which to me is anything that happens in the background or before/after the actual work has been done. An example of this is checking how much point you earned after a days work or checking your profile for new badges or medal you have earned for completing tasks, another example is filling out a questionnaire or browsing a web site earning points when you have interacted with specific videos or links. What I want to explore is using gamification in a more active capacity so that it becomes part of the working experience and actively helps you preform better while still including the passive systems for tracking and rewarding good behavior.

Some of the features which I believe are active forms of gamification are Customer Awareness which will track the activity of customers, how long they have been in the same location, The amount of time spent with an employee and actively direct employees to the nearest customer who is within a predefined percentage that has been established as the point were the customer is going to either leave or become bored. Another active feature is in store navigation for finding products for customers as well as showing the locations of objectives created by senior staff members. The third and final active gamification feature is the use of Augmented reality to aid in explaining to customers the way in which a product will be used to void any confusion on the products intended use.

I see these features as a new for of gamification that takes insperation from things such as full AR games which use augmented reality as a core function rather than a addon feature as well as navigation used in games such as dead space which if used in the right way with AR could immensely help with real world navigation and location problems in retail.

[joshcampherma]

Gamification in the Workplace

To fully understand how prevalent or utilized Gamification has been used in the work place and in what manner it has been implemented I will first have to find cases of gamification that has been used in the workplace and see how my ideas on the subject may differ or improve upon these past systems. Here are some extracts from articles discussing workplace gamification : 

"Productivity metrics are at an all-time low in the U.S., with 70 percent of people in the current work force labeling themselves as “disengaged” or “actively disengaged” at work, according to a recent report from Gallup.

To reverse these declining engagement trends, several leading companies are turning to gamification. What is gamification, exactly? Gamification is the concept of applying game-design thinking to non-game application to make them more fun and engaging. If this concept seems new to you, get this: gamification has actually been around for a long time. Think, employee of the month or salesperson of the quarter." - Written on July 16, 2014 at 9:29 am, by Amy Higgins

Another article dealing with the same issue states:

"Some critics of gamification have pointed out that psyching up and engaging employees takes more than a few interactions with an app. However, both critics and supporters agree that an effective motivational game requires expert planning and skilled game design. Brian Burke adds, “It is not a simple matter of rewarding employees with badges and points that will magically turn them into power-producers; an effective game must be immersive, engaging, and supported by employees.”" - July 1, 2014 By Barbara Swenson

From what I have read gamification the work place has been around for a long time in a very passive manner and has only recently started to explore more active involvement in everyday work with the recent development of cheap electronics and ubiquitous computing power be it in the form of phones or workplace PC's.

[joshcampherma]

Week 6 Assignment

1000 Word Report Week 6 Assignment

[joshcampherma]

Choosing which direction to take my Masters in

I started out by thinking of the areas of game design that I wanted  to explore namely Virtual Reality and Intuitive Motion Controls, After some research and tests with the leap motion I decided to focus my view more on education and how these systems could help train and educate people.

I have a few ways I could explore this subject :-

1.Evaluation of the current state of AR and other non-traditional teaching methods within education and training with the aim of developing a more intuitive and user friendly education system while also training people to become familiar with these new technologies. More focused approach

2.Gamification in educational and training systems. some examples include training for a job such as sales work or classroom education

Education Gamification in Action. 

"There’s a lot of potential in the field of Education Gamification. I believe that humans have an innate Desire to learn. However, much of the school system these days “gets in the way of our education.”" - Yu-kai Chou

I think the field of gamification ties in all of the different subjects and areas of research I had looked at preiviously but gives a more refined subject to explore.

The Author of the education gamification article also created this diagram showing different aspects of gamification. He also has many videos in which he discusses gamification, below is one of these videos. The video is a bit silly but is quite informative

[joshcampherma]

More Unity AR stuff

In an earlier post I had used Vuforia in unity to create a simple 3d object that would follow an image in the real world, These videos above show how Fuforia can be used to make AR games and training systems.

[joshcampherma]

CastAR

The CastAR system is a lot different to most AR technologies as it uses a projector mounted to a pair of glasses to project off of a special reflective surface to create the illusion of a 3D Scene. The applications and systems that are described in these videos are right along the lines of what I feel is one configuration of the future of VR and AR technologies but I still feel that it is going to take some time for people to get used to. I think that if the idea of augmented reality was presented to people and established in an educational environment it would lead the way for wide spread use of AR in the future. In both of the videos I have posted here they discuss how designing experiences for AR is different than traditional design due to the different limitations ad advantages of AR such as being able to use the real world as a backdrop. They state that their is full unity3d integration so theoretically any designs I create in unity could be ported over to be used on the CastAR which is another reason to test out any ideas for educational AR games as prototypes.

Kickstarter Video

More in depth video

Some reactions at MakerFaire 2013

MRI Scan Visualisation

Table Top Game RFID Game Pieces 

[joshcampherma]

Some thoughts on Augmented Reality

Looking to the future I envision people using devices as convenient and ubiquitous as mobile phones or PC's are today, it will merge the technologies of both VR and AR allowing users to seamlessly switch from one to the other and will be used for a variety of different activities from social media notifications, gaming, education or a way to access information while on the go. This is my vision 10 - 20 years in the future and is being pioneered by companies like Google with Google glass and Meta with the MetaOne. But like VR in the 80s the current capabilities of augmented reality haven't reached the point at which it becomes so simple and effortless to use that it can be easily integrated into a users life. I also believe that Virtual Reality is a complementary stepping stone for augmented reality and will be what 3d tv's were to the oculus rift in terms of social acceptance.

Oculus rift AR - Skip to 18 mins for AR

MetaOne 

[joshcampherma]

Experiments in Augemented Reality

I found a simple augmented reality plugin for unity called Vuforia, I'm hoping to create an interactive book that will help get across educational material in various subject like maths, science or History but allowing the user to engage with the material.

some early examples that come to mind could be using AR cards with dates on them and once in the view of the camera they would play an animated scene of specific era for example the 16 Century could have a pirate ship battle, 1965 depicting with an astronaut jumping on the moon. On the reverse side of the card could have additional text explaining the details of the event depicted.

[joshcampherma]

I really like the simple method of selecting different UI elements within this VR demo, I think its a convinent way for simple selection if you dont want to use a controller. I think i might try something similar as a test

[joshcampherma]

Future of Computer Graphics?

2014

2013

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OLD VIDEO 2011

This doesn't really have a direct link to what I am doing with inputs but I find the progress of this technology just amazing.

[joshcampherma]

Making an education game that's actually fun. Motion Controls?

Following up on my previous post I would like to explore how intuitive motion controls can be used in an educational format in conjunction with gamification or even augmented reality to create an educational game or system of learning that is more engaging similar to how some schools have begun using Ipads in very much the same manner.

The main goals when creating an interactive experience is to make the user continue to interact for as long as possible, This can be done in a variety of ways such as rewards for reaching or completing goals and challenges, but these rewards have to be meaningful on some way or they have no value.

Another way is to present an experience that is new and interesting but this will become less new the longer the player is exposed to it and then losses its value. I would like to widen focus from just motion controls to a wider variety of different technologies that can be used to create a more engaging and unique experience such as Augmented/Virtual reality, intuitive control schemes and gamification with a common theme of education and learning that is more engaging while still being fun. Primarily a fun experience but the player will also learn from it either directly or in a more passive way.