My initial concept stemmed from the desire to mix a brand new style of VR gameplay with an immersive narrative set a completely unique world. This sprouted a handful of design questions.
For this breakdown, lets strip everything away but our core system, glassblowing.
The question was, how do we simulate the sensation of a glassblowing within a VR experience? Well..we can’t, but we sure can get close! The VR landscape has already given users amazing tools to aid in virtual art (shoutout to Tilt Brush by Google). Dr. Cardo takes that familiarity and gamifiy’s it. We looked at simulating temperature, fragility, and most importantly, blowing air. Since haptic technology hasn’t grown past its adolescence, we look towards the basic design tenants of visual cues and indicators, to substitute for what we can’t feel in VR. These indicators would show the player how hot and cool their glass is, the hotter the more malleable, the cooler the more fragile (shown as a separate indicator). Two standard indicators that influence the players approach – easy peasy. Not quite! How on earth do we simulate blowing air into a hollow rod to create blown glass..? The easy way would be to set a group of colliders that can detect when:
- You’re holding onto the virtual rod (or puntee)
- The rod is being held close to your mouth (headset)
- The duration of the rod being held close to your mouth
Once those 3 conditions are met, wallah, simulated glassblowing. But that wasn’t enough. The immersion needed to be elevated. We needed to push the hardware to meet us halfway. I theorized a method using audio input. The microphone on the Oculus Quest headset is conveniently located right under the left side of your nose. In engine, we would adjust the microphone input levels to adapt a lower input sensitivity so that when our colliders were triggered, the audio received from a user “blowing into the mic” would output a sensitivity that simulates a breath in-game. In turn, simulating glassblowing.
