The Identity Project

Role: Lead Programmer and Level Designer

Team: Rae Watters and Skye Winters

Development Period: November 2024 - December 2024

Software: Unity and Arcweave

Core Questions: What alternatives could be designed for NPC dialogue interactions in Virtual Reality? How can Arcweave be better incorperated into Unity for developing dialogue systems?

Description:

The Identity Project is an exploratory project that revolves around the question, if you were to design a VR narrative game's dialogue system how would you do so? Through this project my classmate Rae and I explored four different unique methods of selecting dialogue choices using the affordance of VR. In the end, we managed to find that gesture and voice based worked the best although gesture was more reliable and added an interesting new dimension to VR interactions.

Interactions Developed:

• Gesture: Based off the pose of the user's hand, a coresponding dialogue choice would be selected

• Pointer: Through usage of a pointer, would follow a traditional choice based game method of selecting a dialogue option from a list of displayed choices

• Prop: Through ussage of a prop in the enviorment, would select a coresponding dialogue choice when handed to an NPC

• Voice: Based off the sentence the user says, would select a coresponding dialogue choice that is contained within the users statement

Methodology:

The project's development was documented in the following document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XRJDEbvoUvPf2Q00Wp0p8LQi78ni1bEIubYacdDzEVE/edit?usp=sharing

Takeaways:

Allowed for deeper exploration of dialogue systems and potential alternatives to the practices currently being used. Especially identified the promise of gesture based interactions. Also, resulted in the development of a better system of incorperating ArcWeave in a more flexible way beyond their provied plugin.

Credits: Synty Polygon Fantasy Kingdoms Asset Pack