Night at the Elevator
This is the project write up for the VR Nanodegree "Night at the Museum" project.
The assignment was to create a VR app showcasing the results of a research topic, showing the results in a VR environment, for example, a museum. Five viewing stations with different content were required, with certain amount of images and videos divided among them.
Even though the project scope was pretty strictly defined, I wanted to create a simulated elevator, and that became the carrying theme in this work. Creating the elevator took a lot more effort than I initially expected, and of course I also had the normal troubleshooting sessions that haunt developers; for example, I needed to spend a couple of hours googling why a certain light did not show up in the game view at all. I was also very pressed for time for this project, as I have a very hard deadline for the capstone project. Thus, there is a lot that could be improved, but I tried to hit all the requirements in the project rubrik.
So I hope that what I lack in the dazzling content in the viewing areas is offset by the faithfulness of the simulation of the elevator and the interactivity in the scene. I tried to make it realistic, although I had to leave some obvious improvements as unimplemented due to time constraints.
Results
A playthrough video is available in YouTube.
Personas
User Persona -- Harper Penn
Image copyright KONE Corporation
- Age: 38
- Occupation: Elevator technician
- Quote: I do not want to make people wait.
Harper is a pro, and wants to make things efficient. He is willing to try out new technologies if they help him in his job, but he does not want to waste time with nonsense. He does not take work home, he wants to spend his free time walking his dog and with his family.
Harper knows about VR, but has not used the technology before.
Sketches
I started by creating some design sketches. These sketches contain a lot of things that I unfortunately did not have time to implement. (click to see in full-size)
Development process
From the initial ideas, the development process was incremental, with builds created often and the experience tested both in the editor and with the device. User testing was performed to verify I was on the right track, documented in more detail in the next section.
Early screenshot of the project.
Early lower floor test.
Intermediate car operating panel.
Machine room access.
Final car operating panel.
Final version machine room access.
User testing
User test 1
Q: How do the dimensions of the place feel? What would you think the size of the elevator is?
A: Couple of meters high, quite wide.
Q: In the initial location, does anything draw your eye?
A: When you look into the floor, there appears a thing like a Star Trek transporter (it is the location indicator). The plaques, the landing button, the rug next to the lift (actually just rendered shadows on the level plane next to the lift). (added instructional text)
Q: Try to move around. How do the controls feel? After or during movement, do you feel any discomfort?
A: Controls work as D is accustomed to, it was not necessary to show how it happens.
Call button has only a small arc where it allows pressing it, causing some confusion as to whether it was pressable at all. (see screenshot) (extruded button slightly from the wall)
Landing call button is a bit hard to trigger in this early incarnation.
Q: What would you like to do?
A: Wanted to explore the surroundings and got into trouble (pressed the car floor toggle button from the outside, as I had just pushed it out of the way and it was protruding from the lift wall. See screenshot). (fixed clipping of the buttons)
Lift and landing button design in progress.
User test 2
First, the user, Daniela, is allowed to navigate the exhibition freely.
"Lobby floor corners are not very interesting." (unfortunately, no time to address)
Q: Please navigate in the environment. Try to find your way to the top floor and the basement. Did anything in the experience stand out in a bad or good way?
A: Floor indicator does not update when changing floors, only after the target floor is reached. (currently this limitation is by design, left as is)
It feels like a real elevator. Seeing the floors through the glass is nice and brings a sense of realism.
Q: Try to activate the alarm. Was there something that prevented you to do so? What was it?
A: User was unable to activate the alarm at first, did not remember or understand that it requires several seconds of pressing to be able to trigger the alarm. (Needed action: the way the alarm is implemented now does not activate the target reticle -- make the reticle to activate also with the alarm button. Fixed: Added a dummy pointer click handler to make button behave like it accepts button presses and included instruction text to car)
Q: Describe the mood of the place as a whole. How would you describe your emotional state navigating in the building?
A: The floors feel like big halls, like in a museum. Maybe the floors are a bit empty? Maybe not a problem.
Open and close door buttons are missing from the elevator, might be a nice addition. (not added after cost/benefit analysis)
The clouds in the outside make it feel like we're somewhere higher up.
Q: Was there anything out of place or clearly missing from any of the floors?
A: Finnish style dates in elevator exhibition. (fixed)
Clicking the exhibition boards causes teleporting behind them (the board does not break raycasting, fixed)
Shanghai exhibition.
User managed to get into the pit even though the doors were closed, had trouble getting out. (fixed)
In the basement the lift back wall flickers, seems like a bug. (fixed)
Q: How are the sounds? Did any sounds seem unrealistically loud or somehow out of proportion to the others?
A: Floor announcements are too quiet. (upped the volume)
User test 3
This user test was to check whether any too annoying issues were still present after last round of fixing.
Comments from reviewer:
Floor announcement and elevator sounds are more easily heard.
It is possible to travel in elevator while outside the elevator (known issue, lift should be activated from the outside to send it up).
It is still possible to go past the doors to the pit (should not be possible! possible build artifact? No, it is due to Cardboard clipping. We can live with this for now, the access between the doors is now prevented and the biggest issue is solved)
Dates in the exhibition are now correct. Teleporting "through" the video in elevator exhibition does not happen anymore.
Final version
To make it certain I have at least five areas, I created five floors with distinct content, although I am most proud of the locomotion between the floors, the elevator. It is a fairly faithful representation, only thing it is really missing is having calls to multiple floors open at once; this elevator only accepts and serves one call at a time. The alarm button works and lights up; the car and landing call buttons on the target floor light up when call is being served and turn off when the lift arrives. The lift has fairly realistic sounds. The internal and external doors open slightly differently, mimicking real world imperfection.
The floors have different themes for content. The audio requirement for the floors should be satisfied with the floor announcement, not counting the audio in videos and other elevator audio.
I'm not happy with the lighting; probably because the scene ended up being very big in Unity standards, the baking of lighting started to take a very long time and I needed to tune the resolution very low; even after this, the development turnaround time was so long that the lighting is only barely satisfactory.
Conclusion
Faithful simulation of a semi-complex system such as an elevator is a non-trivial task, and a good amount of time should be reserved for it. This experience could be made a lot more attractive by spending time designing the lighting and adding more varied objects to the scene. In the current build, I only used 3D objects I created myself. A few experiments were done with the Blender tool, but nothing that couldn't be done with the basic shape primitives in Unity.
If I come back to this, I would like to experiment by creating scenes for a skyscraper observation deck visit; I think the experience would carry over really well to VR. Also the AR tools for helping technicians would be an interesting experiment, and those could actually be implemented with, e.g., the Apple ARKit.
Even though I was pressed for time, I again learned a lot of the Unity system and I am now very comfortable with the editor and C# scripting, which gives me good tools to move forward to the high-immersion specialization and the capstone project.
Attributions
Sounds effects from royalty free youtube sources.
Machine room video originally from: https://youtu.be/6wkFqTZkmoc