Deep Dive
Deep Dive is an augmented reality escape room built with Unity, Arduino, and a custom-made tangible controller.
My Role
Hardware design
Fabrication
Rapid prototyping
User testing
Arduino IDE
Team
Cara Neel
Maya Pruitt
Dylan Dawkins
Timeline
6 weeks
Overview
We were tasked with using physical computing to create an interactive experience. We created a game in which the player must escape from an underwater cave by finding light, oxygen, and an exit route before time runs out.
User Flow
Prototyping & Fabrication
The main element of our game was an interactive floor controller— to move around in the game, users would have to move around the physical space of the floor. We achieved this through the use of plate switches, which were constructed with cardboard and aluminum foil.
First iteration of plate switch
User Testing
We did our first user test with a very simple Unity environment with 3D primitives. We had a cardboard plate switch taped to the wall to see how users would interact with the environment.
Objective: To discover how people would explore the underwater world with limited instructions.
Research questions:
Will users figure out how stepping in a certain place changes the environment?
Can users discover that certain objects in the world can be manipulated by physical touch?
Outcomes
People naturally explored the space by walking, all of our users did this without instruction.
Pressing the button on the wall was not intuitive: none of our users tried this.
Takeaways
Instructions to users need to be clearer: how to communicate the objectives?
How can we indicate that the wall is interactive?
Iteration
After the failures in the first user test, we decided to try giving the user a handheld controller to pick up/select items (light, oxygen, the dolphin) once they had discovered them. We decided on a pushbutton, linked the button to Unity, and found a creative way to house it.
Pushbutton interaction with Unity environment
Pushbutton finds a new housing: Goggles!
Second User Test
In our next iteration, we had a more fully realized environment in Unity, the users were on the real interactive floor, and the user was given a hand-held controller, to see if that aided them in their objective. We told users to follow the prompts on the screen, and tested them on whether they could find the items needed to escape the cave.
Main takeaways:
The controller (the floor) was too close to the projection for optimal UX
The instruction text was sometimes hard to read in the environment
Users did not pay attention to the timer, but needed a longer time to escape (only one user escaped in the allotted time)
Final Design
We displayed Deep Dive at the 2018 ITP Winter Show.
