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The Footloose VR

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Overall Background

This is a 6 week industrial research/VR experience design project produced by the Happy Feet Studios. Inspired by the movie The Walk, and due to the fact that foot visualization in VR is under development currently, we designed a tightrope walking experiment that looks at how foot visualization affects immersion through the lens of anxiety. The video below is a walk through of the experiment.  

Happy Feet Studios
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I was mainly responsible for game designing and 3D Art including 3D models and animations and also assisted with programming and experience design.

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Team

Adrain Biagioli
Bradley Factor
Lue Fang
Jinhee Lee
John Lennon

Oliver Tan
Joseph Wang

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Software: Unity

A formal Documentation of is shown below and could be accessed here.

Following is the highlights of the documentation.

Experiment Design

Research Questions

Does the ability to visualize one’s feet in virtual reality affect a person’s feeling of immersion in the environment?

Hypothesis

We believed that people who are unfamiliar with VR would be more calm when they saw their feet while people who are experienced in VR would be more excited in an anxiety inducing situation.

Metrics

We utilized VR tracker, VR headset Position, and heart rate monitor during the experience to collect quantitative data and performed pre and post experience survey to collect qualitative data.

Quantitative Measure

  • Heart rate

  • Position of feet

  • Head position

  • Head rotation

  • Times stepping off the rope

Qualitative Measure

  • VR experience

  • Self-reported fear of heights

  • Self-reported fear in the simulation

The following shown is the experimental design.

Feature Highlights

Foot Tracker

Utilizing the Vive tracker and customized 3D printed heel cup, we were able to transfer the foot orientation in real world into unity.

Heart Rate Monitor

We settled on the Garmin chest strap heart rate monitor with electrode gel since we needed an option that was low cost, wireless, and capable of displaying data in real-time. We studied and used the ANT+ protocol to extract the heart rate.

Creating the World

An important factor contributing to the success of out experiment was the believability of the environment.

Skybox

The skybox is made by building a city with actual models, and then palcing a reflection probbe in the middle of it. 

City Building

The City includes a set of buildings designed to fit into the skybox, interactive cars to create the sense of reality, an elevator for scene transition, and an antenna for the final destination of the player. 

Experiment Control Panel

A control panel created to allow us to easily change the settings of the experiment and start or stop data collection. There are three different panels shown to the us: the control panel, the player's view, and a overview of the scene.

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