Double Dutch VR

Problem

The Seattle hackathon 2018 was a weekend-long event for VR design and development. The goal of the project was to create an immersive VR experience in 48 hours.

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Double Dutch VR allows you to participate in a jump roping tournament in space in the future. As part of the VR hackathon, I worked on a team of 6 hackers to create a futuristic gamified physical experience. We built our project using Vive, Audacity, Unity, VR-TK, Steam-VR, YouTube, and with free and created assets in Unity.

Timeline

48 hours

Role

My role was UX Designer, voice actor, sound technician, audio experience design, visual design, photography, asset collection and manager.

Tools

These tools were very helpful in tackling this challenge.

Approach

Our approach was to get started by using our ideas in headset as quickly as possible because of time limitations. I enjoyed researching emerging VR to find out what would be possible to implement into our project. We had to use rapid brainstorming to find out what role each team member could fulfill during our weekend timeline to deliver the MVP. We ran into challenges when we started to ideate in the headset. The headset was far too heavy to comfortably jump so our idea shifted to handling the jump rope instead while having a jumper in game.

Quick sketches of the project timeline breakdown in four phases: research, prototyping, testing, and judging with follow-up.

Challenge

Our time constraint was 48 hours. We broke down this timeline into smaller deliverables to get as close to our goal as possible. My main challenge during the weekend was having very limited experience working and building in Unity and being so new to VR. I learned a ton over the weekend about building a unique user experience in a brand-new software.

We worked to quickly test new features from our collaborative Unity files pulled from Git to the main file.

Design Process

Our design process was to implement new features in Unity and jump into the headset to make sure things were working correctly. As part of the sound design team, I was able to implement sounds in the virtual environment around the player so they would hear sound coming from all directions. This was a new type of audio design for me to complement the visual designs we created.

Me testing to make sure the skybox .pngs lined up correctly in our Vive headset.

“The game felt complete.”

– Judge during testing Double Dutch VR at the 2018 Seattle VR Hackathon

Learnings and Key Findings

We set out and made assumptions about being the “jumper” in our VR experience and proved ourselves wrong when the headset was too heavy to use.

We tested our prototype with over 30 users of all ages and abilities throughout the weekend.

Success

Our project concluded with a wearable prototype for demos using our team Vive. We received great feedback from usability testing about directions and indicators that would help users better interact with the experience.

“The music was perfect for the setting.”

– Judge during testing Double Dutch VR at the 2018 Seattle VR Hackathon

Project Outcome

Next for Double Dutch VR will be to continue to refine and iterate on the game. The game is posted on our ich.io and DevPost and we hope to continue to receive feedback from users of our experience to continue to improve it. We may also add other elements to create a multiplayer game.