DEV LOG

Week 11 / 06 - 11 / 13

With basic keyboard prototype built up, this week we focused on exploring different ideas in different areas of typing in VR. To best support our motivation of revolutionizing input in Virtual Reality while making the whole experience both intuitive and engaging, we decided to put our keyboard design in the setting of a TPS typing game. Game would be an entertaining way to motivate people exploring typing in VR.

In our game, the player is a guardian of a heart and should protect the heart from demon's attack. Demons Every time the player finish typing a word with our VR keyboard, an arrow would automatically shoot down a demon. Click here to view more implementation detail.

Week 11 / 14 - 11 / 21

This week, we focused on refining the game setting to improve the reasonableness and playability of the game. Keeping the universe setting, we changed the player's identity to Keyboardman, a hero coming from the Planet of Text whose responsibility is to protect the planet from their enemy, Planet Emoji. The hero's weapon is just the keyboard, and typing could fire out alphabets to shoot down the emoji troop. The setting combines "typing", "attacking with words" and "universe" together well, and we believe this could give players a more immersive and fun typing experience. The emoji troop meshes and Keyboardman are still in process.

Based on the changes on game setting, we added more technical components into the game, including more sophisticated game mechanism, new meshes and animations, and better game environment. Click here to view more implementation detail.

Week 11 / 22 - 12 / 05

This week we decided to change our focus from only developing game mechanism to exploring more on the research contribution we could make with our game. We discarded the theme of keyboardman from last week and implemented the full game loop of our game. We designed the background story, added more UI menus to the game, and added game tutorial to the game to make the game more intuitive. Now all words being typed in the game would form an interesting sci-fi story. (video 1)

On research side, we decided that our contribution could be that in our typing game, we can collect data of users' controllers and keyboard's movement and thus build a dataset to support future research on users' input habit in VR. We also designed a level to let user replay and visualize their trajectory data in the game. This feature was implemented by using c++ and Unreal. We believe the dataset, after our game being played by more users, could be used in VR companies and research lab. (video 2)

Week 12 / 05 - 08

In this four days we focused on bug fixing in both game mechanism and research analytic feature. We also added more UI improvements, audio effects, and visual effects. We also worked on improving our trailer and website.